447) Stingray Sam (2009)

447) Stingray Sam (2009) Dir: Cory McAbee Not Yet Released Date Seen: December 13, 2009 Rating: 4.25/5

There's something magically deranged about the collage logic undergirding Cory McAbee's two feature films. Stingray Sam, his most recent feature and his best so far, is a scifi western musical featuring Gilliam-esque slideshow montages by John Borruso and wonderful experimental music by McAbee's band, The Billy Nayer Show. It's sixty minutes of serialized melodrama centered around McAbee's preoccupation with space as an isolating place that fosters "certain tastes," as one song lyric puts it. In that way, McAbee translate the little hints of deviant behavior his characters exhibit as new and exciting possibilities, just as his film plays around with its generic junkyard bits and pieces. Cowboy buddies could be cowboy lovers or even develop a paternal bond with a little girl they're rescuing from captivity or even become pregnant with a clone or even a stingray, though the latter option is only partially realized.

That's because consummation of that desire, even beyond hints of that peculiar passion, is not McAbee's thing. It would detract from his films' ceaseless love of boundless play, both thematically and aesthetically. Besides, people gotta do what they gotta do in Stingray Sam, making any extraneous interactions beguiling and enticing but never a viable option. Stingray Sam, played by McAbee, says it best: "Well, 'cause I'm a lounge singer and a lounge singer's gotta sing. He's gotta be there every night to make sure folks get sung to. I know that may not mean a lot to some people but it means a lot ta me and it means a lot to a lotta people that come to see a lounge singer, and that's me!"

206) The American Astronaut (2001)

206) The American Astronaut (2001) Dir: Cory McAbee Date Released (OOP DVD): February 2005 Date Seen: July 2nd, 2009 Rating: 4/5

A warning to anyone about to watch writer/director Cory McAbee's 2001 science fiction musical/space western The American Astronaut: ignore the ending coda. It attempts to resolve a resolution-less story in a manner that makes flying off into the sunset in an alien Cadillac look downright conclusive. Though McAbee's plot runs out of steam about three-quarters of the way through its scant 92-minute-long runtime, the way that it develops its characters' sexual psychoses is what keeps the film intriguing. The coda unsuccessfully tries to dispel the blunt suggestions of attraction between Samuel Curtis (McAbee), a space trader and "The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman's Breast" (Greg Russell Cook), hints which are the lifeblood of the film. 

This is a minor but important setback for a film that ironically insists that what makes outer space so weird and wonderful is that how it warps the minds of its travelers in ways that cannot be expressed. All the major players in The American Astronaut are at least slightly sex deranged. Curtis, played by a 40 year-old McAbee, flirts with "The Boy" in an interminable montage sequence full of slow-motion giggling and exchanged furtive glances. "The Boy" is supposed to be 16 years-old and the idol of a sex-crazed planet of grimy male work slaves, none of whom have ever seen a creature with a Y chromosome. He is being shipped to the Venusians, a planet of women able to procreate on their own that will use the teen as their stag. Meanwhile, Prof. Hess (Rocco Sisto), Curtis' arch-nemesis, looks to have had some kind of taboo altercation with our hero for which he has always blamed Curtis, though that something is thankfully never fully explained.

These libidinal hang-ups are fittingly expressed not through expository dialgue but through winning amateur musical numbers and the thick fog of shadows that surround the men thanks to cinematographer W. Mott Hupfel III's rich black-and-white photography. The film thus does not ever capably provide a uniform polish to its story. Instead, it zooms along on a boundless supply of energy and visual ingenuity. Atmosphere trumps explanations here, making the final coda a negligible speedbump in an otherwise charming and demented alternative space opera.