by Tim Williams - A&SB Contributor

You don’t know it yet, but a certain moving picture is lurking in the dark corners of the Internet, waiting to worm (warm?) its way into your heart, and kick It’s a Wonderful Life to the curb. No, it’s not Italian Spiderman Part II. You may, however, be able to hogtie it, push it down, into some snakewater, and then illegally watch it on your computer.

This would be a travesty of justice. And not just because the Flaming Lips’ giant plastic concert bubble is starting to show its age and could use a tune-up. Also because The Flaming Lips need to make enough money on this to fund another movie.

Yes, it’s Christmas on Mars, and the universe has never felt so alive. I would summarize the plot for you, but all you need to know is: It’s the resulting explosion that would occur if David Lynch and Frank Capra had teamed up to make the musical adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Frontman Wayne Coyne has admitted as much, although with the caveat: “It’s sometime in the future; Mars has been sort of conquered, and there’s a space station on it, but the space program has gone into decline and these people are kind of stuck up there. The whole thing ends up very dilapidated, very un-futuristic, un-2001. There’s an element of confidence among the scientists, but the overall view is that things seem kind of doomed.”

There is also a startling variety of straight-faced vaginal imagery (the best one involves a mother entering her baby-feeding pod). There are obligatory more-or-less arbitrary cuts between black-and-white and a Technicolor Martian. There is a foul-mouthed captain who ain’t having none of this fairy Martian shit.

This would all be absolutely intolerable if it wasn’t accompanied by wildly creative images, pitch-perfect student film dialogue and acting, and a soundtrack to make you forget the Flaming Lips are perpetually one step away from post-emo Death Cab for Cutie.

That it works, and is by the final Christmas hymn rather touching, is more than a band pet project has any right to hold claim to. Unfortunately, unless you happen to live in a city and be paying attention when it comes to a hole-in-the-wall near you, you’ll have to wait until the DVD releases Nov. 11 to pay money to see it. And then buy two more copies of the movie and hide them where you’ll find them in a drunken stupor each Christmas Eve, so you can remember that, if you had grandchildren, you would be, right now, pointing excitedly at the television and failing to make them understand your generation.