So much average

It is a performances centric movie

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Crumb is a documentary explaining the events that led artist Robert Crumb to create the comics he did. The whole family seems to have incredibly weird personalities and views toward sex.Robert's brother, Maxon, practices celibacy as sex triggers seizures for him. His other brother, Charles, has never had sex and is a recluse who lived with their mother up until his suicide. Robert himself is promiscuous and has feet and cartoon (especially to do with cartoons he has made) fetishes. Only a small amount of detail as to why all of these boys are so sexually inhibited is revealed. You do learn about their upbringing but not enough information is revealed to fully gauge why they ended up how they did. Some may disagree with that but I found that more backstory as to their upbringing would've provided greater insight into their situations.I mostly found this documentary extremely depressing. Robert himself says he lacks the ability to love anyone and the only person he loves is his daughter, Sophie. He doesn't mention feeling love for his son, Jesse, who seems a little heartbroken that he can't become closer with his father. Charles (at the time of recording before committing suicide) was on medication to deal with his mental problems. He goes into immense detail about his inability to feel connected to other people. Maxon seems just as strange as he swallows what I believe were pieces of cloth which he would digest in order to "clean out his insides". He also went into detail about pulling women's shorts down in public places and walking in on a woman who was naked in the bathroom, subsequently falling on the bathroom floor and having a seizure after looking at her.This documentary is fascinating, depressing, and leaves you asking more questions after finishing it. Definitely not a movie for a prudish person. But if this sounds interesting to you and you'd like to learn more I recommend you watch this movie.

I always hated R. Crumb's comics, finding them misogynistic and racist and weird and unfunny. In my factory-town hippie youth, the boys who found them funny were boys I avoided. (I never met a girl or black person who did like them, though a few may exist.) So you'd think I might hate this movie, or not want to watch it, or that this review would be negative. But no. I love a good documentary and this is not merely good; it's a great one, directed by film genius Terry Zwigoff. Crumb the movie riveted me, showing me an intricate portrait of a complex man. This is not a short movie, but I was always engaged--great pacing and editing, surprising and revealing choices of scenes.To me what it says about "art" (or craft) is far less important than what it says about this one man.Crumb had a childhood that looks worse than the worst horror film I've ever seen. Bad father, bat**** crazy mother, and three genius boys that I suppose may carry the crazy gene too. As Zwigoff takes us into that bizarre home and the lives of the other brothers, we come to see that R. Crumb's art and life is a triumph of the human spirit, a flower blooming out of burbling sewage. To me, it's not an attractive flower, rather a noisome and homely thing, but dang it, a flower, and I ended up applauding him for doing so well with such beginnings.No matter how crazy your family is, you leave this film thinking, wow, thanks Mom and Dad for not being anywhere near this bad. Your own tiny neuroses will seem charming and mild in comparison to the brothers'. You leave the film with the sense that all things are possible--if Crumb did this with his life despite what you now know, what the heck is holding you back?And if a film can change people, even for a short time, this one has the capacity to make you more understanding of the worst people you meet. What if they had this much baggage? How can you possibly know what made them what they are? Everyone is doing the best s/he can, and while some days that seems like bad news, after watching the film, it feels like good news.

Primarily: You are in the presence of a master creating and displaying his art, and throughout these portions of the film any kind of artist will find much to learn from this man. The comparison made that he is the "modern" Dürer is very apt.Secondarily: You are watching one the most humorous and (blackly) entertaining films ever produced anywhere. Yes, we are reassured once again that an (the) artists' personality(ies) cannot never be confused with or substituted for the work they have give us; the strongest humor comes from the aon-old maxim the truth is stranger than fiction...p.s. One last thing - had seen this piece over a decade ago, but a recent review of Crumb's 2009 outstanding "Genesis" work led back here and there to review. If you haven't read it yet do it tonight/day!

"Crumb" is an amazing documentary about an extraordinary artist. Most great movies are great because they carry kernels of truth: Fellini on sexual desire and repression, The Godfather on the vagaries of morality and business, Casablanca of things bigger than ourselves, the great (anti)war movies on how politicians and generals coldly manipulate young men and ultimately murder them, etc., etc... But the classics are stylized accounts with kernels of truth. "Crumb," in contrast, is truth through and through uncompromisingly laid open. You don't realize how rare truth is until you finally see it.Crumb's own oeuvre is a study in truth, inhabited by a menagerie of characters that haunt his subconscious: rigid "White Man," farcical hippie guru Mr. Natural, Amazonian Angel McSpade, the subhumans who beat up his brother as adolescents, and his own self-pitying self.When he became a counter culture hero, Crumb promptly put the would-be worshipers at arm's length with his openly "perverse" sexual comics. He lampooned America and its critics alike, though "lampoon" isn't quite the right word, for his powerful critiques are frequently wordless, midnight black humor, if it's humor at all (see, for example, his History of America at www.zubeworld.com/crumbmuseum/history1.html). He drew what he felt and never sold-out, even turning down a commission to draw a Rolling Stones album cover because he didn't think much of their music. During the filming of the movie, he and his wife are moving to the south of France because America has become just too ugly, commercial and crass.Interviewed in the film, he and his brothers acknowledge being unpopular wimps, abused by their father and many of their peers. Underlying the truth in his work lay the truth of his life and family, exposed with embarrassing candor. His older brother and mother never leave their small, poor home, though they have nothing in common so they just maintain an uneasy truce. His younger brother lives as a monk, drawing a long linen tape through his body to clean his intestines while sitting on a bed of nails. Neither brother has ever had sex.Crumb, it's clear, loves them, and it's a painful, poignant love because he's also detached. What can he do after all, except accept them? His work too, is poignantly portrayed: at one point he sits semi-autistic listening to soulful old records (he's a collector), with a slow panning over a collage of haunting illustrations.Crumb is routinely referred to as a pervert. And of course his family is deeply disturbed. But so is much of America. And so is much of the world. Psychiatrist Alfred Adler observed that "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well." So of course Crumb is not normal. He has allowed us to know him.