It Is Fine!

Opening this week at http://www.ifccenter.com/ is It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine!, the second part of Crispin Hellion Glover’s “It” trilogy, which is based on the screenplay and sinister musings of the late Steven C. Stewart, who was afflicted with severe cerebral palsy and also stars in the film. Steven plays wheelchair-bound Paul, who meets a divorced mother (played by Fassbinder goddess Margit Carstensen) at a dance and then introduces him to her family (her sexy daughter takes a particular shine to him).

Paul is obsessed with long hair and The Sound Of Music, but when his offer of marriage to the mother is rejected, he reacts in homicidal rage. Leave it to Crispin Glover to remake My Left Foot as an avant-garde horror movie. Art direction by Glover’s co-director David Brothers creates streets and apartment interiors of hallucinatory luridness. That, mixed with the thunderous soundtrack of Grieg and Tchaikovsky give the movie a relentless nightmare quality resembling the Italian Giallo film that also reveled in kinky sex and murder.

Actress Lauren German plays a handicapped girl that Paul meets and tries to woo, but she dreams of dating someone not using a ramp. The only clues cops have to Paul’s series of murders are bent sippy straws. There is also a graphic sex scene that will keep this movie from ever becoming an event screening at the Special Olympics. Compared to Glover’s first film, What Is It? (2005), this surreal fantasy is marvelously macabre and narratively more cohesive. What Diane Arbus was as a photographer, Crispin Hellion Glover is swiftly achieving as a filmmaker. Training his sardonic eyes on the strange and afflicted, he achieves a mad dark poetry on celluloid.