marobertson

It's truly a mystery how a movie this low-grade gets not one but two recognizable stars attached to it. There are points where it honestly felt like I was watching a Syfy made-for-TV original. The plot is paper-thin and the characters are just collections of standard movie clichés that you've seen a thousand times before. You'd think it would have at least been made with some mind-blowing special effects to compensate for those shortcomings, but no! The special effects in this look cheap and nowhere near up to the quality you'd expect for a major release in 2021. I've seen demos done by aspiring SFX artists on their home computer that look better than Cosmic Sin.

Is it art? Is it crime? Maybe it's both at the same time? Graffiti is a shared cultural experience. Everyone has seen it, many have hated it, and some have been forced to give grudging admiration its more artistic forms. It has existed almost since invention of spray paint, but in the early 1970s something changed in the world of graffiti.

Two 'aerosol artists' in NYC, who went by the handles Comet and Blade, moved from simply writing their names in spray painted lines to creating ever larger, more elaborate and more artistic versions of their chosen 'tags,' until their work soon covered entire sides of subway cars. While not the first to utilize spray paint as art, their boldness and fame (or perhaps infamy) sparked an explosion of graffiti art across the city, the country, and eventually into Europe.

In Just to Get a Rep Peter Gerard traces the history of aerosol art from a small, insular group of early pioneers to the young people making waves in graffiti today, across the country and across the pond. His interviews with now middle-aged taggers are amusing and help explode many of the myths that have built up around the origins of graffiti art; particularly the association between hip-hop culture and graffiti, which is largely a media invention.

In fact, a real strength of this documentary is the way in which it examines the dissemination of a supposedly underground cultural phenomenon via media like film (in this case, movies like Wild Style and Beat Street), so that what kids in Europe were receiving initially was a very Hollywood-ized version of the culture.

Gerard definitely manages to capture the spirit, frenetic energy, and sense of community in the graffiti world. The narrative alone is intriguing, but coupled with the rich visuals in Just to Get a Rep is well worth seeking out.

Many of the great artists of history have suffered from some form of mental disorder, and we often find ourselves fascinated both by their brilliance and their madness. Of course, as this documentary points out, none of us ever had to actually live with a Van Gogh or a Lord Byron and deal with the real world consequences of what went on in their heads.

In The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig gives us a rare glimpse into the tortured mind of just such brilliant artist by effectively combining interviews from those who have known Daniel Johnston best with Johnston's own internal monologue. Feuerzeig achieves the latter because, apart from recording hundreds of songs on cassette tapes, Daniel recorded much of his life; from his mother screaming at him as a teenager to his arrest by park officials for painting Jesus fish on the Statue of Liberty to Johnston reading aloud about his own mental illness from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Many people came to know Daniel Johnston's work in the early 90s when Kurt Cobain famously called him the "greatest songwriter on Earth" and wore a t-shirt with an image from one of Johnston's hand-drawn album covers on the MTV Video Music Awards. Johnston's raw and introspective songs were subsequently covered by Nirvana, Sonic Youth, The Flaming Lips, Beck, and many others. Sadly, just as his music was making inroads into the popular consciousness Johnston's mental illness worsened (possibly accelerated by heavy LSD use), and his career and life entered increasingly troubled waters.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston works as a documentary about music, art, and mental illness all at the same time. It grants you unusual access to what's going on inside a the mind of a human being bursting with creative talent while simultaneously struggling to control the demons that haunt him. After watching this, don't be surprised if you find yourself wanting to hear more of Daniel Johnston's work.