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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Peter Knegt points to 45 seconds of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which debuts at TIFF this week and then comes to NYFF in about a month. It’s sort of a trailer, and it’s everything you could hope for from a teaser for a shot-on-circa-80s-VHS portrait of Korinean freaks at play. That green analog noise fadeout at the end is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen … well, today, at least.

The selections for this year’s Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness genre film section  has just been announced via Twitter. The lineup will close with a gala presentation of Jennifer’s Body, the hotly anticipated second feature scripted by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Megan Fox. Other highlights: Cannes stop-motion animation hit A Town Called Panic; “a post-modern, thinking man’s throwback to the ‘B’ Movie/Exploitation films of the 1950s/70s as well as a loving, sly parody of the same” called Bitch Slap!; Symbol, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s follow-up to Big Man Japan, of which Todd Brown said based on the trailer, “Either Matsumoto has cooked up yet another slice of unorthodox genius or he has completely lost his grip and made something totally abstract and self indulgent”; and George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead. The full lineup is also on the TIFF website.

I was pleased to be asked to participate in indieWIRE’s post-TIFF critics poll, through which consensus selected Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking as Best Film, Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) as Best Performance, and Les Plages d’Agnes by Agnes Varda as Best Doc. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of those movies, but the three titles I named as my favorite films of the fest all made the poll’s top ten: Summer Hours, Rachel Getting Married, and Treeless Mountain. For Best Performance, I named Treeless‘ Hee Yeon Kim, Mathieu Almaric from A Christmas Tale (maybe technically a Cannes film, but he still blows most of the competition out of the water, as far as I’m concerned) and Matthew Newton, director/writer/star of Three Blind Mice. I didn’t see as many docs as I would have liked (I guess I’m saving them for the fall season of Stranger Than Fiction, programmed, like TIFF’s Reel to Reel, by Thom Powers), but by far my favorite was Blind Loves.

We still have a bit of TIFF coverage in the can for posting over the next few days, BTW. Look for interviews with Jonathan Demme, Anne Hathaway, Ari Folman and more by the end of the week.

Keven McAlester’s second documentary The Dungeon Masters, which takes a look at three people who run Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, was at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. It could have easily been a comedic film, poking fun at people who are generally called geeks or nerds, but it ends up becoming an intimate glimpse of personalities and situations that are often touching and tragic.

I sat down with Keven and talked to him about how he set about making this movie, how he got into documentary filmmaking and working with Lee Daniel, and how he was able to put together such a good look into the D&D lifestyle, despite having never played the game. Read on after the break for the interview.

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A film about the world’s greatest living couturier would have to work overtime in order to not be beautiful, but Matt Tyrnauer’s Valentino: The Last Emperor manages to find a certain poetics behind the eye candy. Where Unzipped––to my mind the last great fashion documentary––was heavily invested in a kind of designer-as-tortured artist schematics that inevitably could only resolve themselves, competition doc-style, in a final runway show, Valentino is both a more surface-oriented portrait of a man and a deeper examination of the changing politics of the luxury industry.

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The Toronto International Film Festival sent out an email this morning with 15 attachments, and although many of them represent lists of films on the 2008 lineup which have already been made public, it’s still a *bit* overwhelming to have it all land in an inbox at once. 312 films from 64 countries, including 249 features. Where to begin?

If you’d like to look at the full lineup, indieWIRE has that–and please, do look at it, and tell me what you think I should see/report back on. I’ve made some notes about films from this series of releases that I’m excited about––whether out of name brand obligation (the new Coen Brothers, for instance), word of mouth (such as a number of films I’ve missed at other festivals) or pure morbid curiosity (ie: the Paris Hilton documentary Paris, Not France), after the jump. All film descriptons courtesy of TIFF.

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A number of big name titles have been added to the line-up of enxt months’ Toronto Film Festival. There’s going to be some overlap with the just-announced NYFF, including Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, and Che, which the festival’s Cameron Bailey says will be shown “the first time as two separate films on two separate nights. People also will get to see it as one back-to-back epic with a 15- minute intermission. You can choose your Che.” One of the few Cannes holdovers passed over by NYFF, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, will also screen at TIFF.

Also of note:

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The complete slate of non-fiction films to be unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival has been announced, and there are some interesting bedfellows on the list. Keven McAlester’sThe Dungeon Master must be the hippest nerd doc of all time (or, at least, since Nerdcore Rising. Or We Are Wizards. Or King of Kong. Or…nevermind.) A “whimsical look at three adults deeply involved with Dungeons & Dragons explores how the game affects their lives and relationships,” the film features cinematography by Lee Daniel (he shot Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, as well as McAlester’s Roky Erickson doc, You’re Gonna Miss Me) and music by everyone’s favorite Japanese/Italian art rock band, Blonde Redhead.

