Word: crumbs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...turns funny and poignant. It interlaces old clips (for instance, a peignoired Cary Grant declaring, in Bringing Up Baby, "I just went gay all of a sudden!") with cogent commentary by Gore Vidal, Harvey Fierstein and others. It should be getting raves at Oscar time--except that, like Crumb and Hoop Dreams last year, Celluloid Closet was denied a nomination by the Academy's documentary committee...
...CRUMB Robert Crumb, the Brueghel of underground comic books, sits uneasily for Terry Zwigoff's blistering documentary portrait. Crumb's images of geeky guys and rampaging women seem almost normal next to this picture of his middle-class family--a mother and three gifted, twisted sons--all devoured by demons. Appalling and enthralling, Crumb is the ultimate situation tragedy...
...best-selling Culture of Complaint (1993), and an eight-part PBS series, The Shock of the New (1980). He is completing work on an eight-hour TV special about American art, scheduled to air on BBC late next year. He can also be seen in the new documentary film Crumb, offering a critical assessment of the underground comic artist Robert Crumb...
Then we meet Crumb's brothers Charles and Max, and we realize with a shudder that Robert is the normal one. Charles was the one who encouraged--forced, really--Robert to draw. Gradually Charles' own comics became choked with words, rantings in a minute hand. For 30 years now he has hardly left his mother's house. Max eats string, sits on a bed of nails, then goes begging. He felt that his elder brothers never encouraged him to create art. He finally did, saw that it was good, and had an epileptic seizure...
...react to this apocalyptic rubble of a '50s childhood--or to the sexual atrocities limned in Crumb's work? With the only two reactions that modern life demands: a laugh or a scream. The title on one page of a Crumb sketchbook reads, "Words Fail Me (Pictures Aren't Much Better)." But pictures allow Crumb to tell his own truth. To him, as to any artist who ascends deep into the bizarre, his work looks like reality. With care and wit, he draws his own demons and goddesses. One thing he never draws is conclusions. That is for the viewer...