Strange Matter: Please adjust your universal translator to the language of your understanding.
November 27th, 2009 by Andrew Konietzky in Arts, Film, Sarasota-Manatee
Relationships… yes, the infamous R-word. It causes groans from men and screams from the women of our little blue-green world. I grew up watching various documentaries; everything from science to nature was a common weekend staple. The favorites of my father were always something on the bizarre practices of some species of animal. What they ate, how they hunted and even how they mated. Ever wondered how human beings would measure up, if the same kind of documentary was made about us?
With all the intricacies of the modern human mating dance, fraught with so many opportunities for miscues and failures, it’s amazing that any of us get together at all, let alone mate and reproduce. Such is the clever premise of Jeff Abugov’s ingenious and hysterical satire Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, styled like some entry from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and structured along the lines of the show Wild Kingdom.
We look at sexual attraction, love, single life and dating in the late ’90s as seen through the eyes of a misinformed, though completely authoritative extra-terrestrial narrator (David Hyde Pierce). We follow The Male (Mackenzie Astin) and The Female (Carmen Electra), from their introduction ritual at the sacred meeting ground — an L.A. nightclub — through the complex, mysterious pre-mating rituals we all know, yet none of us seem able to master. Primordial first dates, the eternal quest for peer approval, and the dreaded parental introductions. Everything seems to go wrong as the male and female navigate the timeless maze of emotions, expectations and pain on the way to love and marriage. And in the end maybe they’ll even end up where this journey was supposed to take them: parenthood and the perpetuation of this crazy species.
All are clinically and comically chronicled by the unflappable alien narrator who easily steals the show. We’re certainly an odd lot, we humans. But as interesting and entertaining as this clever film certainly is, imagine what visitors from the depths of space think about us. Share and enjoy.
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