Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Reviews

The Crumbs are unpleasant people to spend time with and yet I've watched the film five or six times. So yeah, I get what you mean.


And you're right about Robert. When one of the brothers is speaking and the camera cuts to him it's suddenly clear that he's not so weird anymore.

It's not so much that they are unpleasant. They kind of are, though at least all three seem to have made a decision to try and steer themselves away from actively harming other people (and particularly women or children).

It's more watching people fawn over the art and dismiss criticisms of its misogyny and sexual violence. And to be really clear: I do think that Robert's art IS probably a way of expressing and processing his own sexual anxieties. But that doesn't mean that it isn't also messed up and the kind of thing that could perpetuate a violent or objectifying view toward women.

No One Will Save You, 2023

Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives in a small town where she is an outcast for reasons related to the loss/absence of her mother and a childhood friend called Maude. Isolated in her home, Brynn finds herself suddenly battling a mysterious alien creature that invades her house. With no hope of rescue, Brynn fights for her life against her increasingly powerful adversary.

A stellar premise crashes up against uneven execution in this interesting sci-fi/horror.

It’s hard writing about a movie like this where there are so many things to praise and also so many things that were frustrating. It’s also challenging to talk about this film without including elements of its final act, but I’ll do my best to stay spoiler-free.

On the positive side, the film does a good job of establishing the stakes and isolation of its protagonist. Brynn is facing the double whammy of physical isolation and social isolation. And while being a pariah doesn’t mean that 911 would ignore you, by the time Brynn manages to find others, it becomes clear that her visitor is not on its own.

I’m not really into downer movies, but there was something really engaging about the fact that Brynn is just slowly being corralled. There’s no time spent with some twee mystery about who is being controlled by the aliens or whatever. Brynn has nowhere that she can turn and the more we learn about the aliens the more hopeless her situation seems. Every small victory against one of the creatures seems merely like a battle that is won in a war that will inevitably be lost.

I also liked some of the visuals that went along with the creatures and just in general. There are some nice shots and simple effects---such as Brynn being trapped frozen in a beam of red light--that have a lovely visual impact. I also loved when one of the creatures sat in a resting posture in the shape of a Y.

Finally, I thought that some of the actors did a really nice job with the physical acting side of their characters. One standout was Zack Duhame, who plays Brynn’s goober of a mailman who is one of the first people to be possessed/controlled by the creatures. His physical performance is very strong---apparently he’s mainly a stuntman---and I thought that his character was utilized to just the perfect degree.

Despite liking quite a few things about the movie---especially an idea that is floated in the final 15 minutes that I don’t discuss---there were also some things that just irked me while watching. At quite a few times, the effects were just too CGI for me. I get why CGI is used but boy does it ding my suspension of disbelief. And when certain choices are made in terms of the creatures’ movements (if you’ve seen the film, perhaps you remember a point where one of the creatures is, and there’s no other way to talk about it, voguing. Voguing the house down!), it just looks silly.

This is also the kind of film where the more you learn about what is actually happening, the less a lot of it makes any kind of sense. Maybe the writer had some behind-the-scenes logic about why this was taking place and what would happen after, but I just found myself thinking that the events of the film didn’t make a whole lot of sense in the big picture of things. So many sci-fi ideas are thrown out there that it becomes a bit incoherent, even with the framing that we’re locked into Brynn’s naive point of view.

Love the ideas here, but really mixed on how they were all put together.

Smashed, 2012

Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her husband Charlie (Aaron Paul) are a young couple living a life of functional alcoholism. Waking up to hangovers, making their wobbly way home on bicycles late at night. But for Kate, the “functional” part starts to become more questionable as her drinking spills over in nasty ways into her personal and professional lives outside of the bar.

Full of engaging performances, this film errs by going a comedy route when it should have played things a bit more straight.

With a spate of viral videos of teachers being busted for being drunk/under the influence at work, it seems like a timely moment to write about this film. We don’t necessarily know where Kate and Charlie’s drinking began, but we can see the precarious hold that Kate currently has on being a functioning adult. Stumbling her way through teaching her primary school classes, everything seems to be going alright until it all starts going very wrong.

