Film blogs are sure to be a buzz-influencing force at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which opens tonight and runs through the 19th. And they better be, especially after the apparent runaround bloggers — including Spout’s own Karina Longworth — were getting from the TIFF press office last month regarding credentials. Alex Billington of FirstShowing even arrived in T.O. only to find that the festival had still not decided if he should be given a badge (he was eventually granted credentials).

Anyway, Karina will be reporting through the fest’s run, but I want to first share what some other bloggers are writing as the fest begins. Check it all out after the jump:

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Everyone’s talking about the new R-rated trailer for Jennifer’s Body, a horror comedy starring Megan Fox as a possessed cheerleader. My first impression was that it seems too much like last year’s Teeth, only with less interesting subtext. Alison Willmore of The Independent Eye instead finds the movie reminiscent of 2000’s Ginger Snaps, though she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. Either way, coming from screenwriter Diablo Cody, Jennifer’s Body doesn’t appear original in any way except for its forced, writerly dialogue (”You need a mani bad. You should find a Chinese chick to buff your situation.”). And interestingly (coincidentally?) enough, her Oscar-winning movie, Juno, just so happens to feature actress Emily Perkins, costar of the Ginger Snaps trilogy.

Originality aside (it’s also being likened to Heathers and Species), Jennifer’s Body is being celebrated as low culture, criticized for being worse than low culture and otherwise dividing the bloggers up as only Cody’s feature follow-up to Juno could. Meanwhile, the truly important people (i.e. the teen boys looking at blogs) probably won’t care about what’s a good screenplay or what films this may have ripped off, because they’re probably only paying attention to all the teased Megan Fox nudity (including plenty of footage of that “topless” scene we saw “leaked” photos of last year).

By the way, my second impression of the trailer was that it’s cool they used a Runaways song so that this Bloggery can be linked to last Friday’s posting, in a way. Shows how bored I was with the plot/dialogue/visuals. Also, because you probably won’t see her acknowledged on most posts about this movie, Jennifer’s Body is directed by Karyn Kusama, of Girlfight and Æon Flux.

Now, on to the film blog reactions, after the jump:

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• Sure, The Dark Knight is conquering the world, but Mamma Mia! has just surpassed Titanic to become the highest grossing movie of all time in the UK. Compared to the Batman flick, which has only earned $88.8 million in the UK’s territory (shared with Ireland and Malta), Mamma Mia! has made $132.2 million.
• Following their 2007 share of Michael Cera’s breakthrough, directors Jason Reitman and Greg Mottola are sharing in the rise of another young talent: Jesse Eisenberg, who stars in Mottola’s upcoming Adventureland, will next star in Reitman’s The Wedding, which sounds like The Graduate in more ways than one.
• Gore Verbinski will helm a movie about a real-life, married, role-playing 53-year-old diabetic who spends 20 hours a day online as “a musclebound entrepeneur” with a virtual wife. To acquaint yourself with the whole story, particularly why his real spouse is pissed, check out the Wall Street Journal article upon which it will be based.
• 30 Rock genius Tracy Morgan will star as an African dictator in Freshman Roommates, which asks the question what if those Nigerian prince scams weren’t scams.
• Harrison Ford is making another comedy in which he (likely) ends up with a much, much younger woman, this time played by Rachel McAdams.
• Please, please, please, Academy, nominate “Dracula’s Lament” for Best Original Song Oscar.

• Of all the news related to Twilight’s unsurprising $70.6 million opening, the most important has to be that Catherine Hardwicke (pictured) now holds the record for highest-grossing debut for a female director. The previous record holder was Mimi Leder, whose Deep Impact bowed with $41.2 million a decade ago. And the most important non-Twilight box office news has to be that Slumdog Millionaire continued to have a per-screen average in the $30,000s, even with a minor increase to 32 screens, and reached a very impressive very-limited-release gross of $1.6 million.
• Last Friday, Twilight costar Anna Kendrick was announced as the female lead opposite George Clooney in Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air. But the 23-year-old will not be Clooney’s love interest. That honor has instead gone to 35-year-old Vera Farmiga.
• French filmmaker Pascal Laugier is coming to Hollywood to direct a couple American horror pics, including a Hellraiser remake for Dimension and a short story adaptation titled Details for Paramount Vantage. Both films will likely pale in quality to his French productions, but every foreign auteur has to try tinseltown at least once, right?
• Film print fans rejoice! Digital projection is being blamed for and may suffer from the faulty screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at LA’s DGA Theatre last Thursday. Apparently similar problems have affected recent screenings of Che and Quantum of Solace, too.

