![]() ![]() Natural" or the sweating, panting desperadoes that dominate Crumb's work hardly feels exaggerated. Seen in this light, the corrosive and-some say-liberating view of life expressed by "Mr. If anything, Robert's younger brother, Maxon, is an even scarier case: A convicted molester of women and veteran of the psycho wards, this gaunt figure remains holed up in a San Francisco fleabag with a collection of his own nightmarish paintings and a literal bed of nails.Īs for Mom, well, watch and listen for yourself. The Charles we meet is a gray-faced hermit who's been living in his mother's Philadelphia attic for years-still possessed of wit and sharp intelligence, but clearly a tragic casualty of the family's emotional battleground. Robert's older brother, Charles, was the family's first cartoonist, and probably the best. Crumb's father is dead, and his two sisters declined to be filmed, but no moviegoer is likely to forget the rest of the Crumbs. The terrors he uncovered there might keep a small army of psychoanalysts busy for years. For six years filmmaker Zwigoff, a longtime friend of the cartoonist, enjoyed (if that's the word) intimate access to the Family Crumb. While enduring his classmates' scorn and plenty of discord around the dinner table, he took early refuge in his fantasies, which, he says, included an erotic attachment to Bugs Bunny and a penchant for humping his mother's cowboy boots in the dark of her closet while singing "Jesus Loves Me." The son of a violent ex-Marine and a meddling amphetamine addict, Robert Crumb grew up, by his own description, nerdy and disconnected in Philadelphia. It's a deeply comic film, but no horror flick could match it for sheer creepiness. That's just one of the things we learn in the course of Terry Zwigoff's extraordinary documentary Crumb, which reveals in gruesome detail the sources of a social satirist's art, alienation and sexual obsession. Crumb may be startled to learn that this trafficker in headless female sex objects, anxiety-ridden male outcasts and pornographic kitty cats was probably the happiest member of his family. Give it a miss only if you expect some good, clean, family entertainment, but do so at your loss.Devotees-and detractors-of the underground comics pioneer R. I have watched it many times and intend to watch it many times over. The story, and with it the film, is amazing and totally captivating. Call it a modern - day version of the van Gogh - story, or a look at the darker (or even just the non - Warner - Brothers) side of the flower - power generation, the human condition, the power of art, the battle of the sexes, a case history of mental illness, psychotic families, whatever. ![]() Natural", telling the story of his life through his wife and brothers, with a few scenes of him at a vernissage and a comic book store (etc.) thrown in for good measure. Basically it shows Robert Crumb, the artist famous for "Keep On Truckin'", "Fritz The Cat" (though he does not like to be associated with either of them) and "Mr. So frigging what if it's shot with a hand - held camera and without studio lighting? "Crumb" is the real thing, it does not need any trickery or gloss. ![]() etc.: go back to your Kevin Costner, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise big budget Oscar winners, and stop smearing dirt on one of the best documentaries ever made. With the movie fresh in my mind I want to put out this message to all the people who have made depreciating statements such as "what is Crumb moaning about, he's famous now", "the Sixties weren't really like that", "it was just two hours of whining, rambling and unjustified complaining" etc. After reading the couple of negative reviews of "Crumb" on IMDB I re - viewed the movie one more time just to make sure that the many times when I had seen this movie before, on the silver screen and on video, I have not been in a state of delusion. ![]()
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