How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Year 14, Day 72 - 3/13/22 - Movie #4,074

BEFORE: I worked a 13-hour shift yesterday at the New York International Children's Film Festival, and it was quite busy there - the time actually seems to move must faster when we're busy, with both screens at the theater showing films, and seven shows total during the day, we were never more than a half-hour from a theater either seating, or letting out, so there was almost always something to do. By contrast, working a screening of "Licorice Pizza" or "House of Gucci" with very low attendance, like 2 or 3 people, would feel longer by comparison than a 13-hour day. That's an odd phenomenon to note - but last summer working at AMC as an usher, I was usually never more than 15 or 20 minutes from a theater letting out and needing to be swept, so the shifts there would similarly seem to fly by.  My day started at 8 am and I got home around 10:15, completely tired - so I wasn't really in any shape to watch a movie, but I still persisted, figuring that if I fell asleep, that would be because I really needed to, and that wouldn't necessarily be a reflection on the movie.  I made it through, but then slept for like 10 hours, which was really 11 on the clock, thanks to the stupidity of starting Daylight Savings Time again.  Really?  Don't we deserve a freakin' break from this after two years of pandemic?  We finally get our lives back, and now they want me to lose an HOUR of that?  That's a raw deal. Anyway, Joanna Scanlan carries over from "How to Build a Girl". 

TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" goes back on the 1920's and 1930's beat for Monday, March 14, but I was expecting this, now that I figured out their pattern. I probably won't do all that well here:

3:45 am "Lost Horizon" (1937)

6:00 am "A Free Soul" (1931)

7:45 am "The Sin of Madelon Claudet" (1931)
9:15 am "The Divorcee" (1930)

10:45 am "Manhattan Melodrama" (1934)

12:30 pm "The Dark Angel" (1935)

2:30 pm "Wuthering Heights" (1939)

4:30 pm "Dangerous" (1935)

6:00 pm "Dodsworth" (1936)

8:00 pm "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930)

10:30 pm "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939)

1:00 am "The Informer" (1935)

2:45 am "Disraeli" (1929)

4:15 am "The Jazz Singer" (1927)

Yeah, I can only claim two films here, "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington". Two out of 14 is not anything to be proud of, and with 61 seen out of 153, I've fallen back down behind 40%, only JUST - 39.8%.

THE PLOT: An alien touring the galaxy breaks away from her group and meets two young inhabitants of the most dangerous place in the universe: the London suburb of Croydon.

AFTER: OK, mea culpa - I should have read a little further into the synopsis for this one, and now I've gone ahead and accidentally progammed a little sci-fi movie, based on a short story written by Neil Gaiman, here at the tail end of my romance chain.  Based on the title I just thought it might be a quaint little coming-of-age story, something like "The Perks of Being a Wallflower", and instead it's more like "The Watch" or "The World's End" or "The Day the Earth Stood Still", only it's still a low-budget comedy.  Yes, two characters do have romantic feelings for each other, essentially that's a relationship, so it qualifies, just barely.  But it still feels a bit weird to put this one here - I've already planned it as a link, so I can't change it without affecting the rest of March's plan. 

I'm stuck with it now, let's try to make the best of it - this is a romance set in the U.K. punk music scene of the 1970's, specifically 1977, which was the Queen's jubilee year, her 25th anniversary celebration of her coronation. (Weirdly, 2022 is also a jubilee year for her, it's her 70th anniversary right now - so, umm, platinum?  We're 45 years removed from 1977, a year I fondly remember, and now I just feel old. OK, older.). But it's just a romance between a British teen and a girl from out of town - like, WAY out of town.  Women are from Venus, isn't that how the book title goes?  Just like many romances, the lovers come from different worlds, but that's usually a metaphor, it's just very literal in this story. 

