Robert Crumb is a fascinating genius. A weird, dorky and lanky man. This story develops gradually with tension and atmosphere – the topic of comic books, cartoons. Crumb is funny and engaging, his work is amazing. If this film is your introduction to Robert Crumb, you could do worse.
Crumb is a hero to sexual deviancy. He is not only a really interesting talent, he is also a really good illustrator – I mean he can draw. His fixations are familiar and funny. He has a great attitude about his deviancy. Positive and rebellious, his work is filthy and sick, hilarious and unique.
Crumb, the man, is poetic in his descriptions and choices of details – a natural storyteller. The picture of his brother, Charles is sweet, intelligent and tortured. It’s a sad, sad story. It’s a sick, sick story.
It grabs you and toys with you and it’s just fun to watch. The discussion of sex is strange and devious, shocking but in a way – there are parts of it that are common. We all have an inner sickness. These guys celebrate that geek inside and parade it around for our entertainment.
The people we meet in this film are real nerds. They are cool, funny, vintage-loving freaks. Crumb’s family are beautiful people who’ve been tortured the way of most middle American outcasts in their young years.
The end result is tragic for Charles, but the up-side is Robert’s amazing success, and well deserved. He pushed forward a generation of sex, brave exploration and political reaction to conformity, through art.
We even get to see the development and the inside of Crumb’s creative process, the progression of his career and how he feels about his work. With actual footage from when he was working on some of his early work.
Crumb is attacked as self-indulgent, but all artists are self-indulgent. His work is messy and when he gets dark, he is criticised for being a porn peddler. His art is sexually charged at its core, and celebrated as such. This is a process of affecting the reader – by shock, by horror, by disgust. Sometimes there is meaning. Other times the artist seeks purity, and avoids all trappings, and is attacked for having no meaning. Accused of literary masturbation. Sometimes it is masturbation – but that doesn’t mean it stops being art.
The female critics in this film are humorously ignorant of their own irrelevance.
Crumb seems to be displeased with the modern world. Charles looks laid back and intellectual, but that could be the tranquilisers and other medication. Harmony Korine for an instant comes to mind – a film that started off as a documentary about a great cartoonist, but the story of his life is mundane, grotesque, tragic and almost shameful – like a Korine drama fiction. If it weren’t that in this house there are no boundaries. This is the greatest freedom of the Crumbs.
Women love to hate him. He hates to love them. Crumb is a true romantic, but without all the bullshit. A sentimental deviant. The Crumb point of view is bleak, neurotic, sadistic humour, in an effort to deal with a fascist, deceptive, decrepit society.
Eventually there are even more intriguing tales of molestation, homicidal tendencies and Robert’s brother, Maxon is quite a talented, yet unknown surrealist painter.
Terry Zwigoff should stick to non-fiction – this film is by far his best work – and a beautiful description of a very cool guy, who makes stuff that matters. His work is important. Making his mark. Inspiring us all.
The strongest quality of this film is that it is a sentimental story, but it’s also an artist’s portrait of a visionary maker flirting with the underground, fighting the people who might expect him to sell out and making cartoons to rebel as a political and illustrative expression against conformity. Against the women who are guarded, insecure, sexually neurotic, tragically asexual. Against the quiet, reserved, militaristic, puritan need to crush the deviant geek inside all of our heads.
No, we celebrate the geek. We praise him. We thank him!
4 stars
the joy of eating and the folly of thinking 