Product Description

R.I.P Rest in Piecesis director Robert-Adrian Pejo’s intimate portrait of painter Joe Coleman, who is known around the world as a shamanic, moral voice diagnosing the ills of 21st century America. Coleman holds nothing back, telling us of a world wracked with tumorous cities, perversion, divorce, violence, atomic bombs, and a human race destroying itself "simply because we are born.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87280 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-02-24
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 112 minutes

New York Post
"A riveting examination of an artist who refuses to paint–or play–on the mainstream canvas... squirm-inducing."

Jim Jarmusch
"Joe Coleman is a great artist... he remains a true outsider, an outlaw."

Robert Crumb
"His art is some of the best around these days."

Customer Reviews

Elite warmongers (not nature) want hate.
Coleman's work is quite good. I'd like to see him render some positive things about life; since, as he notes, kindness has as much a place in our lives as cruelty. Actually, most people probably experience much more kindness throughout their lives than horror. Coleman, and people who obsess on the negative would probably be less anxious and wouldn't experience such paranoia while smoking pot if they were to look a little more at the beauty of the world. He mentions how his Catholicism influenced his world view, maybe studying Buddhism would help him work through the muck he excavates and reveals in his work. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living Corruption of the body isn't always as bad as it seems. It's part of a larger cycle that contains a lot of beauty. Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series

The dialogue between Coleman and Jarmusch could've been edited out of the DVD. As another reviewer notes, it was lame.
Also, I don't agree with Coleman's assessment that "nature wants us to hate." He feels it's in mother nature's self-interest for the "cancer" of humanity to war against itself so there aren't so many of us harming the world. He claims there is more hatred now in our culture than ever, and sees hatred between races, sexes and classes as serving the same purpose. I think the hatred he sees is actually being cultivate by the usual culprits - warmongering elites. War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
War is not good for the earth's ecosystems Depleted Uranium - Deadly, Dangerous and Indiscriminate Agent Orange: Collateral Damage in Vietnam Cluster bombs : An article from: The Ecologist The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, so it doesn't make sense for Mother Nature to be longing for it. However, war does divert money from social spending (including the education, health and other investments that reduces birth rates) to the business of war. Grand Theft Pentagon :Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror War on Terror, Inc.: Corporate Profiteering from the Politics of Fear
Coleman's political views could use a little refinement. He makes a valid point when he says that when we focus our judgment of evil upon characters like Charles Manson, that it deflects our attention from the evil of characters like Bush and Clinton (actually, their administrations), who have been involved in killing many more people; such as the sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people and the imposition of trade policies that have imposed brutal poverty upon hundreds of millions of people.
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (American Empire Project)

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." - General Douglas MacArthur

A couple resources to cheer people with broken spirits up:
Yes!
Plenty Magazine

It's Joe Coleman, what more do you need to know?
Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman (Robert Adrian Pejo, 1997)

Joe Coleman. You probably haven't heard of him. (Well, okay, if you're reading this review on Amazon, you probably searched on his name, and you probably do know who he is, so ignore that.) You should have. Coleman is what is commonly known these days as an outsider artist, the kind of guy whose stuff you'll rarely, if ever, see hanging in galleries. But you should.

Pejo's documentary follows Coleman around, interviews friends and supporters (including filmmaker Jim Jarmusch), and generally gets Coleman's take on life. That take is not pretty. It is, however, fascinating (and, depending on your point of view, accurate). Coleman is a charismatic character, whatever you feel about the man's art, and he comes across well here. Persuasive, well, that's up to you, but I don't think he cares one way or the other; he's got a point to make, and he makes it, and who cares whether anyone agrees?

In the end, it does what a documentary is supposed to do: illuminate its subject. I liked it. *** ½

Era respiration-byte:
"Abnormal living body-Joe Coleman controlls the drug fetus's guerrilla=sex brain and thinks about the psychedelic anus of a chemical=anthropoid with the era respiration-byte." - Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric