indieWIRE has news of dozens additions to the lineup for the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Most interesting to me: the world premiere of Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime (guess that rumor that it had been retitled Forgiveness was bunk) and Hipsters, the Russian musical whose Cannes market guide summary famously promised to “never leave the audience indifferent.” Oh, and they’re also showing movies that people think are legitimately good, like A Prophet and An Education. More at the link.

In more Toronto lineup news, indieWIRE has posted TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers’ selections for this year’s festival. Highlights:

• Emmett Malloy’s The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights will mark Jack White’s return to the festival as the star of a nonfiction film, after last year’s It Might Get Loud.
• In Collapse, American Movie director Chris Smith follows “radical thinker Michael Ruppert” and “explores his apocalyptic vision of the future.”
• Bassidji tracks director Mehran Tamadon’s three-year immersion “into the very heart of the most extremist supporters of the Islamic republic of Iran (the Bassidjis) to understand their ideas.”
• In Videocracy, Erik Gandini examines the business and political interests of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlosconi, to show “how his reality TV shows full of bikini-clad women enriched his friends and beguiled a nation.”
• Straight from Cannes, L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot follows archivist Serge Bromberg’s discovery of an unfinished film by the director of Wages of Fear.
• How to Fold a Flag, from Gunnar Palace directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, tracks “U.S. soldiers as they create new lives post-Iraq—from a Congressional candidate in Buffalo to a cage fighter in Louisiana—set against the backdrop of the 2008 election.”

indieWIRE has the full line-up.

Maybe it’s not fair for me to begin the review of a festival film with a lengthy digression on nostalgia and the death of Michael Jackson, but somehow all of these things seem to point in the same direction (and not geographically speaking, despite the connection to Westwood). So please, bear with me:

The Associated Press published an editorial this morning by Ted Anthony, titled “2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day.” In it, he assesses the impact of the near-simultaneous deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson on the segment of the population who were at their most demographically desirably in the late 80s-early 90s. He attributes the following portentous quote to a 38-year-old HBO employee:

“This,” he said, “is the moment when Generation X realizes they’re grown up.”

Thanks to this article and others, “Generation X” has been bopping around Google’s Top 100 search terms all day. Which is funny, because I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the concept of Generation X … before earlier this week, when I watched Passenger Side, Matt Bissonnette’s third feature and an entry in the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Narrative Competition. Starring the director’s brother Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott as two brothers (one a struggling novelist with an aversion to modern technology, the other a personable recovering junkie) who spend a day driving around Southern California looking for the ex-girlfriend who one of them wants to marry, Passenger Side also seems to have that age group’s reconciliation of age and nostalgia for a simpler time on its mind.

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October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.

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On Friday evening at SilverDocs, I attended a panel on film criticism moderated by Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, and featuring contributions from critics David Edelstein, Lisa Schwarzbaum and Amy Taubin, and filmmaker/documentary programmer Thom Powers. In his opening remarks, Kennicott positioned the panel as a referendum of sorts on “Wanted: Documentary Critics”, a blog post by Powers in which he posed the question, “Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” I was surprised that the conversation that ensued mostly skirted the issue of “where” contemporary documentary film will find its defining critic, and was instead weighed down by argument as to whether or not this is a valid question at all.

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On a panel discussion before its world premiere screening at SilverDocs last night, AJ Schnack used the phrase “Robert Altman-esque” to describe the construction of his new film, Convention. This is accurate as a reference to the stylistic tropes we classically think of when we think of Altman — shot by nine filmmaker/camerapersons, Convention tracks the interwoven stories of a number of semi-interrelated characters as they produce, participate in, protest, protect and/or report on the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver — but the film also shares what Roger Ebert, in his review of Nashville, refered to as Altman’s “humanism”, the way he “sees people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience.” The multiple cameras and the multi-faceted streams of vision that they bring to Convention accomplish two major feats in terms of altering the scale of perspective: they condense nearly an entire city’s goings-on during the biggest international event in its recent history into the managable microcosmic experiences of a few of its thoroughly “normal” citizens, while at the same time opening up spaces in the lives of strangers that the viewer can sink into, and thus sync up to a communal sense of Something Happening. It seems so simple, and yet it’s so rare that you actually find yourself in a theater, having a moment of collective transcendance that makes you think, “This is why movies exist.”

