Top 10 Offbeat Documentaries

0   7.6   7.9 

Grizzly Man (2005)

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Werner Herzog

Starring: Timothy Treadwell, Werner Herzog
"I will die for these animals, I will die for these animals, I will die for these animals . . ."

Grizzly manby maciekMACIEK
"Grizzly Man" Video

Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog returns to his favorite theme, obsession, as he traces the story of Timothy Treadwell, an amateur naturalist who spent 13 summers among wild brown bears at Katmai National Park in Alaska. Treadwell and his girlfriend were tragically killed by one of the bears during the fall of 2003. This is an extraordinary and haunting documentary full of astounding footage and some great introspective narration. Herzog sums it all up nicely: "And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior."

0   7.7   8.1 

Salesman (1968)

MPAA Rating: NR

Director: Albert and David Maysles

Starring: Paul Brennan
"If a guy's not a success, he's got nobody to blame but himself. What everybody's got to do is to quit making alibis and excuses and accept responsibility if a success or failure."


"Salesman" Video

A surprisingly engrossing documentary about door-to-door Bible salesmen, Salesman was directed by the Maysles brothers, Albert and David. Follow the "Badger," the "Rabbit," the "Gipper" and the "Bull" as they desperately try to pawn off a bunch of overpriced Bibles on the unsuspecting masses. Mostly, we follow the Badger, who is in a hell of a sales slump. Badger spends most of the movie acting like a whiny little bitch as he longs for the ever-elusive pension that will lead him to the good life (a condo on Miami Beach?). Full of dreary locales such as an endless succession of cheap motels and greasy diners, Salesman pierces the heart of the American Dream. Watching this entire thing eventually depressed the shit out of me and I kept thinking of a quote from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: "To suffer fifty weeks a year for the sake of a two-week vacation." Other classic Maysles documentaries include Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1976).

0   7.1   7.9 

Murderball (2005)

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Henry Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro

Starring: Mark Zupan, Joe Bishop, Andy Cohn, Kevin Cavill, Scott Hogsett, Christopher Igoe, Bob Lujano, Kevin Orr, Joe Soares, Dave Wilsie
"We had been calling it Murderball, but you can't market Murderball to corporate sponsors."


"Murderball" Video

"Mark Zupan swigs beer. Spews out four-letter words. Sweats up a storm in the gym. Wrestles with his dog. Has crowd-surfed at a Pearl Jam show. And enjoys an active sex life with his live-in girlfriend . . . Oh yeah, and he happens to be a quadriplegic who has been in a wheelchair since he was 18. That was when he was thrown from the bed of the pickup of his best friend, Christopher Igoe, and broke his neck . . . Yet his accident, Zupan says, is 'the best thing that's ever happened to me.' He means it. Zupan, 30, is the captain of the U.S. quadriplegic rugby team, which competes in the Paralympics and took a bronze medal at the Athens games. Also known as 'murderball,' it's a brutal, sometimes bloody sport that has wheelchair athletes pounding and slamming the living daylights out of each other. It's the subject of Murderball, a film that won the Documentary Audience Award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival . . . All the hoopla surrounding the film has left Zupan, an Austin-based civil engineer, dazed. 'We're just a bunch of gimps playing a sport,' he says."

—"From Murderball to Reluctant Movie Star" by Donna Freydkin, USA Today, July 8, 2005

An Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature (but don't let that scare you away!), Murderball follows the U.S. quad rugby team as they prepare for the 2004 Paralympic Games. Call it Murderball, Quad Rugby or Wheelchair Rugby, this is a brutal, full-contact and highly competitive sport where opponents are frequently knocked to the floor. And off the court, the Team USA rugby players shatter any and all stereotypes you may hold about the handicapped. Murderball simply kicks ass.

0   6.5   7 

Overnight (2003)

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Mark Brian Smith, Tony Montana

Starring: Troy Duffy, Harvey Weinstein
"As for my film career? Get used to it, cause it ain't goin' anywhere. Period."

Overnight traces the meteoric rise and fall of aspiring filmmaker Troy Duffy, a former bartender who turns out to be one of the most misguided and obnoxious human beings on the planet. After fucking up a movie deal and alienating just about all his friends and family, Duffy somehow managed to go on to direct a reasonably entertaining little cult flick called The Boondock Saints. The last shot of Duffy talking to himself as he wanders aimlessly outside a bar is truly disturbing. For more recommended documentaries, check out Top 10 Offbeat Documentaries.

0   7.8   7.7 

Gates Of Heaven (1980)

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Errol Morris

Starring: Zella Graham, Cal Harberts, Floyd McClure
"Death is for the living and not for the dead."


