Review: Alamo Drafthouse experiences Crispin Glover's bizzaro epic 'What is It?'

Last night, we took in Crispin Glover's It Is Fine, Everything Is Fine! :at the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin, TX. As expected, Everything is Fine! turned out to be a weird, weird movie. Tonight, Glover returned to the Drafthouse stage with an even stranger epic, the infamously bizarre What is It? How did the Alamo Drafthouse crowd react to Glover's film, and what was Crispin Glover like one-on-one? Find out in our report/review below, my gentle Examiner readers...

Crispin Glover (Willard, Back to The Future) swooped into Austin yesterday, ready to deliver a two-night run of shows at the Alamo Drafthouse. On each night, Glover would be conducting a series of readings (from books he'd written over the years) and screening two of the most infamous cult films ever to be name-dropped by hipsters and film geeks: the incredibly-weird It is Fine, Everything is Fine! and the even-weirder What is It? If you missed our report from last night's first bizarro show, head on over to THIS PAGE to get all caught up. Once you've finished reading that, come back here to see how things turned out on night two. Go ahead, we'll be waiting in the paragraph below.

View slideshow: Wanna see Crispin Glover at the Drafthouse? Check out these photos, folks...

Didja read it? The whole thing? There'll be a quiz at the end, so don't screw with us on this. OK, we'll take your word for it.

Crispin Glover's second evening at the Alamo Drafthouse began with another reading, this one combining about half of the material we'd heard the night before with a smattering of new selections. Glover was noticably more relaxed on night two, but I'll confess being a little bored sitting through some of the longer selections a second time. After an hour or so, the actor offered a few quick words about What is It?, and then the film began. Shortly thereafter, the audience's heads started exploding randomly throughout the auditorium. Wanna see the trailer? Check it out over there on the left: it's a doozy (and be forewarned that the video may be age-gated).

The thing about What is It? is, What is It? is a lot like most of the half-assed student films that I've ever seen, the kinda films where heavy-handed symbolism does battle with bizarre musical cues, overly-dramatic dialogue, and seemingly-random events over the course of the film-in-question's run-time.

On the one hand, What is It? is clearly the work of an artist who had a very specific statement that he wanted to make, a very specific series of images he wanted to share, a very specific aesthetic and tone that he wanted to establish on-screen. Who am I to question an artist at work, particularly one as accomplished as Glover? On the other hand, I couldn't help but return to the same thought over and over again as I watched What is It?: would the audience be lapping it all up as readily if it had been made by some random dude from NYU's Film School, or some yutz on the corner of 6th and Congress? Or would they have criticized the genuinely-impenetrable "plot", the symbolism, the questionable...everything? One suspects that the fawning would've been a little less...resounding, but who knows?

Here's a random list of things I witnessed in What is It? (and before any of you call "unfair" for offering a laundry list of bizarre observations completely out of context, be aware that What is It? is not a normal film, and thus cannot be judged-- or critiqued-- along the same lines; I'd laugh in the face of anyone who would say that they "understand" it): a kid with Down's Syndrome performing lines from "Beat It", a guy in black-face glaring into the camera and muttering "Arnold Schwarzenegger hugging me", snails being sprinkled with salt (over and over again, perhaps a dozen times over the course of the film's run-time), scenes set in graveyards, in spooky underground lairs, the guy with Cerebral Palsy from Everything is Fine! laying naked inside a giant clamshell while a girl in a demon mask cradled a watermelon in one hand and, uh, stimulated him with the other. This is the short-list. If I wanted to beat you over the head with the point, I could go on with another 200 picks-- but I think you get the idea.

I can't claim that I completely understood the film, but-- like the genuinely entertaining readings that Glover offered on both nights-- What is It? does manage to succeed as a moody piece of performance art. Sure, it's performance art that's been captured on-camera and blown up to silver-screen size, but...well, one couldn't call this a "film" in the traditional sense of the word. Yes, images have been captured on film and run through a projector onto a big-ass screen, but What is It? makes David Lynch's Inland Empire look like the most pedestrian, predictable rom-com Kate Hudson's ever made. It succeeds in the tone it establishes (that'd be: "disturbing") and in the personal mission that Glover had to make a film with an all-Down's-Syndrome-afflicted cast, but as far as enjoyable movie-watching experiences go, Everything is Fine! was far more palatable.