Master will be unveiled on the Reel to Reel program, alongside a documentary treatment of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation called Food Inc; American Swing, about the notorious 1970s sex club Plato’s Retreat; and 18 other new features. Meanwhile, the fest will also host special presentations of Agnes Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnes, described as a “self-portrait via photographs, film clips and some surprising encounters”; and Matt Tyrnauer “fly-on-the-wall exploration” of fashion designer Valentino.

indieWIRE has the full lineup.

Mike Jones has two sets of additions to the Toronto International Film Festival lineup at The Circuit. The first, detailing nine Gala and Special Presentations, informs us of the existence of a documentary about A Chorus Line, as well as the news (I *think* it’s news–I haven’t been following TIFF updates closely enough to remember what’s just been rumor and what’s been officially confirmed) that the festival will world premiere the Larry Charles/Bill Maher doc Religulous, and host the North American premieres of Guy Ritchie’s RockNRolla and Waltz with Bashir. Meanwhile, the other release tells us to look forward to the continental premieres of Delta (the incest-tinged Adam and Eve story from Cannes) and Tokyo Sonata, as well as a number of world premieres from Scandinavia, and much more. Click forth for the details.

The Toronto International Film Festival begins on September 6, and is currently scheduled to showcase 349 films through September 15. I’m only going to be in town for four days, so I’ve combed the schedule and picked out 15 films that I’m going to make an attempt to see during that time. I’ve purposely left films that are going to be at the New York Film Festival off this list; hopefully, I’ll be able to scratch off one or two at Telluride as well. If there’s anything I’ve glaringly missed, let me know in the comments. In alphabetical order:

Across the Universe (dir. Julie Taymor, starring Evan Rachel Wood)
Which version of Taymor’s long-troubled psychedelic musical romance based on the songs of The Beatles will Toronto audiences see? There’s still no running time listed on the film’s IMDb profile, which could mean that Sony hasn’t figured that out yet.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (dir. Andrew Dominik, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck)
Okay, marketers, I give: I’ve been seduced by the gorgeousness of the latest trailer.

Battle for Haditha (dir. Nick Broomfield, starring Elliot Ruiz, Andrew McLaren)
Broomfield is best known for his tabloidy first-person docs; I missed his most recent drama, Ghosts, when it debuted at Sundance, and it seems to have vanished since. Judging by the comments on IMDB about Haditha (which is a drama based on the actual incident in Iraq), the British director is heading into a realm of controversy that’s going to make his persecution at the hands of Courtney Love look like picnic.

Cassandra’s Dream (dir. Woody Allen, starring Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor)
Control (dir. Anton Corbijn, starring Samantha Morton and Sam Riley)
See my previous commentary here and here

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (dir. Shekhar Kapur, starring Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen)
My sometime celebrity boyfriend Owen co-stars as Sir Walter Raleigh in this sequel to the Oscar-nommed Elizabeth. Blanchett reprises her role as the no-longer-so-virginal queen.

See my next nine picks after the jump.

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On the Toronto International Film Festival’s official Doc Blog, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers has been asking various film fest and doc professionals (including Matt Dentler, Agnes Varnum, and David Nugent) to name the nonfiction films that they’re most excited to see at this year’s TIFF.

No one’s asked me what I think, so of course I’m going to chime in anyway: the film on the Real to Reel program that I’m most looking forward to is probably Obscene, Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s portrait of publisher Barney Rosset, who fought obscenity trials over works like Tropic of Cancer and I Am Curious … Yellow. I’m also interested in Operation Filmmaker, which made a few of the Doc Blog lists. Directed by Nina Davenport, it’s the story of an Iraqi film school student who, after the bombing of Baghdad in 2003, gets a job on the set of Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated. One blogger, reviewing the film at the Sydney Film Festival, called it “an often gauling example of the naive simplifications that those on the Left, for all that they may mean well, often make.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it’s piqued my interest nonetheless.

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***The National Legal and Policy Center has released a report intended to “shame” Google for failing to block access to pirated films on Google Video. Among other things, the NLPC charges that Google gives preferential treatment to copyright holders “it makes business deals with.” In response, a Google spokesman implied that some companies don’t want their copyright material removed from the site. “Copyright status can only be determined by the copyright holder, and their preferences vary widely.”

***Michael Tolkin, the author of The Player, has been hired to adapt the Fellini-inspired Broadway musical Nine for the screen. The Weinstein Company is producing the film; Chicago helmer Rob Marshall will direct.

***September’s Toronto Film Festival will host a Gala screening of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. The thriller re-teams the director with his History of Violence star, Viggo Mortensen.