There are some things that I think the film captures really well about this kind of situation. Charlie likes drinking, but seems somewhat better at managing it and its after-affects. When Kate decides to take a step back from drinking, she doesn’t insist that Charlie follow suit, and it’s clear that without the centerpiece of alcohol, there isn’t as much to their marriage as they might like to think there is.

The movie also captures the way that friends, partners, and families can do more harm than good when someone tries to make a life change. In a great sequence, Charlie and Kate visit Kate’s mother, Rochelle (Mary Kay Place). Rochelle is clearly a heavy, habitual drinker, and her disdain for Kate’s decision to abstain from alcohol speaks volumes.

I also think that the film does a good job of showing how people who are addicted to intoxicating substances can have the idea that they’re doing just fine. In one scene, an already-drunk Kate tries to buy a bottle of wine from a local retailer who tells her he cannot sell it to her because of how late it is at night. As Kate tries all different manner of getting him to sell her the wine---including insinuations about him wanting to sleep with her, theft--you can tell that she thinks she’s being perfectly reasonable. You wonder how much of this encounter she will remember, and how she will remember it. Winstead really nails this character and her increasingly brittle wall of denial.

There’s a lived-in quality to the portrayal of someone living in that barely-functional alcoholic space that makes the film, at times, feel deeply personal. And I thought that it was really unfortunate that the script settled out into something like a 70/30 comedy drama split. The stuff that is played straight---or played straight with some sense of humor like Kate’s late-night quest for wine--really lands with impact. But a lot of the film is played for just straight up laughs and I did not care for it at all.

Megan Mullally is given the overtly comedic role of Kate’s principal, a woman who takes Kate vomiting in class one day as a sign that Kate is pregnant, a lie that Kate goes along with to preserve her job. Mullally is very funny, but the role itself is too funny for the story around it. Likewise, I cringed at just about every scene that took place in Kate’s classroom. Like Mullally, the child actors are given comedic roles, spouting the kind of sassy, on-point critiques that children in real life simply do not deliver. The problem, again, is not with the children themselves, but rather in the framing of their characters as deliverers of one-liners. In reality, having a teacher who was drunk would be unsettling for some children (because in any classroom, unfortunately, there’s always at least one kid who knows what day-drunk looks like).

The cast is, in fact, loaded with great supporting actors---Nick Offerman, Mackenzie Davis, Octavia Spencer---but the comedy aspect takes the heft out of most of their characters. Paul is fine in his role as Charlie, but even his character is too slight. When Kate starts to decide to get sober, it seems like the death knell for their relationship. But I kind of struggled to care. Kate herself is a well-developed character, but all of her relationships with the other characters are so anemic that they make very little impression. When I realized Kate and Charlie were probably going to break up, I just sort of shrugged like, “Yeah, probably for the best.”

Great cast, and great lead performance from Winstead, but pretty thin overall.

Bones and All, 2022

Maren (Taylor Russell) is a young woman with an irrepressible desire to consume the flesh of other people. Shuffled from place to place by her father (Andre Holland), Maren wakes up one day to find that he has left her to navigate the world alone. With only some cash and her birth certificate on hand, Maren decides to make her way to Minnesota, where she hopes to find the mother she never knew. Along with way she finds that she’s not the only one of her kind. Meeting fellow “eater” Sully (Mark Rylance), Maren starts to learn the ropes. As she continues on her journey, she meets up with Lee (Timothee Chalamet), also afflicted with the insatiable hunger.

Trapped in largely unengaging space between straight-ahead horror and art-house allegory, a handful of promising scenes leave you wishing for what might have been.

To quote Folding Ideas host Dan Olsen, “Okay, so what . . . is this?”. There is a lot of great horror out there whose monsters and scenarios can easily be seen to double for all sorts of real-world terrors: addiction, infatuation, domestic violence, mental illness, etc. But while the construction of this film suggests a gesture at such an allegory, things just do not cohere in any kind of satisfying way.

