Rubin and Ed

1991 comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Titular Ed befriends the reclusive and bizarre Rubin in order to try to sell him something. Rubin's trying to get over the death of his cat, and Ed agrees to help him find a place to bury the pet. They wind up in the desert.

Ed Tuttle: "It's going to get weird now, isn't it?"

No, Ed. It starts weird. This comes off like a low-brow Waiting for Godot with absurdist arguments about whether there's hair on a head or if a cat is really dead. Or if Andy Warhol is really a great artist or if he "sucks a big one." Crispin Glover is deliriously odd in this movie that is quirky anyway. He's got a pair of striped pants, perhaps the same pair of pants that Richard Harris was singing about in "MacArthur Park," and these platform shoes that I'd imagine are hard to walk around the desert in. In fact, there were moments that I gasped audibly and feared for Crispin Glover's life a few times as he walked around in those things. It's the same garb he wore for his infamous Letterman appearance when he came on the show as his character but neglected to tell anybody associated with the show and just freaked everybody out. This is the perfect kind of role for Glover. He gets some outbursts, gets a chance to dance rhythmically with a squeaky mouse, and has a dream sequence that will be the best thing I see in a movie in my entire lifetime. That, my friends, is no hyperbole. It's got this in it:

I should have spoiler-alerted that, but you can still know about that one and be surprised by it, so it probably doesn't matter. That cat, by the way, can eat a whole watermelon. One of my old favorites, Howard Hesseman, does an admirable job of keeping up with Crispin. He gets a few angry outbursts himself. And they bounce lines off each other like this:

Rubin: "Why don't you keep your hands off other people's refrigerators?"
Ed: "Look, you don't eat those things, do you? A guy could get sick eating cats."
Rubin: "It's a pet!"

The whole thing cracked me up even though I could understand the argument that it runs out of gas about halfway through and has a few tangents--barking people, dancing bullies--that make it a little too goofy. Still, this is one of those undiscovered gems of a movie, and I'm throwing it in my list of favorite Crispin Glover films.