The Null Device

Films about loser artists

This evening, I rented and watched the following two DVDs:

• Max: the 2002 Canadian/Hungarian/British production about a young Adolf Hitler's relationship with a (fictional) cosmopolitan Jewish art dealer in Munich, immediately after World War 1. Hitler was played by Noah Taylor, who looked like a leaner version of the housemate he played in He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, or possibly like the frontman of an Australian indie-rock band; he put in a decent performance, playing the young Hitler as a bitterly angry monomaniac torn between the world of art (in which he wasn't much of a success, partly due to his disdain for modern art trends and/or general crackedness; this was before outsider art came into vogue, of course) and fringe politics.
• American Splendor: a film about underground comic writer Harvey Pekar; he is portrayed here as a pudgy, generally grubby-looking loser with a dead-end job, severely limited horizons and a generally shitty outlook on life, which has lasted him from childhood. Pekar starts writing a comicbook series based on the minutiae of his life, and gradually gets a cult following. I imagine that, were he doing this 25 years later, he'd probably have started a weblog instead.

The night before, I watched Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (which was amusing; it took the memoirs of a delusional former TV personality and used them as a vehicle for clever-dick scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman to play with the ways that being a 1960s game-show host and CIA assassin could interact).

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