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I literally have not owned a video game console in 20 years (I got bored with my Sega Genesis very quickly), but I was about ready to finally get one after hearing this news: Lars von Trier’s controversial new Cannes-winning sensation Antichrist is being adapted into a first-person video game called Eden. Fortunately, I probably won’t need a Wii or Xbox or whatever the kids are playing with these days, since the game will apparently work on my PC (the only game I’ve ever played on my computer is Solitaire). Not much plot is know about this game except that it will feature the voice of Willem Dafoe, will take place after the events in the film and “invites players to confront their fears.” So, I guess that means there could actually be genital mutilation involved, since ejaculating blood is definitely a fear of mine.

This tie-in makes me hope other Von Trier films will get their own video games. The Element of Crime should be the easiest to adapt, but here’s some other ideas: In Breaking the Waves you have to sleep with sailors and then tell your husband about it. In Epidemic you’re the doctor in the film within the film trying to cure an epidemic that you ironically are also spreading. In The Boss of it All you’re an actor pretending to be a company boss without the staff figuring out they’re being duped. And, of course, Dancer in the Dark would be a hybrid game: part first-person shooter in which you have to kill cops trying to steal your savings; part Dance Dance Revoution-type music video game.

Check out what other film blogs are saying about the video game after the jump:

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BAMcinemaFEST, Brooklyn’s new summer showcase of American film festival favorites culled from Sundance, SXSW and elsewhere, begins tonight with a screening and party for Don’t Let Me Drown. I’ll be away (at SilverDocs, then LAFF, then on an off-the-grid vacation) during much of the fest, but we’ve previously covered many of the new films screening. Including, in the order in which they screen:

• Children of Invention (screening Thursday night and Saturday afternoon)
• Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same (screening Thursday night and next Wednesday)
• You Won’t Miss Me (screening Friday and Tuesday night)
• Humpday (screening Saturday night and Sunday afternoon)
• Beeswax (screening Sunday evening)
• Sorry, Thanks (screening Wednesday night)
• The Exploding Girl (screening next Thursday night)

Next weekend, the Fest moves into a wave of rep programming, starting with the annual BAM takeover, an all night movie marathon/party this time featuring four programs and the unlikely juxtaposition of Hou Hsiao-hsien with Diana Ross, demonlover with Look Who’s Talking Too. Choices, choices. There’s more info at the BAM site.

Of the seven features I watched in full whilst at the 2009 CineVegas Film Festival, it seemed that the bravest endeavors, those that took the greatest stabs into the unknown both formally and conceptually, were actually shot on film. If this isn’t notable enough in a space increasingly dominated by digital photography (and, all too often, an aesthetic indifference that fails to push beyond the ease of use of the tools), the fact that films like Impolex, Modus Operandi and Redland are all the first features of men either barely or not quite the age of 30 is astounding. While other young filmmakers exploit ever-changing technology to shrink production budgets and experiment with non-theatrical models of distribution, Alex Ross Perry, Frankie Latina and Asiel Norton have made uncompromising films that defy contemporary technological trends and notions of financial convenience.

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If there’s a throughline to the films screening within the various competions and sidebars at CineVegas, it’s that those marked by qualities that would make them anomalies at other festivals here play as standard fare. You come here expecting to see genre hybrids (such as Alex Ross Perry’s verite-style comic WWII fantasy Impolex, or Cory McAbee’s half-animated space cowboy sci-fi musical Stingray Sam, about which much more later); stylish art films that push the boundaries of craft and form but may not offer the pleasures of a traditional narrative (see Asiel Norton’s Redland — or don’t, if gorgeous experimental cinematography isn’t enough to interest you in a story that drowns itself deep in elliptical abstraction); or superindie narratives that make up for what they lack in style with balls-out attitude (like Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me, which seems to get more anarchically funny each time I see it). At this festival, it’s the movies that you can imagine premiering on any other major festival’s lineup that seem most out of place, that have the ability to shock for the simple virtue of their traditional professionalism.