After the What is It? had its way with us, we were again treated to a(n even lengthier) Q&A. A few things worth noting about the second night's Q&A: for one thing, Glover repeated whole swaths of "dialogue" verbatim, repeating seemingly-off-the-cuff remarks word-for-word from the night before: it became evident very quickly that Glover's Q&A was really about 50% audience participation, 50% rehearsed story-telling. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but I'll admit that it was jarring (and a little tedious) to sit through the same ten-minute anecdotes about the funding of, say, Everything is Fine!, particularly when he told the same stories word-for-word the same as the night before. I shouldn't complain about someone-- especially someone who's clearly as uncomfortable facing a large crowd of strangers as Glover is-- preparing material for a paying audience (after all, comedians do it every night), but because the session was presented as an entirely-motivated-by-audience-questions situation, it did make the whole thing feel a little...odd. But then, "odd" had already been redefined by the time we got to the Q&A.

Also worth mentioning: Glover really nailed home his ideas about offending the audience, "taboos", and the "Corporate Entertainment Machine". The night before, he wasn't as explicit as he was on night two, but here's the logic he presented: ignoring taboos is important, mainly because taboos shouldn't be important. It might be considered "taboo" to show a handicapped couple screwing in a movie (with full penetration, no less), but it's unimportant simply because we've made it "taboo" by being so damned prude. Glover seemed very, very concerned about what the audience might write about him online after the show (this came up time and time again on both nights), and he was especially wary of anyone misunderstanding him on this point. See, it's not that offending the audience is his mission: it's that the audience shouldn't be offended in the first place, even if he is putting some wildly offensive imagery (the aforementioned sex, the graphic violence, the dude in black-face, the frequent use of Swastikas, and so on) on-screen. Um, OK.

After the show, I had a chance to sit and chat with Glover for a few minutes, and I found him to be both shy and talkative--if that's even possible-- one-on-one. He was still very concerned about what me and my associate (the lovely April Swartz of Badass Digest, a site you should all be reading frequently) had to say about the show, and seemed very eager to find out what we did and didn't like about each performance. We told him that we preferred the first night, and we also agreed that Everything is Fine! was-- overall-- the more palatable filmgoing experience. He asked which of his reading-selections we preferred and voiced concerns about a few technical errors that had sprung up the night before. We waved them off and told him-- truthfully-- that we'd had a great time. Glover also mentioned how much he loves the Alamo Drafthouse, and told us-- as he'd told the audience after the What is It? screening-- that he hopes that Alamo owner Tim League "takes over the world". I can't help but agree, but then, I'm from Austin.

All in all, it was a strange couple of nights. Glover's friendly and warm (if perhaps a little squirrelly) in person, his readings were enthusiastic and well worth hearing (though maybe not twice in two nights, though that might be different for Glover superfans), and his films were absolutely worth checking out. I've been hearing about What is It? and-- to a lesser extent-- Everything is Fine! for years, so it was great to finally find out what all the hubbub was about. I wish that Glover's films were just a tad more accessible (something along the lines of Lynch's best work, for instance), but what's the point of comparing the two? Glover's a true artist, and after catching these two shows at the Drafthouse it's more clear than ever that he's determined to spend the rest of his career making films and producing content on his own terms, with zero apologies.

My Grade? Everything is Fine! gets a B-, while What is It? gets something in-between a D and a C+ (for excessive inaccessibility)

NOTE: If you're interested in attending one of Crispin Glover's upcoming shows, check out ticketing availability over at CrispinGlover.com. We can't recommend these shows enough, even if they will leave you with a few nightmares, questions, and introduce you to a few images you might be better off not seeing. Say what you will about how weird it all is, but you'll never be bored.

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