There is some really good stuff scattered through the film. To begin with, I really liked Russell as the lead. She’s trying to navigate her own sense of survival and morality, and Russell does a good job of portraying someone who just keeps running up against versions of her life that she does not want. Chalamet is one of those actors who is very easily watchable. He’s got an understated charisma that’s well-suited to a character who largely doesn’t want to be noticed. Rylance walks a fine line between endearing and super-creepy as a man who keeps the hair of his victims in a long, braided rope that he carried in a satchel.

I also have to mention a scene in the film that, frankly, is an A+ as a short film within the larger movie around it. Maren and Lee end up around a campfire with two other Eaters, Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Brad (David Gordon Green). In the flickering light, cracking cold beers, Jake tells the story of how he and Brad met. I’ll not reveal the details, but this scene on its own, right down to Maren’s last line in the scene, is brilliant.

As would be expected from director Luca Guadagnino, there are some really lovely shots and angles. Early on, Maren and a friend at a slumber party lay together beneath a glass-top coffee table. The sequence around the campfire is beautifully lit and eerie. While Maren is, herself, something of a monster, every setting in the film whether it’s a field or a mental hospital is leveraged quite well for tension.

But, seriously, what is this? There’s too much navel-gazing from the main characters for it to have the necessary clip and momentum of a straight-ahead horror film. And I am totally fine with horror that moves slow and build suspense, but this movie is all over the place. It’s riddled with half-hearted gestures at a theme.

In one scene, Maren and Lee sit in a barn where cattle are housed before slaughter. They muse about the fact that the cows have family and even friends. Okay, so is this a movie about being an ethical consumer? In other scenes, we learn things about Maren and Lee’s family that raise the idea of being an Eater as something hereditary. Okay, so is this a movie about patterns of violence/abuse/addiction being passed down through blood? Then, in the scene from which the title is taken, characters discuss cannibalism as being like a fulfilling act of sex or love. Okay, so is this a movie about emotions and the idea of love being a literally consuming thing?

If the movie had picked one idea and gone with it, I think you could have ended up with something visually and thematically interesting and engaging. But as it is, this is like a hodge-podge. I was genuinely baffled by the lack of nuance in a sequence where Maren is distraught after she and Lee eat a man who they did not realize had a family. But not once does Lee point out that a man who gleefully bullies children and has anonymous sex in the middle of the night with strange men is probably not the best husband and father.

I also always find myself incredibly annoyed when a movie makes it clear EXACTLY how it is going to end, and then gets there in a really contrived way. Some movies can telegraph their endings and still be brilliant, but that’s not the case here. At the climax of the film I felt no catharsis, just irritation.

Watchable, and worth watching for the campfire scene alone, but overall underwhelming.

I think there's a way to portray it that might be disturbing, and then there are many ways to portray it that aren't. And I can't really remember this film but I guess it portrayed that violence in a non-disturbing way. I think this because I'd remember if it portrayed it in a very disturbing way. Few ways of portraying sexual violence against women (or men, for that matter) are disturbing to me, so I remember most occurrences that were.

It's kinda like saying playing violent video games produces school shooters. You just have to know the distinction. -I MADE SOME WOMAN-BEATING JOKES HERE BUT I CUT THEM BEFORE SENDING THIS MESSAGE. I DON'T WANT TO UNNECESSARILY PROVOKE YOU EVEN THOUGH I WAS JUST KIDDING-

I appreciate how you find it harrowing. Genuinely. I've become so immune to such things. I don't think I have ever been particularly shocked by it anyway. I think NOT showing it but somehow implying it is what gets me. But showing it does nothing to my emotions. It's kinda like intellectual "OK, it's wrong" and that's it.

The only thing I wrote after I had watched Crumb was: "Crumb is a very good film about a bunch of weirdos. I don't know anything about comics, but I liked it". So I appreciate your review. Your writing is so much better than mine and you always seem to perfectly capture your feelings and thoughts about the movie in your write-ups.

__________________
Being kind to others never goes out of style.

It's more the context that makes it upsetting. The reality of living in this world/society is that I see portrayals of violence/sexual violence/misogyny daily. And I freely admit that some of that comes in content that I deliberately seek out (like a lot of the horror I watch).

What's upsetting here is not so much the existence of the content--which is mid-level in my opinion, though disturbing for including fetishized images of children being sexually abused/assaulted for example. It's the context whereby people are like "Oh, wow! How brave! How open!".

