Not everyone in Los Angeles had Golden Globes fever this past weekend. Hundreds of film industry types were schmoozing and seeing movies at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Big names turned up again this year – everyone from Michael Douglas to Natalie Portman – and attention was given to films that might otherwise have trouble finding traction in this awards-saturated season, like Peter Weir’s The Way Back. Another of those films is Daydream Nation, an angst-y tale about a brainy and manipulative girl (Kat Dennings) who shakes up a small town when she begins a love affair with her teacher (Josh Lucas). The film won over many of the festival’s younger fans, who were, lets be honest, in short supply at the open-to-the-public festival in one of America’s retirement hotbeds.

“I was listening to Daydream Nation a lot when I was writing the movie. I wanted to make a film that had the feeling of that record,” writer/director Mike Goldbach said of his decision to use Sonic Youth’s seminal 1988 record as the title of his film. He evened named one of the characters Thurston, an homage to Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore. “It’s beautiful and ethereal, but then all of a sudden the movie will swerve, just like the record, and become violent and atonal,” he continued.

On Saturday, a sold-out third screening of the film enthralled movie fans, who swooned over the film’s music-nerd soundtrack. Two Sonic Youth songs, “5 or 6” songs from Devendra Banhart, a Sebadoh track, a Beach House song, a Stars song, several songs by Metric’s Emily Haines (including a cover of Neil Young’s “Expecting to Fly”), and a Lou Reed number are all featured in the film and on the forthcoming soundtrack, from Last Gang Records.

The film was scored by Broken Social Scene’s Ohad Benchetrit, but despite the presence of a stellar songwriting throughout the film, the story mostly unfolds sans sound, musing on sex, death, and relationships in a rain-soaked small town. “It’s a dreamy, hazy, occasionally violent and scary bipolar movie,” Goldbach said. “When you name a film after an album by Sonic Youth, it sets the bar really high,” the director continued. “You want to live up to the promise.”

This past weekend in Palm Springs, Goldbach’s film did just that.

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This video won’t embed, but click on the image and it will take you to the website.

The scans from the article in Now Magazine are now up in the gallery. Click the picture above to be taken there. :)

Kat looked absolutely smoking as she posed for Daydream Nation portraits on TIFF’s third day. She was joined by director Michael Goldbach and co-star Josh Lucas in the portraits studio. They all look adorable together. :D

See the rest of the pictures here in the gallery.

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Kat looked absolutely radiant at the Daydream Nation premiere last night at the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto, Canada. There isn’t much out there in terms of pictures yet, but I’m assuming they’ll start trickling in during the day as photographers get organized and upload online. From what I can gather on twitter and various small blurbs on blogs, the film has been well-received :)

So far, you can check out the following albums in the gallery for TIFF images:
TIFF Daydream Nation premiere & Q&A.
TIFF Portraits 2010.
TIFF 2010 interviews.
CANDIDS – TIFF September 10, 2010.

Daydream Nation has been added to another festival’s lineup this fall, also in September. The Atlantic Film Festival is held in Halifax, Nova Scotia every year, and lasts for ten days.

Mike Goldbach’s film is set for one screening thus far, at 9:30 PM on Tuesday September 21, the venue being Park Lane – 4. Maybe Kat will show up for this screening too? :) Let’s home so. In the meantime, TIFF opens tomorrow.

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TIFF is set to open in two days, and Kat is on the front page of their website. If you’re going to the festival, Daydream Nation is set to screen 6 PM September 10th at Ryerson, and 12 PM September 11th at AMC 3. Can’t wait for actor portraits and premiere pictures. :)

In the meantime, Andersonesque has this to say about the film:

This Canada First opener by Mike Goldbach (Don McKellar’s co-writer on Child Star) is a gorgeously shot portrait of small-town desperation that’s plenty beguiling until it becomes too clear how much Goldbach has borrowed from Tom Perotta and Alan Ball’s forays into similar thematic and geographic terrain. Luckily, the movie’s best scenes are as whip-smart as Kat Dennings – she carries the day as Caroline, a high schooler who clinches her aspiring bad-girl status by seducing her English teacher (Lucas). Traces of Donnie Darko can also be discerned in Daydream Nation’s many portents of imminent teen apocalypse and it’s all effectively (if somewhat excessively) scored to songs by Stars, Emily Haines and Sonic Youth.

TIFF keeps updating their site, and they recently added more stills from Daydream Nation. Hopefully we’ll get this in bigger format later, but for now I just have to say I am seriously looking forward to this film, not to mention all the premiere photos, and Kat back at TIFF :)

For the third year in a row, one of Kat’s films will be featured at Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF for short. Daydream Nation will have its world premiere at this year’s festival, according to the official website’s recent press releases. I can’t wait to see what reviewers say of the film, and how big a distribution it will have after this. :)

Watch the trailer here, since it won’t embed.

Here’s what they write about Daydream Nation:

Only sixteen years old, Caroline Wexler (Kat Dennings) is facing a teenager’s nightmare: her widowed father has moved from the city to a tiny, nowhere town where the major tourist attraction is an industrial fire that seems destined to burn forever and everyone under the age of nineteen is permanently stoned. Concocting new ways of getting high is a major hobby for most of Caroline’s classmates, including the lovelorn Thurston (Reece Thompson), who falls for Caroline the minute he lays eyes on her. And then there’s the minor inconvenience of a killer running around the neighborhood. What’s a girl to do but start an affair with the most available teacher at school?

Visually arresting, slyly funny and boasting its share of chills, Daydream Nation is a smart debut from Mike Goldbach (who co-wrote Childstar). An astute account of adolescent confusion and angst, the film exposes the wide rift between the adult and the adolescent worlds. No parent really knows how out of control their children are, but the adults in this world don’t seem to possess more maturity than their juniors.

Daydream Nation is driven by a stellar performance by Dennings as a girl who’s too smart to get sucked into teenaged melodrama, but only has a tenuous hold on her temper. The film is propelled by Caroline’s voice-over, a potent mix of sarcasm, naïveté and confusion. Dennings is supported by a magnificent cast which includes Andie MacDowell as Thurston’s overwhelmed but sharp single mother.

Goldbach subtly and effectively overlays genres here; initially, the film is an exposé of adolescent life, using suspense elements to invest the characters’ dilemmas with gravitas. The principal characters may be young, but their decisions are fateful. Daydream Nation announces the presence of a skilful new voice on the Canadian film scene.

Sources: here, here & here.