Review of Crumb (1995) by Terry Y — 26 Sep 2007

Cartoonist R. Crumb has been described as many things: grotesque, mysoginistic, misanthropic and just plain weird.

This film goes on to prove that all of these descriptions are, in fact, acurate. However, the most shocking thing about this film is the fact that despite all of Crumbs nuerosis and quirks, he is, surprisingly enough, the most well-adjusted member of his family. The interviews with his two brothers, Charles (a heavily medicated shut-in who's lived at home since the late sixties and who has an unhealthy fixation on the child star of [i]Treasure Island[/i]) and Max (a destitute epileptic painter who had a history of fondling women in the Philadelphia subway) are equally engrossing and repellant. And amazingly enough, they make their brother look downright normal.

But however strange the film gets, whether talking about Crumb's strange and sometimes pornographic cartoons, you can't help but be taken in and (dare I say it) entertained by it all. As some of his more controversial 'toons and strips are analyzed by art experts, some of the more whimsical (but no less unsettling) ones are montaged together with old time jazz from Crumb's own personal collection of old 78 RPM records.

It takes a great amount of chutzpah to point a camera at yourself and let every little part of your life, no matter how embarassing it might be, be captured and rebroadcast for the rest of the world to see. This film seems to put Crumb up on a pedistal and knock him down again, only to find out that he didn't want to be up there in the first place. It's certainly a movie that stays with you in a haunting way.