"Gates Of Heaven" Video

Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris' first feature documentary, centers around the pet cemetery business, specifically two California pet cemeteries: the Foothill Pet Cemetery in Los Altos and the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park. Totally bizarre and captivating! View pathetic pet owners who shell out thousands of dollars to ensure that their pooches make it to doggie heaven! As a sidenote, Werner Herzog bet Morris that he would eat his own shoe if Morris ever completed the film. The result was another offbeat documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

0   6.9   7.6 

American Movie (1999)

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Chris Smith

Starring: Mark Borchardt, Mike Schank, Bill Borchardt
"I figured he'd become a stalker or a serial killer."


"American Movie" Video

Imagine if Ed Wood had allowed a documentary film crew to follow him around while he directed the cult classic, Plan Nine from Outer Space. We could eavesdrop on Wood's decision to use his chiropractor to fill in for the film's "star," Bela Lugosi, who passed away before filming started. Watch the production crew set up that cardboard cemetery and fling those paper plate UFOs. Observe Wood's rapport with his main actors: Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, Vampira, Dudley Manlove ("Eros") and Criswell, the film's narrator. Unfortunately we have no such document of the widely acclaimed "Worst Film Ever Made." However, I'll settle for American Movie, a documentary about extremely low budget filmmaking. It's the best documentary I've seen since Crumb and contains about the same number of whacked out characters. Apparently, the director of this masterpiece, Chris Smith, has another film out there called American Job about low-level jobs. Bottom line: American Movie is a demented Hoop Dreams for the drug-addled set.

The main character, Mark Borchardt, is the obsessed filmmaker and he's about as far away from Hollywood as you could possibly get - in this case, Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. His main goal in life is to finish a full-length horror film titled Northwestern. It's obvious that this guy's entire film career is based on the opening scenes of Night of the Living Dead. He also credits Dawn of the Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Phantasm and The Shining as major influences. If Mark is hanging out, he's drinking beer; if he's directing the movie, he's got a beer (usually a Pabst Blue Ribbon) in his hand; and if he's taking a rare shower, he's draining a beer. Mark's determined to live out his version of the American Dream. He's also a deadbeat dad with three kids out of wedlock. To fund his masterpiece, Mark runs up credit cards, borrows from friends and relatives, and works a series of menial jobs - from delivering newspapers to vacuuming a mausoleum. His creditors are after him and so is the IRS. He doesn't give a shit. So he drops Northwestern and focuses on a shorter film called Coven, "a psychological thriller portraying an alcoholic writer's descent into the demonic abyss of a self-support group." He figures if he can sell 3,000 "units" of the flick at $14.95 apiece he can raise enough money to finish his dream project. We also meet Mark's Uncle Bill, who looks like one of those derelicts who lives under an overpass and holds up a sign that reads "WILL WORK FOR FOOD." Believe it or not, this old coot is the principal investor for the film. He lives in a trailer but he's got a $280,000 nest egg. And it's obvious through the duration of the film that he doesn't have much longer to live. One of the most interesting characters is Mark's friend Mike Schank. This guy just doesn't give a fuck about anything and he follows Mark around like some latter-day Sancho Panza. He spends his time playing the guitar, buying lottery tickets (he's "won almost four thousand dollars playing scratch-offs," according to the official web site) and helping Mark with his films. Both of these guys still sport Led Zepplin T-shirts and have long, stringy hair. And they're Packer fans to boot. The final scene of American Movie is very revealing. It shows some of Mark's old silent black-and-white film clips from the early '80s - the same friends racing around madly, drinking beer and raising hell. Nothing has really changed . . .

My top 10 favorite scenes from American Movie:

1) During the first Northwestern producting meeting, the room is full. In each successive meeting, the number drop off until it's just Mark and some guy who looks like he'd rather be ANYWHERE else!
2) Mike says that Mark became his friend because he was the only guy who would drink a pint of vodka with him in the middle of the afternoon.
3) Mark gets Uncle Bill fucked on, I believe, schnapps.
4) With a shortage of extras, Mark is forced to enlist his mom to appear in a scene out in the forest in the middle of winter as one of the dark-hooded demons.
5) Uncle Bill is given a brief but crucial role in the film. He's got about three lines to remember—some ludicrous rant about Jesus coming. The poor guy keeps fucking up his lines and Mark makes him go through more than 30 takes.
6) Mike relates a story about how he dropped some bad acid and landed in the hospital. When he woke up, what did he do, swear off drugs forever? No, he searches his pockets frantically for more acid!
7) Mark and Mike go to the university to distribute flyers for Coven. Mike starts strolling off—without the flyers! Mark asks him what he's doing. He responds that he's going to put up the flyers. Mark informs him that he needs the flyers in order to put them up.
8) The day after Memorial Day, Mark's got to pluck about 3,000 flags from graves during his job at the local cemetery.
9) After the Packers win the Super Bowl, a drunken Mark unleashes a tirade of profanities directed at nothing in particular. When he leaves the room, the camera turns to his mom, who says, "I'm glad the Packers won . . ."
10) Mark flings one of the other actors headfirst into a supposedly "breakable" kitchen cabinet until he's nearly unconscious.

