Crispin Glover

By Robert Avila

In a show of independence that really is a show, actor-writer-painter-filmmaker Crispin Hellion Glover has been touring the country with his new film, “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine” (part two of his “It” trilogy, produced by his company Volcanic Eruptions), thus circumventing the standard corporate-dominated model of film distribution with his own horse-and-buggy extravaganza. There are solid reasons for doing so. “Everything Is Fine” is already the kind of idea that does not come out of a major studio alive — at least not in the eyes of a tenacious visionary like Glover — and its delivery to movie audiences requires a little loving care. A colorful off-color head-trip written by its star Steven C. Stewart and co-directed by Glover and longtime associate David Brothers, Everything Is Fine is the story of a middle-aged man with cerebral palsy who fantasizes his way out of a depressing nursing facility into a series of lethal sexual encounters with young long-haired women. Sexually explicit and fantastical in design, the film is strikingly tawdry, garish, arch and, yes, kind of lovely; as deadpan in its macabre humor as it is sincere in its sympathy with Stewart’s autobiographical protagonist (the 62-year-old Utah-based writer and actor, whose own lines are largely unintelligible, died less than a month after the film was completed).

And so the road show, which arrives at the Castro Theater for three nights this weekend, along with a midnight screening on Saturday of the trilogy opener “What Is It?” (Glover’s award-winning 2005 directorial debut whose most readily traded characteristic is his casting of actors with Down Syndrome). Each evening also includes Glover’s live dramatic narration of his “Big Slide Show,

topics: actors, castro theatre, filmmakers, independent film

12.14.2007