‘NIRVANNA: THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE’ Review
March 20, 2025 10:39 am |
Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie is not only an outrageous title, but an extraordinarily wild experience. Venturing into this film almost entirely blind I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, luckily it’s a surreal comedy that will leave you cracking up and *shocked*. The film is shot as a documentary on speed with interactions with the real active world, ala Borat and Bruno – a format we see less and less these days.
Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol are essentially the modern Flight of the Conchords, a band with high aspirations with sights on the stars. The film isn’t about the music, only the idea of the band. It’s a genius blend of comedy and science fiction that is made all the better with the real reactions from the people slightly out of frame.
It’s a film that takes some pretty gigantic leaps into copyright territory, it even breaks the fourth wall at one point to acknowledge this fact and it’s a better film because of everything it’s risking. Just from the title alone, you should be able to gather an idea of the copyright nightmare this film will ultimately be, and that is only one of the many reasons why it is so brilliant (and reckless).
The science fiction elements dive into the world of time travel and the dangers of utilizing it for your advantage (reference The Butterfly Effect). Logically does any of the time travel components of the movie pulling direct inspiration from the Back to the Future franchise make a lick of sense? No, absolutely not, but neither did making a hot tub a time machine in the aptly named Hot Tub Time Machine and here we are.
Leads Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol naturally and authentically work off one another to execute casual yet outrageous scenarios for them to seamlessly move forward into without objection. The pair possesses a unique sense of humor that comes off incredibly earnest. Despite the chaos of filming something like this, it appears as though Matt and Jay are having a ton of fun on screen as these fictional versions of themselves, which compliments and narrowly excuses some of logical gaps in the science they must push through.
From the director of Blackberry, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie will almost certainly catch anyone watching off guard at some point during the experience, especially if you can manage to see the cut from SXSW. During several moments I audibly gasped and nervously chuckled when Jay and Matt did something that could’ve been done with a greenscreen but was horrifically not. The film is meant to send you down a spiral of emotions, into shock, awe, and hysterics. It’s difficult to hold it together as Johnson and McCarrol have created something so uniquely remarkable – a voyeuristic documentary with an absurd premise.
Categorised in: Reviews
This post was written by Connor Petrey
Comments are closed here.