The Astronaut Farmer

What are quirky indie twin filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish (Northfork, Twin Falls, Idaho) doing making a sickly sweet fantasy starring Billy Bob Thornton? Is this a bid to show that they can make a dumb Hollywood movie? Well, if so, they have succeeded.

Thornton stars as Charlie Farmer, a Texan nutjob deep in debt, who dreams of launching his own rocket—in his backyard. He takes his cute teenage son Shepard Farmer (Max Thieriot) and two precious—or is that precocious?—daughters named Stanley and Sunshine (Jasper and Logan Polish, the filmmakers daughters) out of school to serve as his crew. And he gets the undying support of radiant wife Audrey (Virginia Madsen), who stands by her man.

If viewers can buy the “you gotta believe” premise, then The Astronaut Farmer is a nice bit of corn pone. Cynics, however, will chafe at the inaccuracies of this hokey film— for example, how does the blast of the rocket fail to ignite the Farmers’ barn? It defies physics.

While it is a shame Bruce Dern (who could have played Farmer back in his heyday) is wasted here, trivia buffs will enjoy seeing an uncredited Bruce Willis pop up as a NASA guy who stays on the ground while Thornton takes to the skies (the reverse of their previous film together, a little picture called Armaggedon).

And while it is no surprise how The Astronaut Famer ends, what is shocking is how utterly mainstream the film is. The wry deadpan humor that is the Polish brothers’ signature is conspicuously absent here. What is worse is that it has been replaced with that inoffensive small-town cuteness in which the town therapist is also the school counselor, who was also Charlie Farmer’s prom date.

At least The Astronaut Farmer is gorgeously filmed. And Thornton plays Charlie the dreamer with an appropriate twinkle in his eye. —Gary M. Kramer

Gray Matters

In the painfully self-conscious “comedy” Gray Matters, a workaholic single gal Gray (Heather Graham) discovers to her chagrin that she’s a latent lesbian—and perhaps a bit too close to her roommate, who just happens to be brother Sam (Tom Cavanaugh). The two finish each other’s sentences, have the same taste in movies, and would rather rent a DVD and stay home together than go out and socialize. They’re the perfect “couple”—until Sam meets Charlie (Bridget Moynahan), falls in love (literally) overnight, and decides to get married. That’s when Gray—after sharing a drunken but innocent kiss with Charlie on the night before the wedding—suddenly decides, “Hey, I think I’m gay, and my brother’s wife is perfect for me.” (Insert groan here.)

The movie wants to take an honest but lighthearted look at coming out from a lesbian’s point of view, but, in fact, there’s very little that’s honest about it. The cliché-ridden script is laboriously cutesy (think Gilmore Girls—on speed), and treats lesbianism as if it’s an unwanted sore that suddenly pops up on someone’s lip. Meanwhile, the fact that actors such as Graham (obviously overextended), Cavanaugh (phoning it in), Molly Shannon (hamming it up as Gray’s co-worker) and (for shame!) Sissy Spacek (clearly out of her element—and with no clue how to handle it—as Gray’s wacky therapist) actually agreed to appear in the movie either speaks to the quality of an original, far better script (which obviously didn’t get filmed), or to the fact that they were all desperately in need of work. Based on the outcome of the film, I’m going with the latter.—Ken Knox

Tears of the Black Tiger

Spaghetti Westerns have served as the inspiration for a number of contemporary films, most notably the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino and most of Robert Rogriguez’s, as well. But rarely has a contemporary filmmaker actually set out to make a spaghetti Western again, which is why Tears of the Black Tiger—a colorful homage to shoot ‘em-up gunslinging Westerns of the ‘50s—is frequently entertaining, even if it doesn’t always work.

Wisit Sasanatieng’s film—a cult hit in his native Thailand and the first film from that country to play in competition at Cannes. At times, the sight gags (a head exploding after being shot through the center of a coin, painted sets and plastic trees, exaggerated re-creations of duel scenes filmed from between a shooter’s legs) are enough sustain the filmmaker’s silliness. Shot in grainy “Technicolor”-esque cinematography, the movie is a dead ringer for your father’s favorite Westerns, but—with a sly tongue planted firmly in cheek—it gently pokes fun at the familiar tropes found in those movies while celebrating them. And therein lies the film’s biggest problem: So specific is Sasanatieng in attempting to capture the tone of his influences that he neglects to put much of his own heart into the movie.

The story concerns the doomed love between an outlaw known as the Black Tiger (Chartchai Ngamsan) and an influential politician’s daughter (Stella Malucchi), who has already been promised to another man. But the wooden plot is really just an excuse for Sasanatieng to reference the works of Sergio Leone. Which is just what he does—in spades. It’s only too bad he didn’t put as much effort into directing his actors to create characters instead of archetypes. Indeed, the movie is a lot of fun to look at, but in the end, it’s all fairly shallow.—K.K.