The Screengrab : charles burns

Screengrab Review: "Fear(s) of the Dark"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

A black and white, animated anthology film that draws on the talents of an unusual mix of well-known comics artists and graphic designers, Fear(s) of the Dark is the trippiest cross between a European art-house curio and a thrill-crazed midnight movie since the heady days of Fantastic Planet. As usual with omnibus features, the stories vary in quality, but the shifts from one striking visual style to the next will keep your eyes glued to the screen--unless you turn your head away from the grislier moments, notably the recurring episodes, captured in compellingly scratchy-looking artwork from Christian Hincker (the artist known as "Blutch"), in which a wild-eyed, cadaverous-looking nobleman terrorizes the streets with a pack of vicious dogs. There are also full segments from a pair of giants in the comic book world, Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattiotti, both making their first forays into film animation (though Burns once adapted his "Dogboy" character for a bizarre, stylized live action serial that ran on MTV's old animation showcase Liquid Television.) Mattotti's brief segment is a beauty, a sophisticated rendition of a folk tale that seems to carve out its own quiet, eerie space at the heart of the feature. Burns's segment is lively enough and supplies the movie's only traces of humor, but it might seem most impressive to people who haven't seen a lot of Burns's work and so haven't already been well-exposed to his retroland style and obsessions with virginal sexual terror. (It'll be easy to tell which reviewers of Fear(s) of the Dark are new to Burns; they'll be the one whose first thought is to compare his segment to David Cronenberg.)

As a whole, Fear(s) has the experimental feel of people trying things out in somebody else's laboratory and hoping that the results will mesh. A minor work that draws on some major talents, it seldom achieves anything like the obsessive charge that some of these artists have been able to generate with their work on the printed page. It's probably of greatest interest to comics geeks who'll get a tingle from seeing some of their favorites working on film, and horror addicts intrigued by the fresh angle it provides on some classic tropes of the genre. Members of both groups will be gratified to discover that the movie ends with a knockout punch supplied by director Richard McGuire. It's the simplest and most basic of scare movie set-ups: a nameless man lost in a snowstorm at night discovers an empty-or-is-it? cabin and beds down for the night. Virtually wordless and depicted in chunky black and white images, with the the protagonist's face and hands jutting out of the inky darkness of the unlit house, it's an elegant formal exercise that actually manages to get your heart racing a little. For twenty minutes or so, in theaters playing Fear(s) of the Dark, it'll really feel like Halloween.

Rep Report (February 28 - March 6)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Sunday, March 2 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King Kong's debut appearance in New York City, and to honor the event, Film Forum is running the 1933 classic for two matinees, one day only. Those attending the 1:00 P.M. screening are automatically eligible to stick around and participate in the Fay Wray Scream-alike Contest, to be judged by a crack panel of experts that includes Film Forum repertory program director Bruce Goldstein, film critic Elliott Stein, and Ms. Wray's actress daughter, Susan Riskin. One lucky, leather-lunged winner will receive a two-disc DVD set of the movie, a one-year membership to Film Forum, (trust me on this — if nothing else, it pays for itself!), and a romantic trip for two the top of the Empire State Building. Jeez, you'd think it would be thrill enough just to get to be in the same room as Elliott Stein...

Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008" (February 29 - March 9) kicks off with Claude Lelouch's Romain de gare with Fanny Ardent and Audrey Dana, introduced by the director. There are also new films by Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Miller, Sophie Marceau, and — this sounds interesting — Fear(s) of the Dark, a black-and-white animated omnibus film that incorporates material from such comics artists as Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti.

SAN FRANCISCO: "The Unabridged Coen Brothers" (February 28 - March 2) at the Castro was apparently assembled for the benefit of anyone who's just landed here from Mars and is curious about these fellows who just won the Oscar. Of course, it might also be useful to any Coen fans who see this as a fine time to have themselves a wallow. Includes Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which, it says here, includes "Southern folklore, slapstick stunts, cinematic tributes, religious ritual, political satire, and social commentary." All that and dancing Klansmen too!

SEATTLE: The Grand Illusion Cinema brings back four of "the No-Nonsense Films of Phil Karlson in the '50s". Karlson was a specialist in hard-nosed, low-budget action noirs whose resume of grungily efficient little knuckle-busters makes Don Siegel look like Busby Berkeley. (After decades of scuffling from one small-time gig to the next, Karlson hit the jackpot with his next-to-last picture, the rabble-rousing 1973 blockbuster Walking Tall, which he had the foresight to own a piece of.) Starting February 29, the theater is showing the fifties films Five Against the House with Kim Novak and Brian Keith and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte; on March 6, it trades them in for the Western Gunman's Walk and the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 2

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:05:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Persepolis didn't impress me much as a coming-of-age memoir, but even I, filing one of the few dissenting reviews amidst the tsunami of fervent acclaim, had to admit that its monochromatic animation style was stunning to behold on a frame-to-frame basis. If you, like me, are partial to stark black-and-white drawings, but would rather watch some poor dude being used as an insect incubator than a little girl in a chador singing "Eye of the Tiger," keep an eye out for Fear(s) of the Dark, a French-financed omnibus horror film that provides six renowned artists and illustrators with a forum to explore their personal phobias, using any graphic tool save for color. As with any collection of shorts, quality varies widely; a couple of the entries here are little more than gorgeously baffling, and one amounts to a predictable sick joke. But Charles Burns — he of the aforementioned insect bit — turns in a hilariously grotesque tribute to EC's classic Weird Science/Weird Fantasy line of comics, complete with boldfaced irony and (it was the ‘50s) unapologetic misogyny. And the final segment, animated by Richard McGuire and set in a time-honored Old Dark House lit only by a roving candle and the embers of a dying fire, is simply one of the most eye-popping exercises in contrast ever attempted on the big screen. In a way, it's too dazzling to be scary — it's hard to get nervous about offscreen bumps and creaks when you're marveling at the way McGuire captures a bottle of booze rolling across the floor via only the light that reflects off of its white label. Sundance has buried Fear(s) of the Dark in its little-attended New Frontier section (why not Park City at Midnight?), so you may not see a whole lot of coverage from other sources. But for devotees of innovative animation — and the severely colorblind — this is a must-see.