Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 14, 2008, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Good movies are a constant at Montreal’s Fantasia festival (see the first part of this report here). But the last show at the Concordia Hall Theatre last Monday night proves that the fest can serve good causes too. Introducing the French animated anthology Peur(s) du Noir (Fear(s) of the Dark, pictured above), programmer Mitch Davis reveals that the screening has served as an unannounced benefit for Emru Townsend, editor of the on-line animation magazine fps, who was diagnosed with leukemia late last year and is awaiting a bone marrow match for a transplant. Introducing the movie, Townsend’s sister Tamu makes an impassioned plea for those in attendance to consider registering to be bone marrow donors, and expresses her hope that this showing of a scary movie can help save lives threatened by the true terror of disease.
Peur(s) du Noir brings together noted graphic artists and cartoonists Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti and Richard McGuire to contribute black-and-white segments ostensibly based on, well, fears of the dark—though only McGuire’s stylish closing entry, the last of the bunch, truly explores the terrors of pitch-blackness as a man becomes trapped inside a strange house, and does so with evocative visuals. The best entry is Burns’, a traditional but quite disturbed narrative reminiscent of Lucky McKee’s Masters of Horror entry Sick Girl, in which a young man with a lifelong obsession with insects falls in love for the first time, only for his beloved to become infected by a nastily possessive bug. Caillou’s entry, a tale of Japanese spirits and haunting, has its moments with its eye-catching designs, whose many shades of gray suggest a color film converted to monochrome.
Two of the artists’ works intercut throughout the collection and varying intervals: Blutch follows a wizened, villainous nobleman as he sics vicious dogs on unfortunate victims, with impressive drawing and a couple of startlingly grisly moments but not much of a payoff. Di Sciullo goes the philosophical route, as assorted abstract designs cavort while a narrator recites all the things she’s afraid of, and the result is much closer to navel-gazing than nocturnally frightening. And Mattotti provides the richest artwork as a man recalls the events that terrorized his rural village when he was a child. Uneven though it may be, Peur(s) du Noir is worthwhile viewing for both animation and horror buffs, though the former may ultimately find it more satisfying than the latter. Look for it in select U.S. theaters via IFC Films this Halloween.
Speaking of shorts, I was remiss in not noting a couple of live-action minimovies accompanying the features covered in my last report, so I’ll do so now. Preceding [REC] was James Wilkes’ Desmond Coy, a black comedy of mistaken identity that deftly transitions from visceral to refined and back again. Showing before Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge was Laura Panic, from the Home Sick team of writer/director/producer Adam Wingard and writer E.L. Katz, a very brief but effectively nasty study of the titular girl (adorable Hannah Hughes) and her extreme crush on an unsuspecting man.
The omnibus approach continues on Tuesday as I catch the multidirector Hong Kong crime actioner Triangle at the J.A. De Sève theater. Many things come in threes in this feature, starting with its triumverate of filmmakers, all well-versed in this sort of fare: Tsui Hark shot the first third of the movie before turning it over to Ringo Lam, who then had to continue the story for another half hour before passing it on to Johnnie To, who wrapped things up. There’s also a trio of central characters played by Louis Koo, Simon Yam and Sun Hong Lei, who become embroiled in a scheme to steal a buried ancient treasure from inside a government building; a Triad threesome for whom Koo is also doing robbery jobs; and a love triangle between Yam, his wife (Kelly Lin) and a cop (Lam Ka Tung) who’s being fed tips by Koo.
There’s more, and the setup is a tad confusing as Hark throws out all manner of plot threads for his followers-up to elaborate on. Thankfully, though, Hark avoids the visual overkill of some of his other recent directorial ventures to return to the high-gloss/hard-edged style of the Better Tomorrow movies he produced for John Woo two decades ago. More satisfying overall is Lam’s second act, in which the colors become toned down and the narrative comes into sharper focus, with the theft’s aftermath leading to suspicion, betrayal and the protagonists’ true colors starting to surface. Things take a turn toward the eccentric as To wraps things up, even as he delves even deeper into the themes of brotherhood and sacrifice, and he concludes with an elaborate and entertaining final confrontation. While it packs sufficient pleasures of its own, Triangle will probably be most enjoyed by students of HK genre cinema, who’ll have fun comparing, contrasting and debating the approaches of its three auteurs.
