Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

It was the night of Big Bob's wedding to Diane that I saw THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT.

The new owners of the Zam-Zam, legendary Art Deco cocktail lounge in Frisco's Upper Haight, had planned a big wedding: ceremony at the Swedenborgian Church, reception at the old Lehr's Greenhouse (now known as Murray's Glasshouse Restaurant), then a seven week honeymoon in Europe (from which, at this writing, they have not returned). Intelligence had circulated earlier that the saviors of the Zam-Zam would make an appearance in the Haight before they left. Alexander the Greek of The Gold Cane (my local) and his handsome tow-haired bartender, Brandon; Todd and Vivian, the former social/intellectual lion and lioness of the Cane; the Greater Pizza of the Street, in general, would be among the guests.

Macresarf1 was not in attendance (for there was no real reason that he should be), but, after a shop at the corner Cala Market, suffering from a rare fit of Society curiosity, he had come along to the Cane. And shedding my mythical persona, and along with the other fifty vicarious revelers who had not been invited to the wedding, I found myself checked in with Akbar (he the designer of beautiful bongo drums), who was kindly taking a shift for Brandon, the usual Saturday night barkeep at the Cane. I sat around, savoring a Sierra Pale, until eventually, the word came down that the august couple would be at the Zam-Zam around 9 p.m.

Partially for that reason, leaving quarters in paper cups and skirting figures asleep in doorways along the way, I presently wandered west a block or so, to see a movie, any movie, at the Red Vic Theater. Surprisingly, few patrons were gathered around the Zam-Zam's elegant curved bar when I passed the lounge's open door. It seemed to confirm that the wedding party was still downtown.

Arriving at the theater, I did not at first recognize THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT by title (though remembered details of a previous showing came to me afterwards). A scarcely out-of-focus face loomed out from the darkness of the lobby poster above a smaller hunched figure of a saturnine-looking man seated at a desk. I recognized neither of them, nor any name at the bottom of the sheet, though the two faces resembled vaguely those of the above-mentioned Todd Gollimoni and Dino Christiansoni [Poet Laureate of Oklahoma], respectively.

"Space is a lonely town," the tag on the poster told me. Ah, well, I had two hours to kill.

Inside, I noticed, amid the general mix of shrubby young, quite a few rather upscale hippie-types with red or blue spiked hair, dressed in expensive retro-clothing. I bought a medium popcorn (which at the Red Vic comes in parquet wooden bowls) and joined the shrubbery, who gave off a delicate fragrance of good marijuana.

To describe the plot of THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT is to destroy much of its goofy charm, but I'll try to be gentle.

In W. Mott Hupfel III's high contrast black and white photography style, and to a bizarre Billy Naylor Band Rock n' Roll march, Cory McAbee -- Writer, Director and Star of THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT -- strides into his role of Hero Sam Curtis from his newly landed space ship into an all-male bar, frequented by scruffy miners, on the large asteroid Ceres, somewhere between Jupiter and Venus. Professor Hess (Rocco Sisto, LORENZO'S OIL, 1992), the Narrator, tells us that Sam has intentions of trading a cat for a girl (Annie Golden) in a black box. He will then later trade the box for The Boy Who Actually Saw a Girl's Breast, and then --

I have to rest a moment.

AMERICAN ASTRONAUT, while actually the kind of 16mm film school effort common before video tape, wants dearly to be a cult flick, like a cross of elements from Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (1926) and David Lynch's ERASER HEAD (1978) with Jim Jarmisch's 1996 DEAD MAN and a touch of Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER (1982). Did anyone mention THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW? (Yes, AMERICAN ASTRONAUT is, among other options, a musical.) It also nods to the setting Pete Hyams' 1981 Sean Connery vehicle OUTLAND, in a monochromatic semblance of a Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon Serial from the 1930's.

All financed apparently on a budget derived from pawn shop loans.

