Quick Review: _How to Talk to Girls at Parties_

[jducoeur]

The movie How to Talk to Girls at Parties came out about five years ago -- it was mentioned by the annual Movie Year in Review panel at Arisia, and I've been on the lookout for it ever since. It's now available on HBO Max, so we watched it for movie night.

tl;dr: weird as hell, full of attitude, not for everyone but I liked it.

The movie is loosely based on the Neil Gaiman story of the same name, about a trio of guys who wind up at the wrong party, full of aliens, and have a strange night of it. The original is mystical and odd, very Gaiman, but a bit too abstruse to really grab me deeply.

This adaptation is chock-full of attitude. It is set in the punk scene of 1977 Croydon, and doesn't let you forget that for a second. (It includes Nicole Kidman chewing scenery as a slightly over-the-hill punk queen bee who owns the local scene.) The music, style, and language are very much of that time: be prepared for a period piece, but a loud one.

Less obviously, the style of the movie is that of a 1977 science fiction movie -- from the cinematography to the sheer goofball weirdness, this is a love letter to the strange movies of that time, and it is beautifully executed. Even the SFX are intentionally by no means modern.

This is very much a love story, not just an alien encounter, and the adventure goes both ways: the alien girl exploring Croydon, and the colonies going after her in this strange new world. It's a story of a collection of hidebound dying civilizations (all bizarre, but each distinctive in subtle ways) coming face to face with a culture of principled rule-breaking.

No, it's not the most brilliant thing I've ever seen, but it's surprisingly good in its own way -- better than the original story IMO. If you're interested in something deeply, unapologetically strange, celebrating both the SF movies and punk music of the 70s, it's worth checking out.

Comments

[danabren]

I am going to need to hunt this down, thank you for the rec.