Crumb

1994 documentary


Rating: 17/20


Plot: A brutal look at the life of 60's counterculture comic artist icon Robert Crumb and his dysfunctional (word is too mild here) family. Bizarre sexual proclivities (piggyback rides and thick legs), mental disorders, and misanthropy abound.


"When I was young, I was sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny."



Possibly the most honest documentary look at an individual ever made with subtexts about sexuality, family, genius, the worlds of art and pornography, individual expectations. Crumb's an interesting and quirky enigma, a guy who is almost unbelievably portrayed as the most normal of the three brothers in his family with the older an Autistic recluse who rarely leaves his room and spends all of his time writing illegibly in notebooks or reading and the younger a pseudo-monastic painter who rarely paints and spends the majority of his time sitting on nails or begging on the streets with a wooden bowl. Director Zwigoff, who apparently spent over ten suicidal years creating this labor of love, lets the audience just watch the subject without embellishment, and it's fascinating to see an artistic genius surviving in a world he hates by retreating into his sketchbooks. Uncomfortably entertaining and sometimes difficult to watch and sad. Pretty brilliant work.



I just might be better looking than Robert Crumb: