2001 Directed by Cory McAbee
Samual Curtis's first mission in this bizarre science fiction musical comedy requires him to take a cat to a saloon on an asteroid. There, he meets his former dance partner (the Blueberry Pirate) and collects his payment: a device capable of producing a Real Live Girl. Including music by alternative rock group The Billy Nayer Show, this film began life as a live show with a loyal following.
האסטרונאוט האמריקאי, Американский астронавт, Американський астронавт
USA
USA
The American Astronaut
“Imagine a Laurel & Hardy skit directed by Salvador Dali.” (1)
“A cross between Deadwood and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.” (2)
“Existo (1999) crosshatched with Space Truckers (1996)” (3)
“A cross between Eraserhead and Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang” (4)
“Somewhere between Six-String Samurai and Dead Man” (5)
The American Astronaut was Cory McAbee’s debut feature. Like Jean Cocteau and David Lynch, McAbee is a polymath in the area of art. McAbee was previously best known for his band The Billy Nayer Show (who composed the music for the film) which has released eleven albums and a book of “cartoons, parables, puzzles and illustrated bunny tales” (from the film’s press notes). McAbee has also made several short films…
Feeling like the blasphemous love child of Wes Anderson and David Lynch, The American Astronaut is offbeat, campy, and more than a little too quirky for its own good. As a sci-fi/western musical, can it really be any other way?
Written, directed by, starring, and scored by Cory McAbee as the titular Samuel Curtis, The American Astronaut suffers from an incredible first half and a supremely lackluster second. I'm still trying to decide if the novelty of it all can only sustain itself for so long, or if it just loses steam on its own accord. Regardless, what a first half it is. Impromptu dance numbers by swarthy gentlemen, strangely endearing space scenes hand-painted rather than digitally constructed, and one…
Space is a Lonely Town
Imagine Firefly, but dustier, grittier, and with more dancing. Imagine it was directed by someone like Guy Madden, and you’d get a fuzzy picture of the cult gem The American Astronaut, the cinematic spawn of modern day Buckaroo Banzai; multidisciplinary artist, and all round superhero Cory McAbee. He brought his singular vision of the ‘space western’ to screen nearly two years before Whedon did.
You don’t need to know much, and probably shouldn’t, but the story centres around a hard boiled interplanetary trader, a cat ( named MonkeyPuss ), a rough crew on an interplanetary outpost saloon, an infamous fruit thief named The Blueberry Pirate, the entirely male populated Jupiter, and the entirely female populated…
A bizarre escapade. Limited in scope but engaging nonetheless, initially due to how it plays with and mixes genre conventions and styles. Yet the musical numbers and offbeat concepts give it worth beyond plain absurdist fun, and it benefits from memorable if not limited characters.
It's a shame the film falters in the second half, because the remarkably entertaining first portion sets a lofty standard. The last 20 minutes, in particular, take a dive in quality, accompanied by some wildly troubling storyline implications and a surprisingly awful closing number. But despite the disappointing close, the preceding hour or so is utterly fantastic in its oddball humour and eclectic ideas. While there are hints of previous works in the mix, the range of influences are innovated into something akin to little I've seen before. It may even be the quintessential sci-fi western musical.
i really can't say i've seen a movie quite like The American Astronaut before. the western and the space adventure are of course a perfect match, with their themes of lonesome men exploring a dangerous frontier, best exemplified in something like Firefly. but The American Astronaut is also a black-and-white comedy musical, with rollicking, twangy alternative rock dance numbers popping up randomly.
it's extremely lo-fi, quirky, and at times borders on nonsensical, with characters named the Blueberry Pirate and The Boy Who Actually Saw A Woman's Breast, and a plot centered around trading a mate to the all-female colony on Venus. it's also never boring and, most importantly, an undeniably unique vision.
As per new tradition, Nick Langdon and I mini-collab a loser from the recent Collab week I hosted that he wanted to win over the actual winner.
I'm not going to be able to surpass his brilliant summation of The American Astronaut as "David Lynch's Dark Star"; this Sundance funded indie musical could certainly co-exist in the same universe as those more esoteric works. Cory McAbee's maximizes his meager budget well, using stark black and white cinematography to distract from only having three sets we go between. There's a Lynchian drone that goes on in the background whenever the characters aren't singing that imbues the audience with a sense of unease, and the appearance of space born Nevadian miners whose bodies have atrophied into paper mâché puppets evokes memories of the Eraserhead baby. The music ain't half bad either.
The problem? No money. After a bit of plodding, the movie simply ends, just like this review.
Not much to say about this one. A deliberately obtuse no-budget "space western musical," it was a labor of love by professional weirdo Cory McAbee, who like Guy Maddin has made an entire career out of purposely head-scratching gonzo underground art projects, the kind of guy who fronts a rockabilly band while maintaining a group arts collective dedicated to intentionally offputting performance pieces for hipsters at places like SXSW. As such, then, this movie not only makes no sense, it's deliberately created to make no sense, something I used to have a lot more tolerance for when I was younger, but that now makes my patience wear thin as I approach 50 and have now spent 30 years in the…
Argh. I could not get on this film's wavelength. The visuals are intoxicating, but the humour didn't work for me and the catchy music appears in jagged snippets. I'm all for a black and white musical western, but does it have to be this aimless?
Absolutely love this kind of movie that raises a million questions and just confidently tears past them in order to tell a bizarre story with the utmost charm, humor and thoughtfulness. A perfect cult film. So many memorable scenes, songs, dances, and lines. Love how the effects were done here with just enough polish and just enough shoe strings to walk the line. Rocco Sisto’s happy-anguish dancing in the piles of sand alone…….
I loved how plainly excited Cory McAbee was to be acting in his own movie, and then I saw him in a post screening Q&A and he was just as energetic and optimistic it just made it all the better.
Revisionist industrial era filmmaking posing as a musical sci-fi. This is what it would be like if, not only the moon landing was faked, but if it existed in its own purse of absurd existence that we opened up whenever we needed it. Could be perceived as an Oingo Boingo experiment into making La Voyage Dans La Lune but if at the end of it was the Mos Eisley Cantina, with old time blues, rock n roll and other blue-eyed american greatisms being parodied into oblivion but coming back full circle and sounding amazing, rousing, and totally perfect.
i think the people involved were trying to make a weird midnight movie, but what they ended up making was a steam-powered blues musical version of Star Wars that would play in Miners Clubs in burning pictures of the original incarnations of your hometown.
