Film Review: Journey of the Childmen

Journey of the Childmen- omg yay!!! I'm happy to announce that I have finally obtained and watched my copy of The Mighty Boosh documentary, Journey of the Childmen, and have had a chance to watch it several times now- so now feel comfortable writing up my review. This film is wondrous. Wonder-making. Wondertastic. It's a must-see for any Boosh fan.

Directed by Oliver Ralfe, this movie offers a delightful and insightful behind-the-scenes peek at the Boosh cast during their 2008 Future Sailors live tour. Entertaining, funny, intimate, fascinating, touching, illuminating....all these words and more describe this film. It's filled with lovely little bits of Booshy animation, too. So many great scenes in this movie, but I wont go into them all as you should just watch it and discover them for yourself. I will say that the scene of Noel and Julian writing together is both mind-boggling and miraculous, almost like watching twin-speak or something. It's also lovely to see Noel just casually lounging around in a dress. :-) Good Lord Bowie, how I love that man!

Also, the DVD special features have lots of delicious extras- including several short films that feature Julian as either director (Curtains) or star (The Savage Canvas and HIV: The Musical- both of which are hilarious). Also included is a 5-minute long trailer for a short film that Noel starred in, The Wonderful World of Death....he is spook-tacularly dressed as a kind of zombie-ish looking dead person, with a wonderful sort of Edward Scissorhands-esque quality that makes it impossible not to think about how awesome it would be to see Noel in a Tim Burton film. Frustratingly, I cant seem to find the full film of that anywhere online- it seems that so far it has only been shown at some film festivals. Hopefully someday it will be viewable on a greater scale, as it looks really good!

As a technical note- This film has not actually been released for Region 1 (for those of you who are in the U.S.), BUT, the DVD is coded "Region 0", so if you get a copy, you should likely be able to watch it. I ordered mine through Amazon U.K., and had various degrees of success playing it on the DVD-playing devices in my home- it wouldn't play at all on the Blu-Ray player, it did play on my laptop but kept skipping/freezing, but it plays just beautifully on my old regular DVD/VCR combo player in my bedroom- just like any other DVD and no problems at all any of the many times I've watched it so far.

Rating- Well, normally I use the Netflix rating scale of 1-5 stars, but since Netflix doesn't even have this film on it's radar yet, not even to "save", I'm going give it 17 stars, on a scale of 1 through 8. :-P