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.

AJ LoCascio If you're lucky perhaps one out of a hundred movies will change the way you look at film making - for me The American Astronaut was such a movie. From the very first scene your already thinking "What the hell is this?" Now this question doesn't necessarily dictate that the viewer is enjoying themselves, but once that thought occurs it is undeniable that they have just stepped into a completely unique world.The only way for me to describe what this movie is like is to say: it is as if the director Cory McAbee - hell bent on making a stew that had never been tasted before - went into his kitchen - went through his cupboard pulled out a cup of musical honey for an unexpected sweetness, some robust western beef, a very carefully measured amount of comedic spices, a thick film noiry broth and put them all together in a pot. Not everyone will like this stew - while your eating it you may find that one moment you absolutely love it and nothing before or after has or will taste as good, then you take another spoon full and you wish you'd never started eating in the first place, but when you take yet another you can't imagine what it was you disliked.I for one loved the movie - It was the dancing cowboy in the beginning that got me. That image really hammered down what this movie was going to be - and that is: exactly what you don't expect it to be.As for direction - I absolutely loved the way it was shot. It's very minimal as far as lighting goes, you can almost actually see where the lights have been set up. I remember in the bathroom scene when the two cronies are dancing you can blatantly tell how the light kit has been arranged because of the obvious shadows. We accept this very obvious lighting, because, though it seems very rushed and in your face, you know it's actually very carefully planned and stylistically consistent.Over all the editing didn't bother me and flowed quite nicely. There was one particular cut when they flash to the workers that bothered me. It was very quick and such a specific moment that I almost feel silly mentioning it, but it didn't seem to have any flow with the other cuts and seemed unnecessarily disjointed. It reminded me almost of one of my first editing projects I did on I Movie - just one of those moments that makes you go - "Ooh ouch." But other then that moment, the editing didn't faze me.The music is so unusual - I have to comment on it. Sometimes it just doesn't match the action at all. There may be vague hints like in "The Girl with the Glass Vagina" you think "Okay I'll accept that he's singing about Vaginas- it's Venus the planet of women - there's lots of those there." but by that point your brain is pretty much mashed potatoes anyway, having sat through nearly the entire thing. I love that the songs take you out of the absurdity for a moment only to bring you to a level even more surreal then before.Over all I really enjoyed the American Astronaut. It was like falling down the long dark halls of my subconscious with a faulty flashlight, and I loved almost every flicker.

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.

breezyturtle The American Astronaut is like a 60s sci-fi on acid. It's warped and doesn't make much sense. It doesn't have a strong plot and definitely isn't for everyone. But, I did find myself laughing at certain points and I enjoyed it.There is a scene where the main character is on the toilet in the bathroom and two guys follow him in there. You're certain they're about to beat him up....until they plug in their record player and start singing to him. It's like West Side Story in another dimension. The Ceres jumping (their version of moon walking) in sync with the music makes for another great scene. This movie was born a cult classic.