• We’ve been teased about it for so long, but finally The Hollywood Reporter has confirmation that an Arrested Development movie is seriously happening. Series creator Mitch Hurwitz will write the screenplay and direct the film apparently with help from Ron Howard, who will also produce through Imagine Entertainment. Fox Searchlight will distribute. Here is SpoutBlog’s suggested plotlines for the film, originally published a year ago, in case Hurwitz is stumped for ideas.
• Also moving forward is the DC Comics adaptation Captain Marvel, which is now at Warner Bros. with Get Smart’s Peter Segal still directing as part of a new first-look deal with the studio. Before we get to hear shouts of “Shazam!” on the big screen, though, Segal will be helming a faux biopic titled Liam McBain: International Tennis Star and Proper English Geezer.
• Twilight supporting player Anna Kendrick reportedly beat out many young actresses, including Ellen Page, for the female lead role opposite George Clooney in Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air. Hopefully there are no hard feelings in case Reitman ever wants to reteam with Page for Juno 2.
• John Malkovich, who made his feature directorial debut six years ago with The Dancer Upstairs, announced he’s making a documentary about the plight of migrant children titled Triple Crossing. Mexican actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna are producing.
• Twilight will unsurprisingly be the box office champ this weekend, especially now that it’s reportedly finally acquiring interest from boys, too. Maybe because that’s where all the girls will be?

• With almost-sure thing comic book blockbusters (Iron Man), long-awaited franchise extenders (Indiana Jones and The Rise of Shia LeBeouf), and chick flick counter-programming for us old maids (Sex and the City) projections suggest that this May’s box office tally may break records.
• Recently installed replacement governor David Patterson showed up at the Tribeca Film Festival’s opening press conference yesterday to hype the state’s new tax incentives designed to combat runaway film production. Meanwhile, festival co-founder Robert DeNiro was shooting a film in Connecticut. Seriously.
• Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival is putting its Just Comedy industry conference on the map by featuring a one-on-one conversation between Jason and Ivan Reitman. It takes place on July 17.
• 10 features have been added to the Cannes lineup, via the Critic’s Week sidebar. Five of the films are by first-time directors; none of them are from the U.S.

• I got a press release about this yesterday, but in the pre-SXSW rush, I didn’t have time to post it. Baby Mama, a comedy starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, will open the Tribeca Film Festival. Is this a bad sign for Tina Fey’s highly-anticipated (by Karina, at least) movie star debut, considering that the last comedy to open the festival was Raising Helen in 2004? Maybe let’s just hope that Baby Mama is the United 93 of “career gal bickering with her white trash maternity surrogate” movies, and leave it at that.
• Dana Harris has a guide to where to eat whilst in Austin for SXSW. She’s totally right about the place at the Driskill, and totally wrong about Iron Works.
• Jason Reitman is gonna direct Jim Carrey in Pierre Pierre, described as “a politically incorrect story” about “a self-indulgent French nihilist.”
• Patrick Swayze’s rep has confirmed tabloid stories that the actor is suffering from pancreatic cancer, but says reports of his imminent demise are “absolutely untrue.”

We always assumed Diablo Cody would become a punchline about five minutes after she wins an Oscar, but thanks to SuperDeluxe, it looks like we don’t have to wait that long! New York comedy troupe Olde English (they did that rap video about shooting on the streets of New York) and Jackie Clarke (co-star of the infamous Welcome to Our House videos) team up to take on the unimpeachable symbol of the Juno backlash. Too little too late to stop the inevitable Best Original Screenplay win? Probably. But whatever––the Jason Reitman characterization alone is priceless.

The biggest shock in the Oscar nominations this year was certainly Jason Reitman’s bid for Best Director. In fact, it’s such a given that the Juno helmer won’t win the Academy Award that even the kids know it. One brave brat from the Santa Barbara Middle School Teen Press even tells Reitman to his face that he has no chance, in this slightly amusing video that’s circulating the interweb. Many are suggesting the clip was actually set up by Reitman himself, though the fact that he posted the video on both his Myspace and YouTube pages only makes it clear that he’s probably responsible for the thing showing up on the net at all. Either way, he at least has a good sense of humor regarding everyone’s doubts that he deserved the nod.

My favorite question, and one that I wish he had a better answer to, asks what his actual role was as director. That’s something I’d actually like to know. The acknowledgment of Juno having first and foremost a great script and great actors seems to indicate this is indeed an inside joke, but at least the question is a bit better when asked a second time: “but what did you do?” Anyway, the reference to the director’s father, Ghostbusters helmer Ivan Reitman is a bit sloppily handled by the kids — the fact that they are aware of Papa Reitman but don’t know Jason Reitman didn’t write the Juno script is further evidence that this is all a pre-written gag by someone other than middle schoolers. And meanwhile I still don’t really know what kind of great, Oscar-worthy contribution Reitman really made to the film.

