Flaming Lips movie to finally premiere?
Psychedelic rockers the Flaming Lips have been promising a film titled "Christmas on Mars" since 2002.
The fantastical sci-fi film has been postponed from year to year, prompting those on the Flaming Lips' message boards to compare it to Guns 'n' Roses' "Chinese Democracy." Dig around on the Flaming Lips site, and find a page in which the band describes the film as a bit of "The Wizard of Oz," and a bit of "2001: A Space Odyssey," and offers a release date of 2003. When I last interviewed Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne in 2006, he said he hoped for it to be out by the end of the year.
But now it appears the film, created with the help of Bradley Beesley ("Okie Noodling"), will no longer be a myth and will actually see an official release. The Flaming Lips were announced Monday as headliners of the Sasquatch Music Festival in Quincy, Wash., and while the Sasquatch website has no mention of the film, Billboard.com reports that "Christmas on Mars" will premiere at the event, although I won't fully believe it until the film starts rolling.
Jim DeRogatis' 2006 Flaming Lips bio, "Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips," provided further insight into the movie, which is set on a doomed space station on Mars.
"If I'm good, people will walk away thinking they saw a movie about an optimistic guy who decides to celebrate Christmas even though the space station is careening toward certain doom, but that's not really what it's about," Coyne is quoted in the book. "To me, there's some abstract quality that you can get in moviemaking where the image and the sound and the music all combine to elevate a moment into something super-emotional. Even when you watch a bad movie, like 'My Dog Skip,' you still wind up crying, because it's that powerful. 'Christmas on Mars' is really about the idea of belief: that if people around you believe in you, it influences what you can do."