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Under discussion:

Lost Boys 2: The Tribe  (2008)

• Oh good, fake controversy! Everyone’s pointing to Jeffrey Ressner’s Politico piece on Boogie Man, the Lee Atwater doc screening here at LAFF. “Atwater doc makes conservatives groan,” cries the headline. But, as AJ Schnack points out, those groaning conservatives were actually Ressner’s invited guests, conservative plants who would likely be hostile towards the subject matter regardless of its actual treatment.
• On to controversy-baiting classics: “The 7-minute film has a hero called Eveready Harton (sometimes spelled “Hardon”), a fellow with a very large penis who, throughout the course of the film, lets his manhood lead him into contact (mostly sexual) with a naked woman, an unfortunate man, a farmer, a donkey, a cactus and ultimately a cow.” A brief history of dirty animation from Nick Dawson at Film in Focus; behold the adventures of Mr. Harton above.
• Finally, WTF? Sequel Controversy: Corey Feldman strenuously attempted to defend the existence of a sequel to The Lost Boys last night at LAFF, but even the sequel’s director seemed unconvinced: “I still think no matter what, it’s not like Citizen Fucking Lost Boys Kane.” More from Stu at Defamer.

Under discussion:

Flight of the Navigator  (1986)

Medicine For Melancholy  (2009)

Throw Down Your Heart  (2008)

I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.

Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump.

The evening began with a cocktail party hosted by Cinemocracy, the Denver Film Society’s initiative to produce a film festival at the Democratic National Convention. They were handing out buttons, which was useful because earlier in the day I had spilled coffee on my dress and I had a spot that I needed to cover up. Here are (l-r) Mike Jones from Variety, Cinetic’s Matt Dentler, Throw Down Your Heart director Sascha Paladino, and Eugene Hernandez from indieWIRE.

From there, it was on to the Sunset Marquis, for a party thrown by IFC to celebrate their films at the festival. I didn’t get pictures of either of these things, but highlights included the flower that Josh Safdie was wearing behind his ear, and a “group spoon”, involving about ten drunk filmmakers lying on the floor in loose embrace. Gregg Araki, pictured above with Strand’s Marcus Hu, was not one of them.

Barry Jenkins, director of Medicine for Melancholy, did spoon. He’s pictured above right, next to Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, IFC’s Ryan Warner, and muti-hyphenate Michael Lerman.

I have a lot of pictures of Michael Lerman, who wrote a fantastic writeup of the first half of the fest for indieWIRE. Above, he’s pretending to be a wine snob with Amy Seimetz, a producer on Melancholy who is also directing her own feature and appearing in the next film by Joe Swanberg. Below, Lerman and Yeast star Amy Judd.

Then we moved on to the Target Red Room, the Festival’s corporate sponsored party space, where Serge Bozon was DJing. Serge is here with his feature La France, which was described to me as a “World War I pop musical. Obviously, that made me swoon. The filmmaker is a vinyl collector who spent $900 on a handful of 45s hours before his set. In between each song, he’d pop on the mic in heavily-accented English (see above) to introduce the next track with what we eventually figured out were misnomers. “Here we go, with another classic track from Minneapolis!” was one of his favorites, which I think, at one point, he applied to The Ramones; for his finale, announced a “slow song” which turned out to be a ten-minute epic piece of proto punk that was essentially too fast to dance to. But I tried.

Variety critic Robert Koehler captures the magic.

Sales agent Nguyen “Wyn” Tran poses with LAFF programmer Doug Jones.