The combo of last week’s DGA contract agreement and yesterday’s announcement of the Oscar noms may have set the WGA in a new direction towards ending the writer’s strike. Yesterday afternoon the WGA announced it had withdrawn demands for jurisdiction over reality and animation, which the AMTPT was dead against recognizing. The two sides are reportedly meeting together today.

• Nikal Saval has an admittedly cranky but masterful takedown of I’m Not There at N + 1. Calling Todd Haynes’ pastiche the Worst Movie of 2007, Saval scratches particularly aggressively at Haynes’ habitual referencing and naked larceny: “Haynes is drowning in his film school education, just as his audience is drowning in allusions, and not a single original idea floats by to rescue him or us.”
• I still haven’t received my copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz (I know you’re concerned; right now, it looks like the problem is with UPS and not Amazon, and I’m working on it), so I’m going to avoid Ed Howard’s episode-by-episode recap of Fassbinder’s series, for the time being. Via The House Next Door.
• Erin at Steady Diet of Film has a helpful translation of what Jason Reitman, John Sayles, Adam Shankman and Joe Wright were REALLY saying on a recent episode of Sunday Morning Shootout. Useful information gleaned: Reitman, who “hates going to awards shows because he has to stop dressing like he’s homeless,” has a masterful death stare, but Sayles is not impressed.
• Lots to report today on the Berlinale front, including the news that Martin Scorsese’s long-delayed Rolling Stones doc Shine A Light will finally make its premiere at the festival–and on opening night, no less. David Hudson has two roundups.

• This year’s Sundance juries will be more star studded than I’ve seen them, particularly the Dramatic Competition Jury, which will include five boldfaced names: Quentin Tarantino, Mary Harron, Sandra Oh, Diego Luna and Marica Gay Harden. Other notable names on the other three prize-awarding panels: Eugene Jarecki, Heidi Ewing, Jason Reitman and Alan Alda.
• Marc Graser examines how the fall of the Golden Globes (which we mentioned here, but will go into in further depth later this morning) is going to have a devastating impact on the already-strike-crippled Los Angeles economy. In addition for seriously reduced paydays for party planners, photo agencies, the HFPA and NBC, there are “losses that are impossible to calculate: The film studios and networks use the event to publicize their kudos contenders.”
• Meanwhile, the strike climate may not get better before it gets worse. As Dave McNary puts it, “Despite much buzz in the blogosphere”––thanks for that––”the DGA is still far from reaching the bargaining table with studios and producers.”
• Daniel Day-Lewis, the Coen Brothers and Jonny Greenwood walked away from the Critic’s Choice Awards last night with trophies from the Broadcast Critics Association, for Best Actor, Best Picture/Best Director, and Best Score, respectively.

So. Tired. Of. Talking. About. Juno.

Look, let’s get one thing straight: in that post that I wrote earlier this week,  I wasn’t making a statement about Juno’s quality. I’ve done that elsewhere, but at this point it seems like my energy would be best directed elsewhere–it’s not THAT offensive, and it’s certainly better than Little Miss Sunshine. All I was saying, is that the idea that this film has “crossed over” from an “indie” sphere to mainstream success is a fiction created and promoted by Fox Searchlight in order to align Juno with past “crossover” successes. This is working for them, so that’s great. But the idea that Juno is “small”, that it’s some kind of an underdog––either at the box office or within the clusterfuck of award’s season––is categorically insane.

It’s also somewhat troubling to think that if this kind of marketing coup works so well once, it’ll almost certainly work again, and at some point, there won’t be room in the marketplace for actual “small” films that have actually “crossed over”, because they’ll be pushed out of the conversation by studio films (I don’t care how much Juno cost to produce–it was paid for by a studio and it has the full benefit of a studio’s marketing apparatus) masquerading as “small” “crossovers.”

I don’t think I have anything left to say about this, but feel free to have at it/me in the comments.

I’ve read two stories in two hours that refer to Juno as “crossover hit.” I’m not denying that it is, so far, a hit, both with audiences and with critics. But tell me again how this film––made by a not-exactly-maverick director for a studio specialty division, starring three known actors and one tabloid staple, targeted at teens and young adults, both thematically and stylistically indebted (or, at the very least, related) to previous hits like Superbad, Ghost World and Napoleon Dynamite––qualifies as a “crossover”?

Yes, Searchlight bought “indie” credibility by taking Juno to a bunch of festivals and rolling it out slowly. But we’re also talking about a film that’s been advertising on NYTimes.com for over three months. This is so clearly a studio film that, in a bit of smart awards season strategy, has been sold by its distributor as an indie. Why are journalists who should know better playing along?