And so we come to Easier With Practice, a dramedy written and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, based on a true story published by FOUND Magazine founder Davy Rothbart in GQ. Rothbart, who travels around the country with his brother promoting his magazine and books, answered the phone one night in a motel and eventually found himself in a long-term phone sex relationship with a mysterious stranger. Easier with Practice stars Brian Geraghty as a writer named Davy who, whilst on a roadtrip with his brother to promote his book, answers the phone in his motel one evening and allows the sultry female voice on the other end (Kathryn Aselton of The Puffy Chair) to talk him into a session of mutual masterbation, which leads to an ongoing relationship which renders Davy basically incapable of participating in real life.

What’s interesting about the film (beyond the fact that it seems to stay extremely faithful to Rothbart’s too-good-to-be-true real experience, if anything amping up the character’s social imcompentence) is the fact that Alvarez has taken material dark and difficult enough to mandate an indie production — it’s basically a movie about loneliness peppered with large doses of explicit sexual language, and as such, it simply would not get produced by a studio in its current form — and churned it into a slick crowdpleaser. Shot on the RED camera, it’s got the distinct look of a pre-video road trip indie. The story arc leads to a reveal that’s shocking in its specific details, but not in its existence — there’s a wave of surprise, but not one extreme enough to throw a viewer. Geraghty sinks so deep into nerd drag that he’s unrecognizable as the same actor who plays the third lead in The Hurt Locker. All in all, everything just works — there’s an ease to the filmmaking that allows the universal elements of the story to come through. That it’s a film without obvious rough edges or blatant challenges to and audience makes it, at CineVegas, an anomaly; in the world at large, that’s exactly what will probably make it very appealing.

I was super surprised when Giorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, one of my favorite movies in Cannes, was selected as the winner of the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Before the prize was announced, very few members of the press had seen it, no one was talking about it, and it was competing against much higher profile films, including the Romanian favorites Police, Adjective and Tales of the Golden Age. The NSFW teaser trailer below the jump (from Twitch, via Living in Cinema) reinforces some of why the film is an unlikely prize winner — mainly, its sense of humor is brattily crude, its aesthetics are ugly-pretty, and though it’s no more bloody than main Competition entry Inglourious Basterds, its commanding melding of genre film and art film is much weirder and more unnerving.

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For Vulture, Dennis Lim allows Cannes juror Asia Argento to plug 42×42, a short film omnibus series with a vodka sponsor that the filmmaker/actress organized with her husband, and then gets to the good stuff: how come a bunch of movies that critics hated won big fancy Cannes awards? Asia, perhaps unsurprisingly, eagerly takes all the credit/blame.

“I was very happy with [Best Director winner] Kinatay,” Argento told Lim, although her subsequent praise of the film sort of seems like an insult: “It felt like the director had no idea how to do it and picked up a camera and was shooting the first movie of history. The 45-minute scene in the car where nothing happens I thought was incredible.” Argento also defended honoring the equally derided Spring Fever with the Best Screenplay prize, even though “the movie was very long.”

So was pissing off critics part of the plan? When Lim told her that both the screenplay and director prizes were booed in the press room, Argento responded, “I know. That’s always a good sign.”

In 2008, The Class won the Palme D’or “out of nowhere” — or so it seemed, as the film hadn’t screened before a large chunk of the press had gone home. Almost as if pulling a bait and switch on journalists who stayed through the final weekend the following year in fear of missing a second Oscar-safe “surprise”, the 2009 Cannes lineup saved not the best for last, but certainly the most balls-out and commercially unviable. The two films I saw on my final day in the South of France were admirably experimental, undeniably gorgeous to look at, obstinately focused on form over narrative, so ambitious as to threaten to render that word meaningless as an adjective, and really fucking hard to watch.

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Though not for lack of trying, I haven’t seen a film worth really writing about in days. This afternoon I check out Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, about which I’ve heard good things; before I leave I’ll attempt to see the Competition entries from Gaspar Noe, Tsai Ming-Liang and Isabel Coixet. But the end of Cannes 2009 is definitely in sight. The market wraps up today, and the crowds are both thinning and wearing out. I arrived at this morning’s screening of Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus 90 minutes early to find nothing like a crowd in wait; when I walked out of the film after 40 minutes because my eyes ached from rolling so much, it looked like everyone in my half-full row was asleep.

So in lieu of reviews, here’s some gossip and other notes on the past few days:

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