Enn and his two mates spend their time kicking around the pubs, getting into trouble and going to see punk music shows, hitting on the girls they know there from school. They stumble on a group of people with very strange ways, who wear what appears to be futuristic fashion, and then Enn falls for Zan, who appears to know very little about human culture.  Actually, she seems to know a LOT, it just feels like she's making it all up, or just agreeing with everything Enn and his friends say, and they're just too naive to know the difference.  She takes them back to meet the rest of her clan, the people she's "on tour" with, and those people are even weirder than her, they engage in bizarre rituals, but Enn & company just think that they're part of some weird cult. Or maybe fashion designers - actually this is a bit of clever because in the 1970's some musicians or fashion models wore such outrageous things that they might as well have been mistaken for aliens, of course I'm thinking about David Bowie, but other answers are possible. 

It's just too bad that the story doesn't really GO anywhere, Enn and Zan hang out, they perform a song on stage together in some kind of mind-meld fashion, and Enn's friend has some freaky three-way sex (I think?) with an alien couple. Nicole Kidman plays the manager of the local punk music venue, and for her to NOT be one of the aliens, well that just seems like a lost opportunity there.  Instead she's a normal human who just dresses a little funny, and she's a momager to a rising punk music star.  How and why is she like the most boring character in the whole film?  

All of the conversations between the humans and the (suspected) aliens all have to have these weird double-meanings, because the film doesn't really want to tip its hand too soon, even though it's pretty clear what's going on - but the human characters need some time to figure it all out and deal with it, I guess.  Good to know that if the aliens are here, they're probably here for our Earth music, and I would guess maybe our movies too, but if they're hanging out in the U.K. then they didn't come for the food.  Or maybe they did, who am I to judge, if they want to eat black pudding, spotted dick, haggis and welsh rarebit - there's maybe a lot of British food that could pass for alien fare.  

The theme of the short story this is based on was that the punk scene was all about expressing one's individuality, while the aliens are big on conformity - they dress the same in various colored robes which make them part of various "colonies" and there's a hierarchy based on "parent-teacher" relationship, but when the child outgrows the PT, then there's a whole ritual about it, and, well, it's not for the faint of heart.  They also multiply by some kind of whole-body cellular division, so I guess sex isn't part of the equation, but instead - twinsies!  But it feels like the movie doesn't really deliver the same sort of message that the short story did, instead it circles around a few times but ultimately doesn't really go anywhere - what's the point?  

The aliens didn't really have consistent "powers" either - there was some kind of body-swapping or body-snatching going on, they called it "riding", as if they could project their consciousness into humans.  But then are they just floating consciousnesses, using some kind of astral projection, or do they also have real bodies of their own?  Did they travel here in a spaceship or did they just think their way here?  This was more than a little confusing, nothing really got explained, and the peek at the rituals taking place in their Croydon estate only made things worse.  There's so much I didn't understand here - usually I'm a big fan of Neil Gaiman's work, but this just confused me.  

I liked "American Gods" as a mini-series, but it just went on too long - it should have been one season, but they tried to stretch it into three.  I liked "Good Omens" also, which told its story properly in one season, and now somehow a sequel season is in development.  And of course I'll watch "The Sandman" on Netflix when it eventually airs, but I worry it will fall prey to the same narrative mistakes, as in not answering any questions and ending everything with a cliff-hanger so you'll have to tune in again for the next season.  "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" seems to suffer from the opposite problem, though, it was too short, and they just didn't explain enough about what was going on. 

Also starring Elle Fanning (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Alex Sharp (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Birth"), Ruth Wilson (last heard in "Locke"), Matt Lucas (last seen in "In Secret"), A.J. Lewis, Ethan Lawrence, Edward Petherbridge (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Tom Brooke (last seen in "The Dresser" (2015)), Martin Tomlinson, Alice Sanders, Lara Peake, Jessica Plummer, Marina Bye (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Elarica Johnson (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Joey Ansah (last seen in "The Old Guard"), Stewart Lockwood, Jed Shardlow, Jumayn Hunter, Eloise Smyth, Stephen Campbell Moore (last seen in "A Good Woman"), Paul Bell, Rory Nolan, Hebe Beardsall (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2"), Kaitlyn Akinpelumi, Taylor Jay-Davies, Eddie-Joe Robinson, Shawn Yang, Jodie O'Neill, James Puddephatt (last seen in "RocknRolla") and archive footage of Queen Elizabeth.

RATING: 3 out of 10 tomatoes that grew by the sewer pipe