WolfgangHorizon This is a triumph of so many genres and ideas. I felt the black and white style was pretentious at first, but this movie just destroyed my prejudices one after another. This is one of those movies you MUST give 10 minutes to, and you'll be hooked. At first it seems silly and a little too given to retro b&w slavishness. Give the stand-up comedian an opportunity for the longest ever joke and the communist-style hero worshipping auditorium scene a chance and you will forever be hooked. Don't listen to me. Just go watch. what did your father teach you? kill a sunflower.This is imaginative cinema in the best possible style. I could happily go for a year of such style in cinema. Brilliant. Refreshing.

fedor8 "Eraserhead" meets "Dark Star" meets Jarmusch meets alternative rock. And that doesn't even begin to describe this utterly original little flick. The soundtrack is entertaining, weird. How do I even label it? "Happy psychedelic rock"? I have no clue what it is, but that's never a bad thing when it comes to music. I wasn't too crazy about the vocals, but the rest is well above average.AA (and the initials do have fitting implications), is the most bizarre, nonsensical movie I'd seen in many years. It is a movie without a point, without a message, without logic, without a real beginning, and with an ending that might as well have been in the middle, as far as I'm concerned. In other words, very very refreshing. An inter-planetary road movie? And that's one of its more normal aspects.No left-wing baloney, no mindless/boring tackling of "social issues", no asinine preaching, or a pathetic anti-war message right out of Gandhi's left hip. In fact, this is the most purely apolitical movie that one can make, not a trace of Hollywood baloney in it. It is obvious that McAbee intended to make a movie that went totally against the grain, and wanted it to be experienced rather than intellectualized over.AA lacks logic, so don't even bother. Curtis fails to notice his "nemesis" in the bar. The evil professor kills everyone with great ease, seems to be the only armed person in the Solar System. Etc. In fact, I get the sense that McAbee is even proud of his movie's non-logic, this being best exemplified in Curtis's comical explanation of why the professor kills people whom he has no reason to kill, while refusing to kill those whom he has a reason to kill. It's buffoonish anti-logic par excellance. It reminded me of Python at their best.You will never find a sci-fi film with this type of visual slant. Spaceships look like run-down log-cabins, the interiors look like they hadn't been lived in for decades, and if they have then only by serial killers or winos.At the start I was thrown back a bit by the very deliberate "weird for the sake of it" attitude that relentlessly pervades from start to finish, because some of those films can be embarrassingly awful. So it does take a little while to get into the groove of AA. It does grown on you, though. Just as George Lucas yelled "faster, faster!" at his actors during the making of "Star Wars", I could easily imagine McAbee shouting "weirder, weirder!" at his actors during the shooting.I've rarely seen a movie this well acted and cast. Nowadays that's a rarity. But then again, AA is already 10 years old, belongs to the turn of the millennium era when the last droplets of quality dripped from America's dying indie scene. That scene is pretty much dead now. It's all about making left-wing political commercials that will win awards now.The only real flaw, however, is the "villain", the dull middle-aged geezer who kills everyone in sight. I neither found this actor nor the character he played all that interesting, nor funny.It's nice to see that there are still filmmakers out there who get the urge to do something completely new, instead of dishing out the same old useless crap, over and over again.But then again, this film is ten years old, as I said. Originality and lack of pretentiousness almost seem to have been banned in American film recently.

rgiscardian Okay, I saw the movie at the Red Vic in the Haight/Ashbury of San Francisco...a perfect setting for an off-beat film where movie-goers can watch a flik from a flea-bitten (j/k) couch while eating' good and cheap confection. Maybe this sounds like an ad for the movie theater, but I find such a setting perfect for how I would categorize American Astronaut: as a couch swallowing, camp/cult SCI FI flik.With its punkish music, it is a caricature of solar system space travel reminding me of Rocky Horror; but yes, it had the disconcert of Eraserhead. It all began on a f'd up bar on an asteroid. And while the ending was perhaps unsatisfying, it ended when I needed it to end...kind of like a Phillip K. Dick novel.I'm giving the movie a very high grade because it was made on the cheap. It made me laugh hard. It left a lot of room for personal interpretation. It is a social commentary. And it was quite disturbing, especially in its view of men and women existing separately.Oh yeah, it definitely had some commonality with The Queen of Outer Space...though crasser. For some reason, I was wondering if SCI-FI had a category called Kitsch SCI-FI. I looked up kitsch and must say that there is nothing kitsch about American Astronaut, especially the low budget spaceship because we really don't yet inhabit the solar system and glossy Star Trek space boats are extreme imitations of truth while even an Einstein cho cho train elaboration is more relativistic to our Earth...or at least way REALer than than captialistic star boat Enterprise.Ultimately, it all felt gay no matter which way you look at it..."Not because he wants to wear it, but because he gets to wear it." It's one of our pseudo hero's funniest lines as I remember it from the movie. I'd own this film if I could find it.

didi-5 'The American Astronaut' promises much more than it delivers, I'm sorry to say. It has all the hallmarks of a cult movie - comedy musical western with a rock score - but falls short of what it could have been.Cory McAbee (director, writer, star), who doesn't come across as particularly interesting as himself - guesting at a screening of this recently - plays Curtis, the astronaut of the title who wins a dance contest on Ceres, gets given a job to do, and - well, it's downhill from there, really.As Professor Heiss, Rocco Sisto comes across as very Ed Wood, moaning about everyone ignoring his birthday, reducing people in his wake to piles of sand. Greg Russell Cook is 'the boy who actually saw a woman's breasts', a bored cutie in a Greek God uniform; while Tom Aldredge is a bitter old man in the pub on Ceres who tells the long-winded, and rather silly 'hertz doughnut' joke.The main premise of this messy film is to showcase the real-life band (made up from McAbee, the producer, and the Ceres house musicians) who wrote and perform the score. There's a lot of promise in the musical numbers - one performed in the men's room (now, that was funny); one performed in silhouette in a shed floating in space; one performed by 'the Boy' on stage; one performed by Professor Heiss after a murderous spree, one performed by fat dull Eddie the barman on Ceres, etc. etc.The photography, when it isn't being 'look how low budget we are' (any of the shots with the space ship), is pretty good. The film appears in black and white and uses minimal sets and cheap costume to move its (limited) story along. But it could have been a lot more far-out and wacky. I came away feeling just a bit disappointed and felt that the film-makers themselves lost interest a fair way from the end. Pity.