0   10   7.9 

Burden Of Dreams (1982)

MPAA Rating: NR

Director: Les Blank

Starring: Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale - Fitzcarraldo
"Without dreams we would be cows in a field and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project."


"Burden Of Dreams" Video

Les Blank's riveting documentary focuses on the utter chaos surrounding the filming of Werner Herzog's epic, Fitzcarraldo in the jungles of South America. Whether having to replace his entire cast, attempting to drag a 320-ton steamer over a small mountain or trying to deal with totally insane actor Klaus Kinski, Herzog reveals an unwavering obsession to finish his film.

0   7.5   7.7 

R. Crumb: Dangling from the Wings of Madness

"I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror . . . I have received a singular warning. I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me." --Baudelaire

"You must thank the gods for art, those of us who have been fortunate enough to stumble onto this means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust . . . " --R. Crumb

I once read of a movie theater manager in Seoul, South Korea, who discovered that the running time of The Sound of Music was too long - so he cut out all of the songs. I had a similar impulse after browsing through Monte Beauchamp’s The Life and Times of R. Crumb (St. Martin’s Griffin Press, $17.95, 182 pages). However, my immediate reaction was to trash all of the smug commentary from Crumb’s "contemporaries" that makes up 90 percent of the book’s contents and rip out the midsection, which includes a couple of vintage drawings from Crumb’s storied career.

The book’s slick front cover, with its Drew Friedman illustration of Crumb strumming a mandolin, fooled me. And the back cover contains quotes about Crumb from Joe Coleman and George Carlin, but neither of them appears within the text itself. What the reader is left with are a bunch of excruciatingly boring essays that barely scratch the surface of Crumb’s life and work. Since Crumb is an intensely private man, most of these artists end up writing a quick vignette concerning a meeting with Crumb on a street corner and throughout the rest of the essay they drone on in nausea-inducing detail about their own work and life. It all amounts to little more than hero worship with precious few insights about Crumb himself.

Ironically, the best essays come from the most unlikely sources, including one from Al Goldstein, legendary publisher of Screw magazine. "Crumb reminds me of the antiwar book, Johnny Got His Gun, the hero of which was a quadriplegic, just a stump of a man, nothing more than a mind attached to a failing body . . . He’s a walking mental institution", writes Goldstein. I also enjoyed the piece by underground cartoonist Trina Robbins, who has the courage to call Crumb on his obvious misogynistic sentiments. "It’s weird to me how willing people are to overlook the hideous darkness in Crumb’s work", writes Robbins.

If you would really like a glimpse of the strange and disturbing world of R. Crumb, I suggest that you forget the book and go rent Terry Zwigoff’s brilliant 1995 documentary, Crumb. As the film opens, Crumb, complete with his trademark cheap suit, thick glasses and porkpie hat, sits cross-legged on the floor, listening pensively to a scratchy blues record from his extensive and rare 78-rpm album collection. We soon learn that "bizarre" and "dysfunctional" don’t even come close to describing Crumb’s family. Crumb himself describes his childhood as "grim." He grew up in the "projects" of Philadelphia with his two brothers, Charles and Maxon, and two sisters (who refused to be interviewed for the film). Their father was an "overbearing tyrant" and "sadistic bully," while their mother was strung out most of the day on amphetamines. "My father was a rigid, gung-ho type who had a hard-ass attitude to life," said Crumb. "All three of his sons ended up to be wimpy, nerdy weirdos. He wanted at least one of us to end up as a Marine. He always wore a fixed smile, which I later learned was a sign of deep depression."

The three brothers escaped into a fantasy world of comic books. "It was Charles who started the whole comic thing", said Crumb. "He was totally obsessed." Charles became fixated on the filmed version of Treasure Island and strolled around town dressed like Long John Silver. "He was much cleverer and funnier than I was," admits Crumb. However, it becomes obvious that Charles was never equipped to deal with the real world. "Teachers hated him; kids hated him," said Crumb.

