C. GLOVER

Yet another reason I moved here, serendipitous perfectitude.

So last night after perusing the Storefront for Art and Architecture’s new show Cara and I were on our way uptown to catch the The Painted Veil when we spied the IFC’s marquee advertising Crispin Glover in person for a three day run starting that night. The IFC’s great about having events like this and I still kick myself for missing David Lynch when was in town back in December.

Glover’s been promoting the first film of his trilogy What Is It? for a while now and we missed the chance a back in October when he last passed through. So we stopped by the box office just to see if there was any tickets left and ended up getting one of the five pairs left, so we bailed on plan A. Turned out not only would he be showing the film and doing a Q+A after, but he’d also be doing some kind of slide show for beforehand and all we really knew about the film or any of this was that it was going to be extremely messed-up experience based on what I knew of his books, and this trailer for the film we’d seen online which was just basically confounding. For $20 it was a deal and we were further encouraged by the kid selling the tickets when he said, “Have you seen the trailer? It frightened me.”

So we sit near the front and he comes in from the side exit and gets on stage with a red spot light on his face and starts to narrate eight stories from these incredible bizarre and disturbing books he’s written which are kind of like gothic non-linear Victorian tales with disturbing visual plates. I’d perused the titles in the lobby before the show they had for sale and was honestly much happier he read from his own work, it just made sense that way. It was riveting to watch him get into it and didn’t seem to change my opinion that he was some sort of extremely eccentric individual based on articles and that silly David Letterman interview he did about 20 years ago.

When he finished he thanked the audience and took off out the exit again and then the movie started rolling. I’ll just say watch the trailer to get some idea of what was going on, which included some of the following: almost an entire cast of persons with down syndrome, a minstrel in black face, naked women in ape masks and a character played by a nude man with severe cerebral palsy… oh, and lots of snails decimated with salt. This description does no justice, but needless to say I got it, and some of it is extremely funny in that kind of way you feel like you shouldn’t be laughing but it’s almost impossible not to because you’ve never seen anything like it and it’s... funny.

Afterwards he came onstage again to show three trailers (1, 2, 3,) from the second film in this trilogy, It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE, which features Steven C. Stewart, the cerebral palsy character from the first film, and seemed vastly different and extremely compelling and moving to say the least. Then he took questions.

Here’s where my preconception of him were completely blown away, as he was perfectly gracious and concerned with answering the most difficult and obvious questions concerning the controversial subject matter of his film. He really went out of his way to make sure he was taken seriously, and I didn’t come away with any other impression than he is an especially sincere individual who has some extremely valid points to make about corporate films and how they censor content for the sake of consumer comfort, this film a very personal response to how he feels about all of that.

He’s funny, thoughtful, approachable and deserves our attention.