How To Talk To Girls At Parties (2017) When a movie proudly flies its Freak Flag (
we're batshit crazy and proud of it!).........it comes down to this crucial question........is the movie willing to go all-the-way crazy to the very end or dissolve into a conventional cop-out?
This movie wants to have it every which way........to revel and wallow in its own nuttiness, but firmly remain a story about sweet, romantic love.
That's one hell of a high wire act for any film.......and this one wobbles around in so many directions, it never finds anything close to a unified vision. It's a hot mess from beginning to end......but we couldn't take our eyes off it.
It's 1977 Punk Rock-ruled England,,,,,,and a horny teen threesome of buddies go in search of a concert after-party, in hopes of getting laid. Looking for the warehouse party where the punk fans and bands are ruled by screeching impresario Boadicea (a wild, take-no-prisoners turn by Nicole Kidman), the boys stumble into the wrong house.
Oh brother, did they ever find the wrong house.........a home to multiple species of visiting aliens (the outer space variety)......with each group outfitted like 1950's movie aliens.....multi-colored skin-tight vinyl jump suits and so on.......spending their time gyrating to appropriately other-worldly electronic music.
In the film's primary joke, the entranced boys mistake the strutting extraterrestrials for California cultists, and the kids' leader Enn (Alex Sharp) falls hard for the one space-girl (Elle Fanning) who comes in the shape of an adorably statuesque blonde.
Like all races of movie aliens, the ones on display here come overburdened with their own bizarre anthropological rules and customs.........which the script has them obliquely blather on about in the hopes that we'll comprehend their ways sooner or later.
As weird as this all is (taken from a short story by renowned fantasist Neil Gaiman), "How To Talk To Girls At Parties" turns out true to its title........it boils down to a boy-meets-girl romance between Enn and Zan. And the punk boys encounters with alien girls becomes nothing more than an exaggerated satire of the fundamental awkwardness of men approaching women as if they're.......well, creatures from another planet.
This is one movie that takes 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus' seriously.......
Even when the film threatens to collapse under the sheer weight of its own silliness, it never bored us for a minute. How could it? Kidman going for broke is a hoot to watch and Fanning's always a gorgeous wonder, impish, stunning and impossibly radiant.........(you have no trouble believing she floated down from the heavens)
It barely holds together but we dug the film's final, wrapup scene.......crazy, inevitable and strangely heartwarming, it makes you realize what a down-to-earth tale you've been watching all along. 2 & 1/2 galactic stars (**1/2)......after all, how could we dislike a film where a disgruntled punk girl complains of the aliens, "They took my ass-cherry.....and I was saving it!")
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