Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

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.

doctorschlock One of the best quirky indie original off-the-wall comedies to see over and over again. I've seen some indie original stuff and The American Astronaut delivers with unexpected results. Why explain the unexplained? I liked it. You will like it. You won't be able to rationally explain it, but who can explain a Fun-house anyways? It's a Saturday Matinée kind of film. A fun film. An alternative universe where the men grow up on one planet and the women grow up on another. Thus goes the plot of a space cowboy who has to transport a girl in a box, a cat, and a boy who has actually seen a woman's breast. Did I mention that it is also a musical? Well, it is and you don't see that everyday.

openeyes Cory McAbee plays Samuel Curtis an astronaut on a mission. His mission is to take a cat to a bar on an asteroid to trade it for the clone of a woman and then to take the clone to Jupiter and trade it for the boy who once saw a woman's breast, and then take him.... Ah, don't worry about the rest. It doesn't matter, because in this movie, as is usually the case in life itself, the destination isn't as important as the journey.This ingenious black and white musical gem restored my waning faith in independent film. Over the years, independent film, of the Sundance variety, has become too pious, too bland, too self-important and too formulaic. (How many times can you watch a group of quirky misfits and loners form themselves into an impromptu family? Okay, okay, there's an element of that here too, but the setting and the execution make it fresh and diverting.) Writer/Director McAbee populates the film with unique and interesting characters, and he doesn't care if they are really relevant to the resolution of the story. Take, for example, Tom Aldredge, who tells the "Hertz DoNut" joke. It doesn't go anywhere -- literally -- not even all the way to the punchline, but it is hilarious. The film careens from one amusing episode after another. From the "Hey Boy" showdown in the mens room, to everything Lee Vinsky has to say, to the Woman With The Vagina Made of Glass. Not everything works completely, but I found myself either laughing, or with a goofy smile on my face throughout.I can't help but think that had this film been released in a more adventuresome cinematic time like the mid-80s, this film would have been a massive cult hit and McAbee would be hailed as the next David Lynch or Jim Jarmusch. I had the good fortune to see this film at a screening in DC that featured a Q&A with the director after-wards. He seemed to take the film's -- how can I put this discreetly -- lack of success in stride. I didn't. It's a shame to see such an original and entertaining film limp out onto the market with so little exposure. I hope this film finds it's market. It's too cool to dwell in obscurity.You owe it to yourself to see it.