I think there's this thing where we admire people who will say things out loud. And Robert Crumb is very endearing due to his appearance and gentle mannerisms.

But one of his comics, for examples, shows a man who is upset that a woman won't have sex with him. So he beheads her so that he can have sex with her still-alive body. The woman is given as a gift from one man to another. The protagonist of the comic rapes the woman, but feels bad afterward and helps her get her head back. Her response is to be . . kind of annoyed.

So this is kind of saying out loud a male attitude that is distressingly common: that if you desire a woman but she won't have sex with you, it's fair play to make her have sex with you via whatever means.

I definitely understand the distinction between fictionalized/fantasy portrayals of violence and the real thing. But it's upsetting to have this point of view shown to us, the audience, and then have a historian/art critic tell us why it's so brilliant. That's the upsetting part to me. And while his comics might be intended (by him) for an adult audience, it's clear in the film that they are being read/seen by children. And I do believe that art can shape how children (and adults!) believe it's okay to treat other people.

Thank you. I enjoy reading your writing in your thread as well.

Saloum, 2020

A trio of mercenaries known as the Hyenas---Chaka (Yann Gael), Rafa (Roger Sallah), and Minuit (Mentor Ba)--are attempting to land a big score by evacuating drug lord Felix (Renaud Farah) from the violence of a coup. But when their plane’s fuel tank springs a leak, they are forced to make an emergency landing. Chaka leads them to an isolated resort called Boabab, run by the cheerful Omar (Bruno Henry), where they can lie low and search for resources to fix the plane. But it soon becomes clear that there’s more to Boabab than meets the eye, and even the elite Hyenas may not be a match for what’s waiting out in the dark.

Incredibly engaging characters and a solid melding of real-world events and the supernatural carry this film through a rocky final act.

The likable band of criminals is a well-worn trope, and it’s even a well-worn trope within the horror genre. But darn if it isn’t an effective trope when done right.

The central trio in this film lands on the right side of the trope. Chaka is charismatic, but also clearly haunted and troubled. His extreme fear of water, introduced early in the film, implies that events at their beach destination won’t go all that well. Rafa is the muscle of the group, but at various points we see that he isn’t heartless. Minuit is straight-up some sort of sorcerer/magic man, and Mentor Ba is the kind of person whose striking looks do plenty of heavy lifting for the character. (Also, it is revealed relatively early on that all three men know sign language. This is one of those attributes of a character that is always both surprising and surprisingly appealing).

The source of the sign language reveal is another interesting character, a young woman named Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) who is both deaf and mute and quickly makes the men aware that she knows exactly who they are. While Awa at first seems like she’s been dropped into the film just to stir up a bit of trouble and serve as a maybe love interest for Chaka, Juhen brings great presence to her character. Henry is also good in his role as Omar. We all know that something isn’t right with Omar---far too cheerful! Never a good thing in a horror film!--but exactly what he’s up to is revealed slowly through the course of the film.

There are two streams of plot in this film, one of which is very “real world” and the other of which is supernatural. Something that’s interesting to me about this film is that the real world stuff is very compelling and you can see how the supernatural stuff could have simply been taken out and this would have remained a pretty good revenge thriller. I was a bit less engaged by the supernatural element, and I think it’s because the supernatural threat is more abstract than the very visceral threat represented by the events in Chaka’s past.

I don’t think that the last act here is the strongest, which is a shame. There are some really good, moving character moments. There are also some satisfying conclusions to a revenge arc that is tangentially related to the supernatural stuff. When it comes to the “big bad” of the film, I just felt that it lacked the personal connection of the other subplots. I’ll admit that some of this might be due to my lack of familiarity with some of the supernatural creatures/concepts at play. A lot of terms were being thrown around that I mostly didn’t recognize, and maybe if I had a stronger background, certain sequences would have made more sense to me.

This was a good recommendation, and I’d also recommend it.

Not to undermine the number of such portrayals, they're rampant and for a number of good reasons. But then again, if you're actively looking for them, you'll definitely find and notice more of them. It's kind of like actively looking for racism. You'll soon start seeing it everywhere. Even the less severe occurrences you'd normally not even care about. Even if it was directed at you! Even if it's not there at all! (An American bemoans how much blackface there is in Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, whereas this is not blackface but a parody of ganguro.)

