The four reviews immediately beneath this post are all the entries (so far) in our 5th reader-review writing contest. Feel free to comment on your favorite. You can still submit a last-minute entry, but we will announce the winner on this Thursday, Jan. 2. Thanks to all who entered and good luck!

Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

Hollywood is off on Christmas break, and rather than flooding theaters and stuffing Redboxes with weird, challenging outsider fare, the indies are following suit and spending the holidays nodding out on egg nog. While there are no new theatrical debuts or video releases to mention this week, we did find one event to report on.

FILM FESTIVALS – AN ANIMATED WORLD: CELEBRATING FIVE YEARS OF GKIDS CLASSICS (New York City, IFC Center, Dec. 20 – Jan. 2):

We’re late getting word on this holiday retrospective of international children’s animation that started on December 20th, but we’re joyously shocked to see just how weird the stuff they’re pawning off as “culture” on today’s kids is. The slate includes many films we’ve already highlighted on these pages, including My Neighbor Totoro (a week-long engagement with the Catbus from Dec. 26 to Jan. 2), the Celtic mysticism of The Secret of Kells (Dec,. 28, 39, Jan. 2), Summer Wars‘s cyberapocalypse (Dec. 27, Jan. 2), the not-exactly-for-kids Judaica of The Rabbi’s Cat (Dec. 30), and the existential/class conflict parable The Painting (Dec. 30).

Here are some new-to-us (or at least, uncovered-by-us as yet) upcoming festival features that Manhattanites can enjoy in the upcoming week:

• Azur and Asmar (2006): A light-skinned boy and his dark-skinned companion are raised as brothers, then become rivals as adults searching for a magical Djinn.  Dec. 27 & Jan 1. Also from animator Michel Ocelot: 2011’s shadow play Tales of the Night on Jan 1.
• Nocturna (2007): French/Spanish co-production about a boy exploring the alternate world of Night. Although it’s out on DVD, tonight’s (Dec. 27) screening marks the US theatrical premier. Playing nightly until Jan. 2.
• Sita Sings the Blues (2008): Nina Paley‘s one-woman laptop-labor-of-love: a cutout retelling of the ancient Hindu epic “Ramayana” about a goddess separated from her husband. This hallmark of modern DIY animation is rarely seen on the big screen; catch it Dec. 28 or Jan. 2.
  

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Her: Spike Jonze returns with a romantic comedy about a writer who falls in love with an artificial intelligence. Likely to be only glancingly weird, at best, but Jonze (Being John Malkovich) is always worth a look. Her official site.

Wrong Cops: Quentin Dupieux‘s third feature is a comedy about cops-gone-wrong entitled, oddly enough, Wrong Cops. It has been expanded to a full-length feature from a 43-minute short that played at Sundance in January, and the cast includes Eric Wareheim, Marilyn Manson, and former “Twin Peaks” spouses Grace Zabriske and Ray Wise. Wrong Cops official site.

SCREENINGS – (Cinefamily, Los Angeles, CA, Dec. 23):

Nutcracker Fantasy (1979): A Rankin/Bass styled stop-motion Japanese adaptation of the Nutcracker, with a two-headed Rat King and no mention of Christmas whatsoever. Never released on DVD, this is another incredible obscurity dug up by the deranged archivists at Cinefamily.

NEW ON DVD:

Toad Road (2013): Drugged-out losers decide to drop acid and head down the abandoned country road that local legend claims leads straight to the gates of Hell. Partly improvised, it’s gained multiple comparisons to the work of Harmony Korine. Buy Toad Road.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976): A woman who survived abuse as a child grows up to kill (and, er, dismember) the men she sleeps with. Although this had an exploitative promotional campaign and was one of the movies that managed to get itself banned in Britain as a “video nasty,” it’s by all accounts a serious attempt at a downbeat psychosexual drama (with hallucination sequences, flashbacks and Freudian symbolism). Buy The Witch Who Came from the Sea.

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

From the Online Film Critics Society press release: “The Online Film Critics Society proudly announces the recipients of the 17th annual OFCS awards for excellence in film. Steven McQueen’s ’12 Years a Slave’ was the standout winner, with recognitions for Best Picture, Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender), Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o), and Best Adapted Screenplay, for John Ridley’s hand in bringing Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir to the big screen.”

Normally, the OFCS results are not predictors of the Academy Awards, but this year I would expect 12 Years a Slave to dominate the awards circuit.

Sadly, there were very few viable award candidates this year from the weird genre. In 2011, my first year of voting, there was The Tree of Life; in 2012 Holy Motors was a contender. In 2010, the year before I joined, there was Black Swan and Dogtooth. This year, only conventional films were nominated, and frankly the experimental filmmakers did not do a good enough job to deserve nominations. I thought that Harmony Korine might have snuck in some nominations for Spring Breakers: James Franco definitely could have shown up among the best supporting actors, and technical awards for cinematography or editing would not have been out of the question. Not even dying could get Raoul Ruiz noticed for Night Across the Street, nor could Amy Seimetz break free from the shortlist in the Best Actress category for Upstream Color. I didn’t press for John Dies at the End or Strange Frame: Love & Sax, which are good cult movies but peculiar things not likely to impress the mainstream. Even sometimes weird directors like the Coen Brothers and Hayao Miyazaki chose to play it safe with their offerings this year; so, we were left with a rather boring slate of dramatic realism to chose from in 2013. That being said, I’m more upset about weird filmmakers failure to come up with anything worth nominating than I am with my fellow critics’ failure to nominate anything weird.

As always, I take my voting responsibility very seriously. Here is the list of winners along with my choices and a touch of personal commentary.

BEST PICTURE

Winner: 12 Years a Slave

Also Nominated: American Hustle, Before Midnight, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Drug War, Gravity, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Short Term 12, The Wind Rises

G. Smalley’s Vote: Gravity

Comments: It was absolutely predictable that 12 Years a Slave would win Best Picture. It’s beautifully made. It’s a historical drama, the prestige  genre. It’s full of outrages, without being the slightest bit controversial. What is perhaps more surprising than the success of 12 Years is the fact that there have been so few movies made about American slavery (compared to, say, the glut of films made about the equally dramatic subject of the Holocaust). The most important previous film depiction of the life of a plantation slave was the excellent 1977 TV miniseries “Roots.” 12 Years had the freedom to be much more brutal, and much more explicit about the sexual component of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. While I had a few minor quibbles about the direction and some of the acting decisions in the movie, there was nothing that prevents 12 Years a Slave from being an anything less than an honorable selection.

Personally, among the nominees, I slightly preferred Alfonso Cuaron’s survival-in-space odyssey Gravity, simply because it was more pioneering in Continue reading 17TH ANNUAL ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARDS (WITH OUR VOTES AND COMMENTS) →