The American Astronaut

2001 science fiction western musical comedy

Rating: 16/20
Plot: The title character, a Hans Solo-esque smuggler, delivers a cat to the owner of a bar on an asteroid near Jupiter. He's given a case containing the goods needed to clone a real live girl. Girls apparently are rare in space. While at the bar, a pair of men take a picture of him while he's on the toilet. The astronaut meets up with an old friend, the Blueberry Pirate, who deals in some kind of illegal interplanetary fruit trade. They win a dance contest after an elderly man tells a painfully long joke. A task is assigned: the astronaut needs to transport the real live girl to Jupiter, exchange her for The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman's Breast, take the boy to Venus (a planet inhabited by only women), and then do something else. Complicated plan. I lost track. A sinister serial killer called Professor Hess hopes to foil those plans.
Rating note: I took the average of what I would have rated this movie now, what a normal person would rate this movie, and what I would have rated this movie in high school when it more than likely would have been my favorite movie of all time. It only seemed fair.
Creative, juvenile fun. It's a science fiction western musical comedy after all. There's an almost unbearable amount of campiness but at the same time spectacular cinematography, creative set design, really solid acting, and low budget artsiness. Cheap special effects (slowing down film shot at twice the speed, lots and lots of shadows to take advantage of the crisp black and white, the use of paintings of asteroids and spaceships and space barns to show spaceflight) add charm, and I really liked the rock songs, awkwardly traditional and absurd (see "The Girl with the Glass Vagina"). Sort of like a trippy Buck Rogers with the cinematography and cadence of Eraserhead , almost like a 12-year-old Luis Bunuel trying to direct a sci-fi flick right after he'd discovered girls and Rocky Horror. Beyond quirky, sometimes almost frustratingly so, but at the same time completely original and lots of fun. This is Cory McAbee's labor of love (he wrote/storyboarded for three years, directed, starred in, and performed all music with his band The Billy Nayer Show), and it's created with unbridled enthusiasm and vision. It's unfortunate that he probably doesn't have the money or the audience to do much more.
Here I am enjoying The American Astronaut: