Monkeybone (2001) - Selick's catastrophic fantasy romcom

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Star Brendan Fraser encircled in a virtual vortex of craziness on a poster for Henry Selick's Monkeybone

A cartoonist who has created a vulgar monkey character which is about to premiere as a major animation feature, goes into a coma after an incredible accident. He winds up in a pre-death world created by his nightmares.

Monkeybone is written by Sam Hamm (Masters of Horror (2005-06)), based on the graphic novel Dark Town (1995) by Kaja Blackley, and directed by New Jerseyite master filmmaker Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)), whose 3rd feature it is.
It is a very lopsided film, clearly inspired by Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988). Unfortunately it doesn't come together as a satisfying whole.
Brendan Fraser (Still Breathing (1997)) gives it his all in the very demanding lead role that's also reminiscent of the Nutty Professor/Buddy Love dynamic (in the guise of Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor (1996)), as he plays the zany, vulgar monkey that's inhabited his cartoonist self in parts of the film, which can't but make one wonder what the !%#!! the financiers of Monkeybone were thinking. Audiences unsurprisingly didn't board this enormously budgeted, interesting visually and FX-wise, lavish serving of uncontrolled WTF.
Much of Monkeybone looks like something for children, - and Fraser's appeal at the time also leads one to imagine so, - but Monkeybone is decidedly not suitable for children; it is a unique kind of head-scratching box office disaster.

Related posts:
 
Henry Selick: 2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess 
Top 10: The best adaptations reviewed by Film Excess to date
Top 10: The best adventure movies reviewed by Film Excess to date 
Coraline (2009) - Selick's otherworldly masterpiece   

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 75 mil. $
Box office: 7.6 mil. $
= Box office disaster (returned 0.10 times its cost)
[Monkeybone was released 23 February (USA) and runs 92 minutes. Shooting took place in California, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, from June - October 1999. Selick is rumored to have been fired as director some time towards the end of making the film by studio Fox in an attempt to make it more mainstream, possibly replaced by executive producer Chris Columbus. The film opened #11 to a 2.6 mil. $ first weekend in North America, its peak there, where it grossed 5.4 mil. $ (71.1 % of the total gross). The foreign gross numbers have not been made public at Box Office Mojo. Roger Ebert gave the film a 1.5/4 star review, translating to a notch harder than this one. Selick returned with Moongirl (2005, short) and theatrically with masterpiece Coraline (2009). Fraser returned in The Mummy Returns (2001); Bridget Fonda (Camilla (1994)) in Kiss of the Dragon (2001). Monkeybone is rotten at 19 % with a 3.96/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Monkeybone?

Crumb (1994) or, The Artist As a Cartoonist

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+ 2nd Best Movie of the Year

The curiosity-inspiring poster for Terry Zwigoff's Crumb

QUICK REVIEW:

Robert Crumb, the famed American cartoon experimentalist and societal critic, gets his work and large parts of his life documented here through comic strips, his current and former girlfriends, his children, brothers and mother, as well as through connoisseurs, critics and admirers.

We get very far around the person Crumb in this artist portrayal, and particularly his brothers as well, who couldn't be termed any more well than the man himself, in the two hours that this great documentary runs, which isn't a second too long. Crumb's brother Charles actually committed suicide before the film was released.
Crumb is no technical wonder, almost on the opposite, it is disinterested in technical brilliance. It is made by Wisconsinite master movie-maker Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World (2001)), who has said that at the time of making of the film, (which may well account for its technical side), he was “averaging an income of about $200 a month and living with back pain so intense that I spent three years with a loaded gun on the pillow next to my bed, trying to get up the nerve to kill myself.”
Crumb's own observations, as well as those of his brothers, are sharp and loaded with a similar kind of pessimism and hopelessness. Art is examined and borders are explored and challenged. The film has been called the greatest and one of the greatest documentaries ever made by a slew of critics, and together with the also greatly Oscar-snubbed Hoop Dreams (1994), it became instrumental for an improvement of the Oscar documentary nomination procedure.
Crumb is really good and full of heavy material, unlike Zwigoff's previous documentary, the still good Louie Bluie (1985).

Related review:

Terry Zwigoff: Art School Confidential (2006) or, World of Phoney
Bad Santa (2003) - Zwigoff sticks dynamite under Christmas in this modern dark comedy classic 

1994 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

 

Here's some of Crumb's evocative cartoons:

Watch the amazing trailer for this amazing movie right here

Cost: Unknown
Box office: 3.1 mil. $ (US only)
= Big hit
[But considering the nine (!) years it took Zwigoff to make the film, the success is relative. Crumb won Best Documentary prizes from Sundance, National Board of Review, Los Angeles, New York and Boston Film Critics as well as the National Society of Film Critics.]

What do you think of Crumb?
Have you ever seen a documentary like it?