Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994) B

An all-around interesting documentary about underground comic book artist Robert Crumb. I heard that the main appeal of this documentary was not Crumb's work per se, but, instead, Crumb's crazy ass family. Call me the product of a strange family myself, but I simply didn't find them that dysfunctional or bat shit crazy. I will give in that they're a little odd and the one brother who meditates on a bed of nails was slightly disturbing. It's just that their childhood didn't seem that unusual to me as far as the 1950's go (the father was absent mentally, slightly abusive and got into long verbal arguments with the mother...that's out of the ordinary how?). I actually find Crumb as a nice companion piece to Herzog's Grizzly Man; two documentaries about offbeat, slightly megalomaniac men who have a hard time dealing with the real world.