That may not be surprising, for Creator McAbee has also been a cartoonist, a song writer; and since the founding of the Bay Area's Billy Naylor (rock) Band, its lead singer and frontman. One can imagine him sitting around, smoking a joint with the guys, years back, saying suddenly:

"Ya know, dudes, we should make a movie! I got this idea from a comic book I been workin' on. It's bout an astronaut from a really screwed-up planet, kinda Earth-like, who peddles things . . . n' . . . stuff, throughout the Solar System. A Real Straight Arrow, but cool. Code of the West, understand. But really cold about women. A Space Pimp. He's a guy whose father never had enough time for him, a professor or something. A Mad Doctor or a Republican, see? An old punk . . . likes to vaporize people. It's deep, man. Zap! Vietnam -- Zap! Salvador -- Zap! Panama -- Zap! Iraq -- Zap. Bosnia -- Zap! He's like LBJ or Reagan . . . Bush . . . Nixon! Or was it Clinton? . . . .

"Hmmn, that's good she-it, man!

"And Mom was one of those old-fashioned pre-pill babes, a good lady, understand . . . but doesn't know where it's at. She wouldn't give the Professor any -- we'll call him Professor Hess -- not any at all.

"Mom didn't understand our hero . . . Sam, like Uncle Sam . . . Sam . . . Curtis! Mom thinks the dude's crude an' wants him to become a dentist, but he wants to be an Astronaut . . . or a Rock n' Roller, like us! Then, Mom dies -- I ain't got worked out how. And the Professor loses his marbles, along with his balls, you know, man? He tells the story of how he wanted to kill his own son, Sam, for no good reason . . . cause if he had a reason . . . he wouldn't want to kill him . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"Understand? And we'll use our own songs n' call it a Rock n' Roll Musical Space-Western!"

I don't know if that's how the story came down, but it well might have. Though not all of the above is realized on McAbee's screen, certainly the shaggy dog plot surfaces that way.

For Sam Curtis, up to his hips in thugs, lunatics and shady smugglers -- he must minister to a group of down-on-their picks Space silver miners -- McAbee transmogrifies into one himself at one point -- guys who never got any, or not enough at least, hanging around bars without women, where the big event is when they all laugh at the Big Joke told by The Old Man (Tom Aldredge -- "Hugh diAngelis" of THE SOPRANOS), or they dress in drag for a beauty contest, as a way of entertaining themselves.

"It'll be de-e-ep, man. No body'll know that *Professor Hess is the real hero on account he learns to stop killing people for no reason, and becomes like Sam, who gives up using women n' things as commodities . . . maybe . . . something like that . . . . . "

Later, the American Astronaut encounters more rock hounds marooned in an Ozian Cabin in the Sky.

Or was that ------- "Akbar, make that a Macallan in a snifter, with water back."

Sam trades chocolate for a crewman, Body Suit (James Ranson), and enlists an Inter-Galactic fruit thief, Blueberry Pirate (Joshua Taylor), to help him fly The Boy Who Saw a Woman's Breast (regarded by the horny miners as royalty) to Venus, where a race of women await, to crown The Boy their new King, now that their old stud has died.

The women are coifed and attired in Victorian fashion, and look like nothing so much as clones of the desperately sought for heroine at the end of Robert Enrico's Oscar winning short film, "La Riviere du Hibou," based on Ambrose Bierce's classic Civil War story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." The lonely genteel ladies drift around a grassy field in their hoop skirts, like a cotillion of Antebellum debutantes.

Lady Venus (Melissa Wilder), goddess of the planet, a kind of manic depressive, trades the mummified body of the old king for The Boy Who --

"Have one yourself, Akbar."

And for "The Billy Naylor Band's Greatest Hits": Sam, occasionally breaks into one a song like "The Girl with the Glass Vagina." Or Henchman #1 (Mark Manley) and Henchman #2 (Ned Sublette), while singing "Hey, Boy!" take high angle movies of Sam, who is trapped in the stall of a public restroom at the bar.

"Really de-e-e-ep, man!"

Anyway . . . .

Later, back at the Gold Cane, after passing by a bank of expectant looking pale young men and women selling Sam Curtis T-Shirts or the Billy Naylor Band CD's in the Red Vic lobby, I reflected on THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT. Unintentionally, for the movie was made about two years ago, it does resemble the crazy randomness of 2002 America, and particularly that of San Francisco, in the afterlife of the Dot.com meltdown and the Big Bull Market of the 1990's.

[Within a year's time, the Administration and Wall Street had burned Dollars by the hundred billion on "The War on Terrorism," cooked books on a dozen of the largest corporations in the Global Economy, and given a foolish trillion buck rebate of taxes in an attempt to re-inflate the prosperity bubble, promising to throw the Nation deeper into the National Debt than we had been in a nearly a dozen years.]