No need to be ashamed of that if that's what's eating you! There's something human in seeking out acts of depravity in forms that do not make us commit them. I read write-ups of a girl some time ago, a Gialli fan. She said that she was heterosexual but still loved seeing beautiful nude females in films. And she loved seeing them getting murdered in stylish ways. I guess there's something about women that makes them much more pleasant to the eye than men!

Fair enough. You'd think that perverted scribbles won't bring much of that and then you remember lolicon...

You could say she lost her head for him! What do you want me to say? It's art. It has the right to be edgy, disturbing, and transgressive.

100% edgy high-schooler humor. I can appreciate that!

I think this is kind of saying out loud an artistic thing that is distressingly common: that if you create art, it might be disturbing and taboo. It's fair play to make art about whatever, including terrible content. This is what art is for. It's reserved for the things that do not fit the real world. Art allows us to portray the things that are too evil, too malicious, too transgressive for the real world. And also things that are too pure, too idealistic, too sublime for the real world.

Yeah, children consuming this kind of stuff is another conversation. (Then again, I did, and look how *normal* I am!) I'm not sure what the critics tell us about this stuff because I can't remember the film. But I believe you can appreciate a work of art while disagreeing with its message. There are many films that portray debauchery that I love even though debauchery is wrong in real life. Then, there are many films with political messages that I disagree with but love the movies for their artistic merit.

Do people watch a film like that and then start thinking it's OK to do these things? They probably do! Because many people are quarter-wits! But if they're anything more than intellectual amoeba (or children), they'll understand they're indulging in a work of fiction.

I write little there. I mostly write on Letterboxd. Just quick write-ups to scribble down whatever I have in mind right after watching the movie. Just a dash of words before I start another movie.

Art can do whatever art wants to do (as long as it is not causing actual harm to anyone involved or inciting harm against others).

I'm not ashamed at all about watching movies with violence against women---in many cases I find it cathartic. Nothing takes the edge off of a long week of work like watching someone stab a rapist in the face. So I'm not even saying that I'm judging the content as content.

It's the praise---praise that seems to not want to reckon with the problematic elements of the work---that kind of gets to me.

Plus, I'm never going to NOT have a knee-jerk negative reaction to work that portrays sexual assault, especially when kids are involved. I mentor high schoolers who want to be teachers---they come over and volunteer with our students. Today one of the high schoolers told me that a 1st grader she works with confided in her that she's being abused at home. (Yes, it's been reported to CPS). Am I going to have much patience/indulgence/emotional remove toward Crumb's eroticized portrayal of a man forcing his daughter to perform oral sex? Nope!

It's not a me problem, it's not a Robert Crumb problem. It's just a fact of the unavoidably negative chemistry that's going to exist between me and anyone who creates (and gets famous by creating) sexualized portrayals of children.

Relic, 2020

Edna (Robyn Nevin) is an elderly woman who mysteriously goes missing. Her daughter, Kay (Emily Mortimer), and granddaughter, Sam (Bella Heathcote), arrive to help search for her. Edna suddenly appears after three days, either unable or unwilling to say where she has been, and bearing a strange bruise on her chest. As Kay and Sam grapple and argue over what to do about Edna’s physical and mental decay, a strange mold takes over the home and strange dreams and noises haunt Kay and Sam.

Working from a nakedly allegorical position, this examination of the ravages of dementia via a horror lens is effective in its character work and some admirably upsetting scary set pieces.

Lots of horror movies--and lots of great horror movies!--have featured scenarios or monsters that were clearly meant as stand-ins for real-world villains or fears. In fact, I would say that some of my favorite horror movies feature stories that are really about the dehumanizing effects of addiction, or a fear of growing up.

But while I love a movie that pulls off this double act successfully (it’s a brain-eating parasite AND an allegory for drug addiction!), there has emerged in the last decade or so a subgenre of films that swan around in a moody way while sort of gesturing at a social ill. “It’s like a smoke monster thing . . . but also, it’s sort of like, the shame of sexual assault?”. The problem is that these films never develop the horror all that well, and neither do they create striking enough moments to push something really interesting or insightful about their chosen topic. (So I guess the smoke monster/rape allegory is . . . bad?).