Crumb admits that he was attracted to Bug Bunny as a child and later became fixated on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. His first sexual memory is of hanging out in his mother’s closet and humping a pair of her cowboy boots, while singing "Jesus loves me, yes I know . . . "Needless to say, he didn’t get a single date during high school. "I was kind and sensitive, while the girls were all going for the mean and aggressive types", said Crumb. "So I became a shadow. I spent most of my time looking for old-time records in the black section of town." Blues records from such legends as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Barbecue Bob, Jaybird Coleman, Buddy Boy Hawkins and Furry Lewis revealed a "love for humanity, the best part of the soul of common people."

After high school, Crumb took a bleak job at American Greeting Cards before entering the radical world of underground comic books. He puts an end to the rumors that he hung out with the Grateful Dead during the ’60s. "I never had anything to do with those guys", he said. "I hated their music. I went to some of their concerts and fell asleep." Crumb did make frequent trips to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, looking "to get some of that free love action," but without any success. It was obvious he didn’t fit in and most of the hippies thought he was a narcotics agent. "Crumb, what’s the matter, don’t you like girls?" Janis Joplin once asked him.

It was during this period that Crumb created his most popular work such as Keep on Truckin’ (which caused him "nothing but headaches"), Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat, which was made into a cartoon that "embarrassed me for the rest of my life," he reveals. He finally got revenge on Fritz in a later comic by having a female ostrich stab him in the head with an icepick. Crumb’s LSD-inspired comics during the ’60s truly captured the seamy side of America’s subconscious.

The documentary reveals a wealth of humorous and disturbing details of Crumb’s life and art. Here’s a glimpse:

* After 30 years, Crumb still draws portraits of girls he had crushes on in high school, including a "cross-eyed farm girl who wore homemade clothes to school . . . A funky girl who had body odor and hairy legs."

* One of Crumb’s ex-girlfriends claims he was not at all interested in conventional sex, but enjoyed "piggyback rides," "wrestling" and "sitting on my shoe."

* Alice, Crumb’s second wife, says that her parents thought he was a "retard" upon first meeting the artist.

* Crumb reveals that he has "never been in love with a woman" and that he is a "compulsive masturbator."

* At a seedy comic book store, Crumb browses through a copy of something called Puke and Explode, but refuses to acknowledge his influence on this new generation of underground artists.

* During a photo shoot for Juggs magazine, Crumb hams it up with a bevy of busty beauties.

* Crumb and his son, Jesse, compare drawings of women from the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum.

However, the most memorable scenes in the film revolve around Crumb’s visits to his brothers, both of whom have artistic talent but have been trapped by their insanity, a condition that Crumb has somehow managed to escape. Charles is a recluse who has lived at home with his mother since he graduated from high school. Blankets cover all of the windows and tattered paperbacks line the walls. Charles sits in his pajamas all day in a dark upstairs bedroom, taking antidepressants, contemplating suicide (once he tried to kill himself by downing a bottle of furniture polish) and rereading novels from old Victorian writers "because there’s nothing else to do." According to Crumb, Charles’ drawings began to show "increasing alienation" during his late teens and then the drawings disappeared completely, replaced by pages and pages of rambling, incoherent text. His last comic drawings were of "psychotic bunny rabbits." During a rare moment of candor, Charles reveals that he has always suffered from an "excessive degree of narcissism," which eventually led to homicidal tendencies. Jealous of Crumb’s success, Charles was overcome with a desire to go down to the basement, get an ax and bash Crumb’s skull with it. We discover later that Charles took his own life with an overdose of medication a year after the interview was filmed. Meanwhile, Crumb’s mother spends the day watching TV, doing crossword puzzles and "being pursued by invisible enemies," according to Crumb. "Weird blankets on the wall, cats pissing all over the carpet, it looks like the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane," said Crumb.

Maxon, who suffers from epileptic seizures, lives in a cheap apartment in San Francisco. When he is not out begging on the streets, Maxon spends his day painting Picasso-like artwork, sitting on nails and running cloth through his intestines. His paintings include one of Van Gogh shooting himself in a cornfield and another of a girl with a metallic brasserie. In a later interview, Zwigoff said he didn’t even "touch the surface on Max" in the film, a disturbing thought indeed.

Although he doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, Crumb has gained a level of mainstream acceptance during the ’90s. Robert Hughes, the stuffy art critic for Time magazine, calls Crumb "the Bruegel of the last half of the 20th century." However, the documentary makes it clear that Crumb is totally uninterested in money; he has simply used art as a vehicle to avoid falling in his brothers’ footsteps. "People now don’t have any concept that there was ever a culture outside of this thing that was created to make money," Crumb said. "Whatever is the biggest, latest thing, they’re into it. You get disgusted after a while at humanity."

As the film closes, Crumb and his family prepare to move from their humble bungalow in Winters, California, to a remote village in southern France. Further isolation, yes, but still clinging precariously to his sanity.