It’s only appropriate to follow this one up with a viewing of To and Wai Ka Fai’s new Mad Detective at the Hall. The great Lau Ching Wan, who knocked me out a decade ago at Fantasia with his performance in Lam’s underappreciated Full Alert, is in great form here as titular Chan Kwai Bun, a police inspector who takes a particularly direct approach to his cases. He’s first seen having himself shut up in a suitcase and thrown down a flight of stairs to get a psychological handle on a murder victim discovered in just such a condition; shortly thereafter, he cuts off part of his own ear in tribute to a departing superior. That Van Gogh trick gets him bounced from the force, but years later he’s sought out by officer Ho (Andy On) to help track down a missing cop whose gun has been used in a series of shootings.
The particulars of that case and its ultimate explanation are a little hard to follow, but it’s really a MacGuffin propping up a marvelous turn by Lau. His Bun is one of the most compellingly eccentric heroes to ever anchor an HK police procedural—a deranged, determined, obsessive and clearly troubled man. Yet there’s plenty of room for humor in his characterization too, as when he sits down in a restaurant and repeatedly orders the same meal previously consumed by a suspect, or goes on a dinner date with Ho, Ho’s wife and his own estranged spouse—who’s only there in his mind. There’s a touch of the supernatural in Bun’s ability to see a person’s inner spirits—in one case, all seven of them!—but for the most part Mad Detective is an engagingly offbeat entry in the long line of Asian cop cinema.
I stick around the Hall for the first half of DJ XL5’s Hellzapoppin’ Zappin’ Party, the latest in Fantasia’s annual collection of short films, music videos and other assorted oddities. The crowd is always raucous and the selections frequently inspired; in particular, it’s cool to see how Album Cover Wars (my favorite thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube) plays with a big audience. Aaron Augenblick traces the rises and falls of assorted, invented showbiz personages in a series of clever animated shorts; Adam Green switches from the ’80s horror homage of Hatchet to skewering the same decade’s youth romances with Oh Sherrie; and Andrew Struthers hilariously lampoons classroom nature documentaries in Hinterland Who’s Who: Wood Spider. There are also a few samples from the How It Should Have Ended team, including the ultimate name-dropping mock trailer for Ocean’s 40. Dismayingly, as the roll call of stars flashes across the screen, Optimus Prime receives much heartier applause than Bruce Campbell.
On Wednesday, the two features I’m most interested in seeing—Bill Plympton’s Idiots and Angels and the Korean chiller Epitaph—are playing at the same time. I ultimately decide to head back to the Hall for the latest by fellow New Yorker Plympton, whose unique animated work I’ve long enjoyed since his early shorts and first feature The Tune. Following the more colorful and star-voiced Hair High, which screened at Fantasia a few years back, the filmmaker has here returned to a rougher look, with muted hues and very few spoken words. A good deal of the movie is set at Bart’s Bar, where one of the regulars is an unnamed misanthrope who begins each morning abusing his alarm clock and whose attitude doesn’t get much better as the day goes on. But then something strange happens: He discovers a small pair of angel wings growing out of his back. Hardly the type to embrace such a miracle, he bloodily cuts them off. But when they grow back, he might just learn to be a better person—if he can avoid the greedy machinations of Bart and a doctor pal, who have their own ideas for the uses those wings could be put to.
During a Q&A following the screening, Plympton reveals that Idiots marks his return to making movies for himself, following the failure of the ostensibly more commercial Hair High to win wide distribution. The resulting dark fable is indeed pure Plympton, less concerned with plot than with stretching reality and the human form, combining the mundane with the surreal and mixing cynicism with lighthearted optimism. One moment he’s making you laugh with the airborne “angel” mooning a passing jet plane, the next he’s stirring the emotions with the image of clouds drawn as crying faces, their tears literally raining down on a graveyard. Idiots and Angels doesn’t have commercial distribution yet, but it’s another product of Plympton’s one-of-a-kind talent that’s well worth seeking out.
