The American Astronaut: The Sci-Fi Musical From Nowhere

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Every so often a film arrives with no visible parents and no obvious peers, a thing that seems to have assembled itself in a garage out of spare parts from four incompatible genres. Cory McAbee’s The American Astronaut (2001) is one of those. It is a black-and-white science-fiction Western musical made by the frontman of an art-rock band, and I have never successfully described it to anyone who then watched it and said I had oversold it. If anything I always undersell it, because the sentence “sci-fi Western musical” makes it sound like a stunt, and the film is far stranger and far more sincere than a stunt could ever be.

Wild Zero: Rock and Roll, Zombies, and Guitar Wisdom

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Some cult films earn their reputation by testing the audience. Wild Zero (2000) earns its by rewarding them. It is a Japanese rock-and-roll zombie movie starring the real garage band Guitar Wolf as themselves, in which aliens raise the dead, motorcycles catch fire, heads explode in geysers, and the power of rock — stated plainly, repeatedly, as a law of the universe — is the only thing that can save the world. It runs a shade under a hundred minutes and contains more pure joy per reel than almost anything I can name.

Midnight Movie - vo.rs

The American Astronaut: The Sci-Fi Musical From Nowhere

Wild Zero: Rock and Roll, Zombies, and Guitar Wisdom