This film, on the other hand, doesn’t play any vague games about what it is portraying. It’s dementia. That’s it.

In some ways, this up-front acknowledgement of what’s at play takes some suspense away from the film. But thankfully, the movie stays in its lane, and resists introducing any poorly CGI-rendered representations of Edna’s deterioration or any hysterical character beats. This is a movie about the horror of someone you love decaying---literally in the film’s portrayal---and transforming into someone else in front of your very eyes.

I thought that the film did a really splendid job of creating scenarios that melded reality and the supernatural. The film’s action kicks off with Edna having gone missing. After three days of frantic searching, she turns up. Where has she been? An examination by a local medical professional turns up a strange bruise on her chest, yet she cannot say where it came from. This also filters over into the interactions between Edna, Kay, and Sam. At one point Edna says that she can’t wear her ring anymore and gifts it to Sam. The next day, she spots the ring on Sam’s hand and attacks her, accusing her of stealing it. While “scary old people” are a well-worn trope at this point in horror movies, a lot of Edna’s behavior is perfectly within the bounds of what a person experiencing dementia might do.

Things really kick off in the last act, where Sam and Kay are forced to confront the danger that’s been simmering in the house. This isn’t just a horror movie about someone getting old and losing their personality and their grasp on reality. It’s also a horror movie about watching that happen. It’s also a horror movie about knowing that one day, you might be the one spewing venom at your loved ones and leaving sink taps running for hours. It’s also a horror movie about realizing that one day, you might be put into that caretaker role, and wondering if you have the endurance for it. This is a horror movie about the collision between present, past, and future that happens when different generations come together, and how hard it can be to realize the way that roles are shifting within the family. Sam jokes early on, “First they change your diapers, then you change theirs,” but it’s much more emotionally volatile than that.

I can see why some people wouldn’t care for this one. There’s a degree of predictability to it, a lack of mystery. It trades mainly in unease, creaking floorboards, mysterious thumps, and encroaching dark mold. The one or two times it ventures into jumpscare territory, it does so with middling success. But I found it incredibly effective. I think that what it wants to say---about aging, about caring for the elderly, about anticipating your own advanced years---it says well. The performances are all very solid, and its character arcs resolve in a satisfying way.

This is ambiguous and hard to define.

What does causing actual harm mean? If you want to murder somebody for your film, anybody would agree this is wrong. But there are many grey areas and topics up for debate. Do we want to somehow define all of them or merely judge every single film individually? Also, what do we do if somebody REALLY killed somebody for their film? The film is already made. What do we do now? Boycott it?

Inciting harm against others is even harder to define. Some people would argue that any film that doesn't clearly present the current progressive perspective incites harm. And then, the other group of people would claim films that want to change the status quo incite harm. If you mean inciting harm, as in clearly telling you to murder or hate somebody, then even the worst propaganda didn't do it perfectly straightforwardly. It rather built lies upon lies to incite such reaction in you rather naturally.

This stuff is really wobbly!

Freeze Me (2000) sounds like a movie for you, then. I haven't seen it yet but it's apparently about a woman who was raped and now meets her rapists again to retaliate in a really graphic and nasty way!

Rape'n'revenge is definitely a genre, but I could argue, there's a small subgenre you could call rape'n'no-revenge! Not too many films in that genre, unfortunately! Rape and revenge movies usually seem to cater to our lowest instinct of an eye for an eye and devise a brutal comeuppance to the perpetrator. This is a cliche and makes for a boring and unscary film. But films where the perpetrator never pays for their crimes and is still on the prowl are much scarier. Just like Memories of Murder (2003) is much scarier because of its ending.

