LIPS ON MARS AT LAST

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By Gene Triplett

Published: November 26, 2008

THERE’S NOTHING more boring than sitting through someone else’s home movie — unless it’s Wayne Coyne’s.

When he wasn’t making wonderfully weird psych-pop music on tour or in the studio these last seven years, the singer, guitarist and fearless leader of the Flaming Lips was filming an equally weird and wonderful science-fiction movie — mostly in his own midtown Oklahoma City backyard — starring bandmates Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins, his wife Michelle, friends, family members, TV/film actors Fred Armisen (“Saturday Night Live”), Adam Goldberg (“Saving Private Ryan”) and Steve Burns (“Blue’s Clues”), and himself as a mute alien super-being.

Finally completed late last year, “Christmas on Mars” was released by Warner Brothers on DVD this week, and Coyne is happy to see the long-awaited launch of his “fantastical and disturbing humanistic freakout.”

“In your art, and especially in something like a movie, there really is a side of you that becomes kind of a mythological thing out there,” he said between New York and Los Angeles premieres last week. “And in that sense, I really like it. I like that the Flaming Lips once again — not because we know what we’re doing — kind of stumbled upon yet another way of telling that kind of overly colorful, exaggerated, optimistic story.”

This cinematic extension of the Lips’ musical vision began in 2001 when Coyne, ever the ultimate do-it-your selfer, began working from a script in his head, scribbling notes and drawings on yellow pads as he went along, and making incredibly crafty use of Home Depot odds and ends, junkyard cast offs and an abandoned south Oklahoma City cement plant for props and sets. A recovered 10,000-gallon underground fuel tank was hauled into his sprawling backyard and tricked out with lights, household gadgets, old computer parts, wiring and tubing to become a surprisingly functional-looking space station, and so on.

Coyne’s space oddity is set in the midst of a colony going to seed in the middle of the Martian wasteland. It’s Christmas Eve, systems are failing and the entire experiment seems doomed. Most tragic of all: the endangered birth of an artificially incubated baby.

But then a mysterious green-skinned alien arrives and things begin to change. The special effects are remarkable considering the film’s $350,000 budget.

“As weird as it is, it’s a Christmas-ish story about birth and hope and optimism,” Coyne said. “I mean, this is a Flaming Lips thing here. I don’t think people are all that surprised that we end up not being defeated by the bleakness of reality.”

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