Philadelphia Weekly

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Ballast
Directed by Lance Hammer
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Nov. 14

When characters speak during the first half of Ballast, it's usually with such a severe mumble what they utter barely sounds like words. And that's if they speak at all.

In fact, very little of what you expect from movies happens in the first few reels of Lance Hammer's debut. We eventually figure out that an unseen character has recently killed himself and that his brother (Michael J. Smith Sr.) is trying to do the same, but failing. Meanwhile, the young kid (JimMyron Ross) caught up in rural thug life is the deceased's son, though his mother (Tara Riggs), for reasons we never clearly grasp, legally forbade him from seeing his father.

But these particulars aren't quite so important as the film's mood and its vast collection of stolen moments. Hammer filmed Ballast in the Mississippi Delta during harsh winter with available light, working with a cast of (with one exception) local non-pros and with a script he eventually threw away. This gives Ballast the feeling of having been composed with the camera, not the pen.

For the first 45 minutes the film is thrillingly open, as Hammer does his best to obscure whatever story bubbles under the surface. He perches his herky-jerky, 'scope-shooting camera in places where we only somewhat see the action and he edits with a heavy stress on ellipses. Gleaning basic information is difficult but at the same time it's thrilling to be let loose in a microcosm that seems to exist outside the perimeters of the film that ostensibly holds it.

It's an enveloping experience, and one, sadly, that just can't last. Despite Hammer's hard work his film is ultimately a pretty standard, earnest Amerindie concerning three people fumbling toward a hesitant unity following a tragedy. And once Ballast has gotten its fill of wallowing in the barren, unforgiving landscape and the misery of its characters, things take a turn for the slightly more conventional.

Though Hammer doesn't have quite as firm a grasp on drama as one of his obvious inspirations, the Belgian realists the Dardennes Brothers (Rosetta, The Child), he has a heckuva eye and a feel for unlikely emotional beats. He keeps finding character moments that few would think of, proof that whatever this budding filmmaker does next will likely be devastating.

Fear(s) of the Dark
Directed by Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattoti and Richard McGuire
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Nov. 14

The problem that plagues most omnibus films--that the entries vary wildly in quality or yield only forgettable mediocrity--is only in minor effect in Fear(s) of the Dark, a French-instigated collection of gloomy shorts by six artists and illustrators.

Each of the toon-meisters were asked to come up with something on the subject of dread, the caveat being that they use only black and white ink. As a result, Fear(s) of the Dark is far from ideal, but it has a unity that's rare in films with several cooks.

Charles Burns, of Black Hole, spins a very Burns-ish ode to '50s sci-fi comics like Tales From the Crypt, misogyny intact. A shy college student new to a city inexplicably finds himself with a girlfriend, but his obsession with insects turns out to play an eerily integral part in their union.

Burns, here marking his graduation to moving images, deftly sustains a creepy, banal mood, while comic books illustrator Lorenzo Mattoti tries for creepy-sinister. For one of those recollections of a strange summer past, Mattoti expertly overcomes his yarn's predictability with an atmosphere you couldn't cut with a Ginsu. The animation looks like it was done with charcoal on a rough surface, while the film's amorphous design--with characters disappearing and the like--sends a chill directly down the spine.

Appropriately, the best comes last, namely Richard McGuire's odd, funny twist on The Old Dark House, with a fat, balding mustachioed fellow wandering about a remote manse armed only with a candle. As with Burns, it's strikingly monochromatic--black and white, no grays like Renaissance and Persepolis--and the fun is both in what little we can see as well as McGuire's use of enveloping darkness.

Any film bouillabaisse would be happy to have three terrific shorts, but Fear(s) has six. Blutch's angry dogs serial, Marie Caillou's samurai-heavy dream state and Pierre Di Sciullo's Rorschach-ish blots are perfectly acceptable time-killers between the showstoppers, even if the latter interprets the premise a bit too literally.