Nightcap 12/11/16 An animated film that should be crossed off Oscar's list, BAMkids Film Festival, Yoga Hosers and Randi's links

Alison Krauss – “End of a Summer Storm” from Sandra Boynton’s "Frog Trouble" [Official Music Video] from Mike Lavoie on Vimeo.

Earlier this week I started work on a couple of pieces for later in the month. One of the pieces is the year end wrap up piece which I’m hoping will have a few really good surprises in it… Keep your fingers crossed.

The other piece is one handicapping the Animated Oscar choices. While I’m happy that there are enough choices that there will be five nominees a couple of them don’t belong there. Films like BILAL or MONKEY KING are too small and not cliquey enough to have a real chance. 25 APRIL is an animated doc on the battle of Gallipoli which is going to fall in between categories. Not up to the best of the best of the documentary choices, the film isn’t splashy enough that it will win enough love to make the final Oscar animation cut. It’s sad, but at least being on the short list of animated features may get some of these films an extra couple of viewings

Say what you will about the quality films that won’t make the cut, there is one film that based on the small amount of information shouldn’t even be a subject of discussion for anything remotely associated with Oscar. This grievous offender is called MUSTAFA AND THE MAGICIAN and it appears to have been done in an computer animation style a two decades or more out of date. Despite a web search I can find almost no references to the film other than it being on Oscar lists and the film’s webpage. It looks terrible. There are several consumer animation products that that produce films that look a thousand times better. What’s worse if the filmmakers don’t really seem to care since the trailer on their website is in 3D of the sort you’d see if you went to a movie and took off your glasses during the screening which produces a blurry image for everything other than the titles. The trailer says little and infers that the makers are multiple previous Oscar contenders, but I suspect that was simply because they made an animated film that played in an LA theater long enough to get on Oscar’s list of animated features.

I’ll have more to say later in the month.
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BAMkids Film Festival 2017 has announced it's selections for 2017.  The selections are mostly collections of shorts and a couple of features (I saw MOLLY MONSTER earlier this year at NYICFF and its good.) Don't let the shorts collections scare you BAM has a good eye at the stuff they program.

The festival runs January 28 and 29 and all the details can be found here.
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So I saw Kevin Smith's YOGA HOSERS on Netflix.

While not the bottom of Kevin Smith's barrel, that would be the piece he did of HOLIDAYS, this is a film that kind of sort of almost works but blows up because Smith is too busy saying fuck you to his critics that he ruins the clever bits. Say what you will Smith can be a brilliant filmmaker- the trouble is he refuses to let himself be one and he dwells in the gutter and wallows in it because he feels that's where he belongs.

What a moron. I say that because HOSERS has some brilliant writing in it and a warped sense that if Smith had actually put together in a manner showing some care it might have been a fun movie instead of a painful one.
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And now Randi's links

When Pigs Fly
Perfect Piggies
Retire and sale the world
Mystery of a stolen Klimt
How Tsum Tsum Kingdom was made