Under discussion:

Better Off Dead  (1985)

The Brave Little Toaster  (1987)

Toy Story  (1995)

Luxo Jr.  (1986)

Antz  (1998)

A Bug's Life  (1998)

Pee-Wee's Playhouse [TV Series]  (1988)

Dinosaur  (2000)

Shrek  (2001)

Monsters, Inc.  (2001)

Ice Age  (2002)

Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie  (2002)

Finding Nemo  (2003)

Shark Tale  (2004)

The Incredibles  (2004)

Robots  (2005)

Madagascar  (2005)

Cars  (2006)

For the Birds  (2001)

Surf's Up  (2007)

Happy Feet  (2006)

Bee Movie  (2007)

Ratatouille  (2007)

Kung Fu Panda  (2008)

Wall-E  (2008)

Toy Story 3  (2010)

Up  (2009)

Newt  (2011)

The Bear and the Bow  (2011)

Cars 2  (2012)

Until last year’s brilliantly directed Ratatouille, all of Pixar’s animated features could be summed up with one word (toys, bugs, monsters, fish, superheroes, cars). Then the more complex plot synopsis of “rat functions as a culinary Cyrano in a French restaurant’s kitchen” came along and ruined the studio’s tradition of simplistic scenarios. Fortunately, this year Pixar is back on track with Wall-E, a movie that can be summed up as being about, in a word, robots.

But in their pipeline they’ve got a couple sequels (Cars 2, Toy Story 3) and a couple multi-word synopses (2009’s Up and 2011’s The Bear and the Bow are, at the least, each described with two words: old man and fairy tale, respectively. Only 2011’s Newt could have been pitched using a single word: newts.

So, while Pixar seems like it currently has enough on their hands, I’d like to suggest a few more single-word pitches for animated films in order to get things back to basics:

1. Birds - They’ve given us a movie featuring a variety of bugs and a movie featuring a variety of sea creatures, so the obvious next place to go is a movie featuring a variety of birds. And since Pixar has already made a short about birds (For the Birds), they already have a starting point to jump off from.
2. Animals - I guess it’s a pretty general word, but Pixar really needs to give us their answer to either (or both) Madagascar or (and) Kung Fu Panda. Maybe since DreamWorks has taken care of the African animals and the Asian animals, Pixar can go with the most interesting animal continent: Australia.
3. Penguins - Yes, they’re birds and they’re animals, but this pitch needs to be separate. Though we’ve already seen Sony’s Surf’s Up and Warner Bros.’ Happy Feet, this still needs to be done, just so Pixar can win an Oscar with it and make up for losing to Happy Feet last year.
4. Dinosaurs - Another one to make up, this time for Disney’s bomb from 2000, Dinosaur. Also, because every non-Pixar movie needs a Pixar equivalent (Antz vs. A Bugs Life; Shrek vs. Monsters, Inc.; Shark Tale vs. Finding Nemo; Robots vs. Wall-E; etc.) and we haven’t yet seen Pixar do a prehistoric pic in response to Fox’s Ice Age franchise.
5. Bees - If DreamWorks can do both Antz and Bee Movie, then Pixar needs another kind of bug movie, too, preferably one with flying insects. Preferably to make us forget Jerry Seinfeld’s obnoxious promotions, also.
6. Band - I think what Brad Bird did for superhero movies (it was both the best of its kind and the best spoof of its kind) should be done for rock bands. Plus, isn’t it about time Pixar made a real musical animated feature?
7. Fruit - Pixar’s answer to VeggieTales, or simply it’s contribution to the long tradition of animated talking foods, from the vegetable cart on Pinwheel to the singing burger in Better Off Dead.
8. Supermarket - If fruit is too specific, here’s a more general idea: anthropomorphic grocery items, from the produce aisle to the whatever is on the opposite side of the store aisle (in my local market it’s meats). This would be a great opportunity for more product suggestion (a la Apple Computers in Wall-E and Trix cereal in Presto), or even pure, blatant product placement.
9. Furniture - A little bit Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, a lot bit Brave Little Toaster. Basically, Pixar needs to give Luxo Jr. a feature already.
10. Disney - Since Pixar is owned by the Walt Disney Company, and since our old friends Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Pluto haven’t had a good movie in a long, long time, I think it only makes sense that John Lasseter should produce a computer-animated movie featuring the classic Disney gang. Past attempts to make CG versions of the characters have been disappointing, but if anyone can make it work, Lasseter can.