"It was deep, man."

Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden, like the evil Professor Hess, a key villain in our current metaphysical Space Opera, was nowhere to be found (until he killed again "for no good reason," or he was killed himself, say, in October, conveniently before the Congressional elections of 2002), and a significant number of top Administration figures and Fortune 500 Executives were in danger of indictment on corruption charges. The Deficit on our National Credit Card was ballooning, as lunatic intelligence agencies issued dire alerts of imminent attacks, while urging us to gather in public places and continue to spend what money we had left on anything available.

In San Francisco, where the Dot.com Collapse was palpable and business after business was closing -- EVEN BARS! -- if you couldn't trade chocolate, women, integrity, why then sell the goods to your neighbor -- or auction them on eBay. And what you couldn't sell or trade, you left as a remainder on street corners.

In short retrospect, THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT made more and more sense.

"That was my point exactly, Macresarf1," said *Walter Mangiotto, who had walked out of the theater over to the Cane with me. "As I said in my own Epinions review: 'The reasoning is Beckett, the execution Brecht and Weil.' Brilliant! The film, I mean."

"Akabar! Get Walter another drink."

Hard to imagine that THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT went through Robert Redford's touted Sundance Lab, but it did. Mr. Redford's indie film astronauts must have provided those strange stills of the stylized rocket ship -- definitely out of some rival series to FLASH GORDON. I expected The Blueberry Pirate, tethered by a clothesline, to climb out the port of Sam's cockpit and tack Sam's space ship on a piece of art board for a process shot. So I thought, as Ralph of the Mission Rock Resort, in leather jacket and white silk scarf, cradling his motorcycle helmet, bustled into the Cane.

"They haven't come back yet," he announced. "What have you been up to since I left you at six o'clock?"

I tried to explain to Ralph, as best I could, about THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT.

"You sure this movie wasn't called THE AMERICAN TAIBAN?" Ralph kept asking.

"Well, Ralph, it's not an easy movie to describe. Possibly like something Baz Lurhmann would make, if he didn't have any money. It's all over the map, the way my review on Epinions is going to be."

"No," Walter would interject. "More like Luigi Pirandello. ENRIQUE IV comes into my head."

"THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT. Not a new film. Played in the City last November," grumbled Ralph. "I saw the thing. It was nuts. But my candidate for The American Astronaut would be Mike Kelly, King of the Bartenders, out at Cotter's Corners in the Excelsior."

We all agreed to that brilliant observation as our rather weird wedding watch continued.

Big Bob and Diane never went back to the Zam-Zam that evening. That's what Gold Cane Owner Alexander the (great) Greek and Brandon told us when they sauntered in, resplendent in their grey swallow tail coats, striped cravats and wing-tip collared shirts. The newly weds blasted off straight off to their honeymoon.

It was a happier ending than Sam Curtis got.

The Zam-Zam once was run by a moody little man, Bruno, a Sicilian, born in Ecuador, who took it over from his father, the entrepreneur who created it just before World War II. Bruno was famous locally, even Internationally, for his martinis and his habit of tossing out anyone who offended his fastidious sense of taste and decorum. When he grew ill in recent years, he vowed that the place would die with him. But on his deathbed, two of his old customers, Big Bob (almost a son to him) and Diane, persuaded him to sell them the place. They now have re-furbished it to the elegance of 1940.

"Pirandello. Yes, definitely Pirandello," Mangiotto was muttering as I stumbled toward the door. "VIESTIRE GLI IGNUDI, no doubt."

Like Walt Whitman after hearing the Learned Astronmer, I left The Gold Cane. Above my head in the brisk night air of Haight Street, near a ragged patch of high fog touching the moon, the lights of a jet sailed out of sight. Perhaps it was Big Bob and Diane . . . heading for Venus.

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*I am indebted to thewasp's girlfriend for this notion, expressed in his early review of THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT -- "The American Astronaut: A movie for Womens Studies" --

http://www.epinions.com/content_48326938244

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*Walter Mangiotto -- This name and character are fictitious, but if you would like to read the real Mangiotto, for another view, "Cory McAbee's Brilliant THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT," go to the following URL:

http://www.epinions.com/content_67752595076

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If you wish to explore all of Macresarf1's reviews, indexed by title and category, many with URL's, paste to your browser and go to the following --

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Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older