The American Astronaut

2001 91mins (M)

Writer/Director Cory McAbee

Cast Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook

If Aki Kaurismaki made Rocky Horror , or David Lynch remade Paint Your Wagon, then you might be getting close to The American Astronaut.

The American Astronaut is a film that almost defies description. Made for next to nothing, featured at the Sundance Film Festival and self-distributed by its creator Cory McAbee it has wedged itself into modern film history for its total originality, its blithe disregard for all convention and its beautiful disruption of genre. The American Astronaut mashes sci-fi, musical and western into a rich and joyous pulp.

Shot in black and white it harkens to the ultra B of all B movies and yet paints its canvas with such naive and clever tropes that it hauls itself, on tin can rockets, cubical song scenes and a mythical universe of gendered planets, into a realm of deliciously fractured artistic expression.

McAbee is a writer, cartoonist, musician (his band the Billy Nayer Show scored the film – and it is so much fun), environmentalist and artist. There are no pigeon holes for McAbee; he is his own genre, his own voice. What he offers is rich. As with all great cinema, it is timeless, and sadly not enough seen. We talk of the space between the door and the floor, but more important, in all artistic expression, is that same light between love and hate!

“The unremittingly eccentric science-fiction musical ''The American Astronaut'' is not a picture that is likely to have you walking out of the theatre murmuring that there's nothing else like it. What you may say after sitting through it is that you've never seen so many kinds of leftovers crammed between the same two slices of bread. Its purview is emphatically perverse, a salute to the Midnight Movie, a cultural land mass that spawned John Waters and David Lynch. Mr. McAbee uses ''Astronaut'' as a way to deconstruct and celebrate the corniness of science-fiction epics and musicals; it is evocative of the disconcerting hybrid of musicals and crime fiction like Dennis Potter's ''Pennies From Heaven.''- NY Times

“Cartoonist, songwriter, rock 'n' roll maverick and now filmmaker, Cory McAbee is a renaissance rascal who brings a twist of irony to everything he touches. A tongue-in-cheek, rowdy-boy sci-fi musical with a Western motif, "American Astronaut" stars McAbee as Samuel Curtis, an astronaut who goes to an all-male Jupiter with a cloning device for a Real Live Girl. His travels take him to the all-female Venus, introduce him to the Blueberry Pirate and the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman's Breast, and give him occasion to sing "The Girl With the Vagina Made of Glass" in an outer-space saloon. Loony and unhinged” San Francisco Chronicle

Bring the picnic blankets and hampers and head to The Quad for a great night of outdoor cinema in the heart of Lismore, 21- 23 May.