I was looking forward to quirky, offbeat, eclectic, maybe even eccentric but with the same wry humor and punchy delivery as Grand Budapest Hotel... what I got instead was more like some film school student's bad imitation of a Wes Anderson movie.
Where to even start? The play within a play within a movie seemed like a really novel idea but it kept loosing it's cohesion and quickly became yet another reason to interrupt the occasionally amusing dialogue in the movie. I was expecting this really cool linking of the different elements of the story that never came, for example, when the alien comes down the first time and steals off with the meteorite, I thought they were going to tie that in with the death of the mother...maybe the alien was coming back to pick up his(her?) mother, whom he left on earth near the same place as Augie's wife.
I thought there was some significance to so many of the details (even the roadrunner ...meep meep) but none of them actually held any meaning (maybe that was the point?). Much of the movie seemed to deal with loneliness, grief and melancholy, yet again, these were not really explored and, since the whole outer story was about the play, they were not real emotions, they were "acted" from the outer story and the "Conrad Earp" character (another name I expected to have significance) didn't explain much about it, unless "it" was the brief gay kiss between him and Augie.
Fast forward to the outer story's final scene "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep", repeated ad nauseam by the "cast" in the outer story... seems to be saying that within your own life you're not really awake because you haven't given yourself over to "sleep" (death maybe?).
There were some interesting scenes and high points the to movie, the cast is stellar, great acting... With the exception of the scene above I never felt like running screaming from the theater. I was actually always waiting for the "next scene" to be the "Ah hah! Isn't that clever?" but alas, it never came.
Where to even start? The play within a play within a movie seemed like a really novel idea but it kept loosing it's cohesion and quickly became yet another reason to interrupt the occasionally amusing dialogue in the movie. I was expecting this really cool linking of the different elements of the story that never came, for example, when the alien comes down the first time and steals off with the meteorite, I thought they were going to tie that in with the death of the mother...maybe the alien was coming back to pick up his(her?) mother, whom he left on earth near the same place as Augie's wife.
I thought there was some significance to so many of the details (even the roadrunner ...meep meep) but none of them actually held any meaning (maybe that was the point?). Much of the movie seemed to deal with loneliness, grief and melancholy, yet again, these were not really explored and, since the whole outer story was about the play, they were not real emotions, they were "acted" from the outer story and the "Conrad Earp" character (another name I expected to have significance) didn't explain much about it, unless "it" was the brief gay kiss between him and Augie.
Fast forward to the outer story's final scene "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep", repeated ad nauseam by the "cast" in the outer story... seems to be saying that within your own life you're not really awake because you haven't given yourself over to "sleep" (death maybe?).
There were some interesting scenes and high points the to movie, the cast is stellar, great acting... With the exception of the scene above I never felt like running screaming from the theater. I was actually always waiting for the "next scene" to be the "Ah hah! Isn't that clever?" but alas, it never came.