zee 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.

steve freeman "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.

PaulyC Here is a well done documentary of a very strange man named Robert Crumb who rose to fame as a cartoonist. His comics are off-beat, sometimes racist and almost always degrading to women. There is no disputing any of this from even Robert Crumb himself. Crumb just claims that all this stuff is inside him and needs to come out through his pencil. I actually admire this kind of truthful approach. Filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Federico Fellini come to mind as two others who put a lot of themselves in their work, although they do it on film and not paper. Robert Crumb became popular in the 60's for his psychedelic comics of the time including ZAP comics, one of his most popular. He has two brothers, Charles and Maxon who can also draw well but have had no real success with it. It's hard to believe but seeing these two brothers makes you actually realize that Robert was the "normal" one in the family! Definitely a scary thought. Has success gone to Robert's head? The answer is no. He consistently turns down offers from Hollywood that would make him very rich. Although I admire things about him, I found him kind of a jerk from how he treated other people. One instance is when someone says they love his work and would like an autograph and Crumb wouldn't even look at him and basically just let out his usual defensive laugh. What is curious though is that his wife, son and daughter seem almost well adjusted. Interesting. This movie is an interesting look into a strange artists life which delves into his tough upbringing to see just where all his twisted ideas come from. The DVD itself comes with a commentary by Roger Ebert and other goodies. Good Stuff!

Cosmoeticadotcom Upon rewatching the film, the first thing that stands out about it is how poorly it has held up as a filmic 'portrait of an artist'. In the intervening years, documentaries such as The Kid Stays In The Picture, American Splendor, and Mayor Of The Sunset Strip have used narrative and filmic techniques that make Crumb seem downright quaint and formulaic, by comparison. From the technique of highlighting the bizarre and uninteresting people that inhabit mumbling cartoonist Robert Crumb's life, to having statically placed talking head experts- such as Femininazi journalist Peggy Orenstein and Deirdre English, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, who decry Crumb's alleged misogyny and racism, to egghead elitists like Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes who ridiculously masturbate over the most inane and puerile of Crumb's work, to ending the film with a text-laden write-up of what happened after the cameras stopped rolling, Crumb seems to be a relic from another age; which is ironic since many in the film seem to already- by then, associate him with the bygone psychedelia of the 1960s. But that's what it is- a pre-Internet ideal of the classic Junior High School approach to its subject matter. Its only deviance from formula is the deviance of its subject…. The actual film is not bad, merely adequate, which given its hype, is quite disappointing. In rewatching the film, too, there just seemed to be many moments where things were staged for effect, such as when Crumb is confronted in a coffee shop by a young female who objects to his work, and weakly defends himself by stating, 'not everything is for everyone,' or when Orenstein and English pontificate against Crumb, only demonstrating their stolidity, while Hughes bloviates in his defense over minutia that Crumb does not even buy. That anyone with an intellect can take such lowbrow and transitory work with such seriousness says far more about the decline in art and critical thought than anything satirical or lampooning from Crumb's pen. Robert Crumb may be a great comic book illustrator, but he is not a great artist, for technically his work never rises to a visual sense that moves nor provokes the deepest and highest ideas and ideals, and there is no profound message, nor joy, to his work. In short, it and this film are not nearly as great as its hagiographers claim- which seems about right, for that is just like the man himself.