Coming from Matt Johnson & Jay McCarrol (a bit of a young Lee Mack look-a-like) is a film based on their TV and web series that’s brainer that Kurt Cobain’s garage wall. Like the slacker duo they portray in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the misspelling is another (deliberate) oversight and lack of attention to detail that reflects the pair’s musical ambitions that will never lead to success. Their lo-fi musical act has Jay tinkling away at the piano while Matt improvises grandiose nonsense to delusional effect and their dream is to play the Rivoli, a hip music venue in Toronto. It’s Matt who comes up with increasingly ludicrous plans to get themselves booked (the obvious idea to just ring up the venue and get themselves booked seems to eluded then) and has been on-going since 2008.
Nirvanna the movie….
Seventeen years later and still not having played the Rivoli it’s Matt who hits on the idea to skydive off the top of the CN tower into the neighbouring sports stadium as a publicity stunt that, in one of the films many highlights, inevitably does not go as it should. Undeterred Matt and fuelled by the plot of Back to the Future, he comes up with the idea of claiming that the duo have time travelled from 2008 in their RV which he rigs up with apparatus similar to Doc Brown’s DeLorean except here its fuelled by a Canadian soft drink rather than by a radioactive isotrope. Bur by this time Matt is determined to carve out a solo career for himself driving off in the RV unaware that Jay is asleep in the back. But in a panic Matt hits the magical 88 mph and the pair find that they have time travelled back to 2008.
It’s from here that their time travel adventure gets even more determinedly demented to delightful effect and gets increasingly surreal with parallel universes and in danger of meeting their old selves.
What to expect….
The whole film has a lo-fi rough and ready look to it but with several high concept effects which blend so seamlessly as to make you gasp (it would spoil them to reveal those moments but you’ll know what they are as soon as you see them). The duos pranks and set ups with the public often looking on puzzled, bemused or aghast is part of the films many daft delights
If there’s a more sombre pout underlying the man-child goofy white guys it’s a reflection on John Lennon’s mantra that, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’ and here the pair have wasted years of their lives planning for the big time which will never happen
Back in 2023 Matt Johnson co-wrote and directed ‘Blackberry’, one of that year’s best films, and though Nirvanna is a far different entity it’s just as good.
related feature : Blackberry – Reviewed
related feature : Terry Gilliam talks to us about a Time Bandits sequel
Here’s the Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie trailer……
The post Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie – REVIEW appeared first on Any Good Films.
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