John Cameron Mitchell's film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's 2006 science fiction short story, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, is bizarrely nothing like it.
Gaiman's original story, which has also been adapted into a gorgeous graphic novel, is a quick, focused story about two teenage Brits trying to talk to girls at a party in the late 1970s. One of them is better at it than the other. Some punk music plays in the background. All of the girls at the party turn out to be aliens. But it's twee. No alien fights or galactic space treaties and definitely no fisting scenes.
The book's film adaptation, however, has plenty of alien fights and galactic space treaties and more than one (!!) fisting scene. There are also alien sex swings, modern dance battles, creepy fingers, and jaws that get unhinged so far they can eat a human-sized alien body. It's wild, but what's the fucking point?
In order to extend Gaiman's short story to a full-length film, How to Talk to Girls at Parties elaborates on the two most eccentric groups in Gaiman's story: the punks and the aliens.
The punks are—for reasons unexplained in director/writer John Cameron Mitchell's meandering narrative—led by Nicole Kidman's Siouxsie Sioux-looking "Queen Boadicea." She looks like she is straight out of an early Vivienne Westwood lookbook, but with none of the bite or revolution. Kidman, who fits right at home in Big Little Lies's Monterey, California, seems ill-equipt to lead a riot, but her fancy zipper choker looks super cool. The film's cast of punk kids, guided by the charming Alex Sharp, look like they're selling distressed tees in a Target ad. It's all very cute, but, unfortunately for How to Talk to Girls at Parties, having characters say the word "punk" every few minutes does not make a punk movie.
The other group of characters, the aliens, are fucking intense, and spend most of their time on Earth doing a lot of intense fucking. Fist and foremost: the fisting scenes. Decked out in colorful latex suits that would look stunning at International Mister Leather, the aliens are prone to performing "manual permeation" on humans. This involves them putting their fingers inside a human's butt whom they've wooed (the aliens also have really fancy sex swings), and then another alien comes out of the alien's shoulder, and then both of the hot aliens manually permeate the human until they scream or cry or a big boss alien (the "parent-teacher") catches the fisters and says something like, "Hey, we don't have time for that, we've got to literally eat each other at sundown." After the second fisting scene, the film gives up all hope of making sense or having anything to do with Gaiman's original text, but damn Nicole Kidman's Siouxsie Sioux wig is pretty.
A24 has produced a slew of excellent and award-winning films over the past few years—The Florida Project, Moonlight, The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Lady Bird—and two of its recent projects, Eight Grade and First Reformed, are both "Don't Miss" picks by The Stranger at this year's Seattle International Film Festival. Unfortunately, A24's How to Talk to Girls at Parties is not in the same league as these films. The loud latex costumes, however, may be worth your time.
See movie times for How to Talk to Girls at Parties.
