An Evening with Crispin Glover

So this past Saturday Becky and I traveled to Atlanta for An Evening with Crispin Glover at the Plaza Theatre.  The event began with Crispin's Big Slide Show, which is actually quite entertaining.  He takes old, out of print, copyright expired books and reworks them by blanking out text to make them read differently and adding pictures, etc...  The stories he builds up around these are sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, sometimes both.  Either way, it was pretty awesome.

Next there was a screening of his movie What Is It?  And trust me you ask yourself this question several times during the running of it.  It was 72 minutes of the oddest cinema I've ever taken in.  One of the things you immediately realize is that most all of the characters in the moving have Down syndrome.  But, the movie isn't about Down syndrome and the characters really are playing normal characters.  Sort of like the reverse of someone normal playing a character with a mental handicap... instead here are people with mental handicaps playing characters who do not necessarily have a handicap.

The movie had a specific point where it turned from interesting, to downright... well... What Is it?  I'll summarize that point in the movie with one sentence:

There was a fully nude lady with a monkey mask on sitting on a watermelon giving a handjob to a guy with cerebral palsey who was laying naked (obviously) in a huge opened clamshell.

I'm not even kidding.

But I guess the point to some art, to me, is to make you ask What Is It?

The best thing about it was that Glover came back out after the movie for a Q&A session that lasted seemingly hours. He was very gracious and earnest about everything.  He stated that he only shows the film when he can be there to discuss it afterwards because he wants to be able to clear up any misunderstandings that might arise.  And trust me this movie would totally flip out someone who went in without an open mind.