That was an excellent one.

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

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.

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.

I don't like musicals and I'm not a huge fan of space movies but I loved this film. This black and white, no-budget, space western musical is quirky and full of humor. The music, though beyond any description I can think of, comes from the talented Billy Nayer Show (who made the film as well). Treat yourself to this film. It's not Hollywood, thankfully.This film is character driven with many of the lead rolls played by the band members. To the best of my knowledge, the space backgrounds where also painted by the band. Not meant to be believable (I don't think), they are more real than "real."If you ever have a chance to see Billy Nayer Show live you are in for a treat. But I was first turned onto this art collect through this movie. See it.