I've been seeing it way too often. So often that I started to deliberately skim over the problematic elements and often never even mention them in my own opinions. It's just such a boring approach to film criticism, where you focus on pointing out all the problems of the film not being perfectly aligned with the current state of mind of the Western world. When I see yet another opinion on a film that mentions "problematic" or "outdated", I want to scream. I did that a few times myself, mind you, but I definitely try not to. I don't care about this holier-than-thou approach. I want filmmakers to be able to portray children getting raped and adults getting dismembered and women getting beat up to death and men getting castrated while screaming Sieg Heil. I want a total freedom of art. I don't believe there's ANYTHING that you shouldn't put in a film. (Maybe except for live-action unsimulated cp.) I do believe there are certain times or circumstances when you shouldn't portray a certain thing or even make a film on that thing to begin with. But when the time and your audience is right, just go for it!

That's your prerogative, then.

Crumb's stuff is so boring and unnecessarily edgy, though. I'd rather see Crumb making comics about humane and pure topics that bring us closer to loving each human being and creating a better world. But he chose to make stupid comics that would piss off puritan or overly sensitive people. So let him. Whatever.

Do you think it's less severe if they do that using scribbles and animation than actual real-life children? I'm not talking about child pr0n but something like Cuties (2020).

I think that is a pretty bang on assesment of Crumb.


And I forget the name of that male critic who is interviewed in the film, but he's an established blowhard twit. I think most people who appreciate the work of Crumb, at least those who take any time at all to thoughtfully consider it, recognize that the dysfunction that he depicts is primarily that of the artist, and not necessarily of society (although the two definitely overlap).


An important distinction to be made in regards to critics who place all this extra meta and sub text to Crumbs work, is that the artist himself doesn't do this. He does not rationalize or defend his work in this way. He isn't even certain of its actual worth as a document of himself or society. He just does it because these are the horrible things that exist within him, due, most likely, to his dysfunctional upbringing, and he needs to put them on paper out of some compulsive need. He seems to be completely fine if the world takes or leaves his contribution to society.


He's not a great guy. Nor were his brothers or mother or father. But when it comes to showing how art can become a coping mechanism for broken people, there has never been another film as dialled in at depicting the kind of hell a lot of art is born from.

Right, and I thought that the two women who were interviewed---the cartoonist and the former Mother Jones editor---did a nice job of being like "Here's what's great . . . and here's the stuff we have to reckon with."

Agreed. And, like I wrote, there's a relief in some small regard that he at least is not actually victimizing real women (like his brother did).

That's not how I'm using problematic in this case.

If someone is going to create art that is deliberately using taboo subjects/images as its main leverage, I think that criticism has to consider how effective it is in this regard. The best example of this in the film is probably the cartoon depicting the Black African woman who is taken away by the two white men and exploited. I think that the job of a critic when looking at a work like this--which is purporting to be using parody to call out racist attitudes--to question whether the parody is effective or whether it's in some way perpetuating the very stereotypes and racism is claims to be skewering. For example, the woman in that cartoon ends up in her situation because she is stupid and greedy. In reality, most Black labor ended up in the Western world through nonconsensual means. I think it's disappointing when a critic is unwilling to engage in analyzing how an artist is effective or not effective in different attempts.

In regards to Angelfood (the black slave character) the character itself is racist, obviously, on its face.


Do I think Crumb is a racist? No.


Do I think what he does with that character reveal some of his own internal and prejudiced ideas about blacks in America? Yes. Almost definitely


Does this make such a gross depiction of a black women hard to swallow, even if it is satire? Definitely, as the waters start to get muddy.


But satire made by unclean hands has a frightening kind of power. Something that is both legitimately ugly, while making comment about that ugliness, brings what we should be angry at into greater focus.

It should also be stated that Crumb was recommended and brought to my attention by my grandmother.


"He's so talented" she would whisper quietly to herself while we watched it together.

La Llorona, 2019

Former military man Enrique (Julio Diaz) is on trial for his part in a brutal genocide of the native Mayan people of Guatemala, though he is protected by higher ups in the government. As protestors clamor and chant outside of his home, Enrique is watched over by his wife Carmen (Margarita Kenefic), his daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), and his bodyguard Letona (Juan Pablo Olyslager). Natalia’s young daughter, Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado) is also part of the small delegation waiting inside of the house. When faithful servant Valeriana (Maria Telon) brings in a new servant named Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy), strange visions and dreams begin to haunt the various members of the household.

