The Screengrab : fear(s) of the dark

2008 in Review: Paul Clark's Favorite Movie Moments

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Starting tomorrow, the writers of Screengrab will be unveiling their lists of the top 10 films of 2008. But before that begins, I’d like to post a different sort of list of highlights from the past year. For those of you who’ve only started reading recently, I used to write a bi-weekly column called “The Movie Moment,” in which I’d explore in depth some of my favorite scenes from movies both old and new. This past spring, I had to put the column on indefinite hiatus for various reasons, but I wanted to bring it back for this week only so I could celebrate some of my favorite Movie Moments of 2008. However, I had such a devil of time trying to narrow down my list that I’ve decided to simply list all of the moments that made me laugh out loud, cry like a baby, bite my nails uncontrollably, or which otherwise rocked my world this past year. This list is by no means meant to be taken as comprehensive, but merely were the moments which readily sprang to mind while I was writing the piece. So without further ado, I give you…

2008: The Year in Movie Moments:

(in no particular order)

The little boy’s confession notes- In Bruges

“No-no-no. I kill the bus driver.” - The Dark Knight

The security guard makes his rounds - Man on Wire

Sidney’s musical vows - Rachel Getting Married

The kiss that launched a thousand lens flares - Silent Light (only one of several transcendent moments in the film- the swimming-hole scene or the epic rainstorm might just as easily have qualified)

Mike’s late-night visit (or really, anytime Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” is played) - The Strangers

Peekaboo nudity - The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

Harry unveils the machine - Burn After Reading (honestly, who could possibly enjoy THAT?)

Madame Gaudens’ confession - A Girl Cut in Two

Incident at the race track - My Winnipeg

Most hilarious random line of the year: “When it comes to women, you’re Michael Jordan. I’m… Bill Laimbeer.” - Baghead

The new army suits up for battle - Role Models

Alex takes a shower - Paranoid Park

Brandi forgets her cell phone - Stuck

Black Kold Medina puts on a show - Trouble the Water

Runaway penguin - Encounters at the End of the World

Jung-rae Kim diagrams his neuroses - Woman on the Beach

Alex’s sex surprise, both inevitable and strangely erotic - XXY

The director’s big exit - Tropic Thunder

Most unlikely tearjerking moment of the year: Fred Knittle sings “Fix You”, Young@Heart

Three-way fist fight: Seth Rogen vs. James Franco vs. Danny McBride - Pineapple Express

The Richard McGuire segment - Fear(s) of the Dark

Ninjas! - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (yes, really)

And finally, my five favorite openings and finales of the year:

Perfect openings: “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”, WALL*E; Sunrise, Silent Light; The piano, The Silence Before Bach; The Jean-Claude Van Damme Stunt Spectacular, JCVD; The Legend of Po, Kung Fu Panda

Great final scenes (no spoilers): Synecdoche, New York, The Duchess of Langeais, Shine a Light, The Visitor, Burn After Reading

I would invite all of you to share some of your favorites in the comments section. After all, I’m surely missing at least a couple of really good ones.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 18-24, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, Screenbag fans. William Shatner here to take you where no man has gone before. That is, no man besides that Steve Don Vodiak who usually does the Highlight Reel on Fridays. I thought it was important to step in today because I’m deeply troubled by the 21 Stars We Hate (Parts One, Two, Three and Four). Not because I wasn’t included – it would take a sick mind, a truly disturbed psychosis to even think of such a thing – but because I don’t see such names as George Takei, Adrian Zmed and James Spader on the list. God love them all, but they are truly unspeakable screen presences, whose lines and close-ups I was forced to cut – for their own good!

And speaking of Takei, this Star Trek Showdown post is greatly offensive to me, excepting, of course, the parts of it that confirm the dreadful mental illness that Sulu fellow has labored under lo these many years. I prefer to focus on the positive, such as these reviews of Six Man, Texas, Fear(s) of the Dark and Synecdoche, New York, rather than dwell in the sick cesspool of negativity where posts about The Big Fix, Turkey Shoot, Pride and Glory and Meet the Browns drown in their own repulsive bile.

While the Screenbaggers trash Bill Maher and Roger Ebert, while they wallow in the past glories of Duel in the Sun and the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, while they pretend to mourn Levi Stubbs, Rudy Ray Moore and Mr. Blackwell, I alone will testify to their deteriorating mental states. For I am Shatner.

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.