For what it's worth, McAbee's been making self-consciously oddball short films since the '80s, and their handmade props have been displayed in West Coast galleries. Not really avant-garde any more than it is mainstream, Astronaut is as nonchalantly make-believe and irreverently flexible as a tree-house game of Buck Rogers. Casually traversing the solar system and composed mostly of shadow and basslines, McAbee's movie could've been shot almost entirely on the Bowery. An asteroid is represented solely by the interior of a low-ride gin mill, Jupiter is an old Maspeth ballroom, and Venus is an open field populated by waltzing Victorian nymphos. In McAbee's cardboard celestitude, women are mining-outpost rare, and his laconic space cowboy's mission is baldly absurd. Trading a cat for a mysterious black box said to contain a "Real Live Girl"?or at least the clonable beginnings of one?astronaut Samuel Curtis decides to swap it on Jupiter for the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman's Breast (Gregory Russell Cook), a petulant, centurion-outfitted teen who could then be delivered to the procreatively desperate maidens of Venus.[...]
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Still, this musical epic is unlike anything I (or anyone I know) have ever laid eyes on. That indicates some kind of unique artistic vision. Too bad the ending fails to live up the levels established by the rest of the picture, but I don't exactly have any ideas how to wrap up the show in a manner that would satisfy anybody. Got to give kudos for the effort; it was a fun ride while it lasted. It's stayed with me, too. Any movie capable of opening doors in my head must have something major going for it. That reminds me. Actually, Lynch and Jodorowsky are good benchmarks by which to judge what you could expect here. If for no other similarity than this: You may not know whether drugs were involved in making the movie, but they certainly couldn't hurt the experience of actually watching it. Now that's entertainment!
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