Full of striking imagery and effectively making the horror of genocide intimate and personal, this is a winning, hard-hitting horror/drama.

As I wrote in a recent review, I have a certain appreciation for movies that are about what they are about and create a coherent vision and character arc. That’s definitely the case in this film, in which the crimes and cruelties of Enrique’s elderly General literally come back to haunt him.

What brings some unexpected energy and interest to this film is the fact that the revenge sought by the spirits of the dead isn’t only centered on Enrique---it’s also aimed at the people around Enrique who protect, excuse, and enable him.

Enrique’s main enabler is his wife, Carmen. She listens with what looks like disinterest to absolutely horrifying witness accounts of the way that her husband and his men murdered innocent men, women, and children, committed rapes, debased and dehumanized prisoners, and otherwise brought a rain of violence and pain down on a largely innocent indigenous group. After listening to a woman describe being raped, she coldly remarks that “native women” were always there to tempt Enrique. She frames her husband almost as a victim of his own sexual desires. And then the dreams begin.

There is something particularly insidious about genocide, in that the very scale of it renders it somewhat abstract. If someone says that five or ten people were killed---that is something you can picture in your mind. But if someone says 3000 people were killed, the mind simply fails. This film does a fantastic job of balancing that sense of a swath of destruction while keeping an immediacy to the horrors it portrays. Carmen’s dreams, in which she tries to protect her two young children from encroaching soldiers, push her into the vivid reality of a victim. Paired with a stand-out sequence in which a woman testifies about the violence done to her and to her family (her testimony in her native language communicated to the court accurately but without passion by an interpreter), the specifics and scope of Enrique’s cruelty is not allowed to slide into abstraction.

Much of the supernatural bent of the film relates to Alma, the mysterious new servant. (The old servants are dismissed, all of them native, some of them without pay, and threatened not to complain or they won’t get recommendations for new jobs). Alma immediately bonds with Sara, and one begins to wonder how the child will play into whatever the long game is for the vengeful spirits. Will Sara be spared because of her innocence? Will she be taken as revenge for all of the children who were needlessly, cruelly killed by Enrique’s men? This lingering question of Alma’s intentions toward Sara adds charge to all of their scenes together.

There are also some really beautiful moments in this film. Alma has a luxurious sweep of long black hair, and in one scene the hair billows around her as if she is caught in a strong wind indoors. In the courtroom scene, the woman testifying speaks from behind a thick veil, one that renders her pale and eerie. She is a survivor, and yet her story might just as well be the voice of one of the many dead.

Something I really enjoyed about this film was the way that it interrogates degrees of complicity. There’s no question that Enrique is a monster, and that he deserves what is coming to him. But does Carmen deserve death for her loyalty to her husband and the way that she has turned a blind eye to his crimes? Does Natalia deserve death for continuing to care for her father, though she is disturbed by what she learns about him? What about Sara, who wasn’t even alive when his crimes were committed and seems to know nothing about them? What about Letona, who works hard to protect a man who has brought pain and death to so many? It is easy to accept and even look forward to Enrique’s comeuppance, but the film spends most of its time forcing us to reckon with what justice might look like for all of the people tangential to Enrique.

This was another very solid recommendation and I’d encourage everyone to check it out (and make sure you are choosing the correct film---the 2019 film from Guatemala---as it is a very common title).

Agreed. I'm not drawing a lot of hard lines in what I say about him or his art. (Well, the only hard lines I'm drawing are about my personal feelings, but my personal feelings are not some sort of ultimate art tribunal).

I'm also not saying that I doubt his intentions, only that I think it's important to interrogate that space between intentions and impact/reality.

La Llorona is great!

I get it.



Just saying, 'it's satire, shut up' is a bit of a cop out.


Not that anyone needs to go further in talking about their feelings...but if you are the art critic of the New York Times (or whoever that guy is), you should maybe consider it.



It also doesn't appear that one is even paying attention to what he's doing if they are just going to wave away the offence. If it is satire, it should welcome these sorts of discussions. They shouldn't be ducked. Otherwise, who cares? Provocation for provocations sake? ZZZZZZZZ.