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Fresh and Exciting

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

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.

"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.

After a series of ridiculously amusing shorts, Cory Mcabee made this amazing movie. Not the best film ever made by any means but my personal and eternal favorite. Terry Gilliam had once been my favorite directer. His entire catalog has been trumped by this single film and my own wiry anticipation of what Cory Mcabee might do next. This was the only 100% blind buy I've ever made on a DVD. I bought this based on nothing but stills accidentally found in a Google image search and the synopsis on Amazon.com. It's the best blind buy I've ever made. I've shown it to as many friends as possible. I'm sure the DVD has been in the hands of my friends as much as it has been in my own. All of my friends have grown fond of it. Some have bought it. For me, this movie comes with a higher recommendation than any other I have ever seen.

"The American Astronaut" is the purest of pure examples of how great independent cinema can be. This SciFi-comedy-musical is one of the most cinematically luscious films shot in B&W 35mm by any independent film to my knowledge. The characters are without parallel, especially the genius of Tom Aldredge who delivers one of THE BEST monologue jokes ever captured on film. Cory McAbee not only wrote it and directs it, but also stars in it and co-wrote all the music which is performed by his band The Billy Nayer Show (don't know them? shame shame) Everyone I've ever recommended this film to or who I have known to have seen it raves about this film... except for one guy I know, but his favorite film is "Hard Rain" with Christian Slater... not sure if that should count.Space is a lonely town. There are some pretty deep concepts to this story that are cleverly interwoven into the comedy of the script. Also notable is how much like an elementary schoolyard the interactions and ethics of this film are. Brilliant, entertaining... pure genius.