Day 5 (Monday, January 22):

I had been assigned to cover an 8:30 a.m. screening today, but City Weekly honcho Scott Renshaw generously swapped my schedule with someone else’s, knowing as he does my tendency to not always wake up in time for 8:30 a.m. screenings. Part of me was offended, but most of me was glad.

So after sleeping in a bit (9 a.m.), I went to press headquarters to check on some stuff and do a little writing. Ran into Weinberg there, and we headed over to the Yarrow together. As we were exiting the Park City Marriott (home of Sundance headquarters during the festival), we saw Ryan Reynolds coming in. He is taller and not as pretty as he looks in movies.

Weinberg and I then had this conversation:

ME: What’s he doing here? Is he in a movie?
WEINBERG: He’s in “The Nines.”
ME: Ah.
WEINBERG: What, he couldn’t just be here? Maybe he’s just a lover of good films!
ME: You’d think he’d be in better ones, then.

My first press screening of the day was “Expired,” in the festival’s “Spectrum” category. Everything is divided into categories here. There’s Premieres, which is for films that already have distributors lined up, or that are in some other way not entirely “independent” movies. That’s often where the big-name celebrities appear. Then there are the competition categories: U.S. Dramatic (meaning fictional, not necessarily “dramatic”) and U.S. Documentary, with corresponding categories for foreign films, too. Park City at Midnight is the category for films that are frivolous, loud, gory and/or otherwise aimed at a “midnight” type of audience. And then Spectrum is for movies that don’t really fit anywhere else.

The trouble is, Spectrum usually winds up being movies that aren’t quite good enough to be in competition but that have recognizable celebrities in them, so they get included. That, or someone at Sundance owes someone a favor, or the filmmaker has had stuff here before. (Honestly, if I had made that Crispin Glover movie, Sundance wouldn’t have even bothered to send me a rejection letter. But since it’s Glover, whose last film played here two years ago, it’s grandfathered in.)

“Expired” certainly fits the mold of sub-par Spectrum movies. Samantha Morton and Jason Patric star as L.A. meter maids, she a quiet, mousy woman, he an insecure, arrogant jerk who treats her poorly. You know there are two possible outcomes: Either she will summon the fortitude to stop putting up with his crap and tell him to get out, or she will soften him and he will become a better person. Then it’s two hours of waiting for one of those to happen, enduring his insults and ludicrous behavior in the meantime.

The problem is, he’s not a jerk in a realistic way. He’s a jerk in a movie sort of way, where the things he says are designed to get laughs from the audience, not to represent his character. It rings false.

Sitting in front of me during the film was yet another a-hole with a BlackBerry habit. He got it out and used it at least a dozen times. I had decided I was going to start writing down the names of people who do this — everyone wears their press or industry badge on a lanyard — and post them here, but he left before the movie was over. (Typical industry a-hole behavior: diddle on your BlackBerry the whole time, then leave early. Why’d you show up at all, schmucko?)

Next up was “Year of the Dog,” written and directed by Mike White, who wrote previous Sundance entries “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl.” This one’s about a California woman who loves dogs and who starts to become a Crazy Dog Lady as her passion for animal rights grows. She is played by Molly Shannon, which probably explains the presence of several people from Advocate magazine sitting behind me: The gays love Molly Shannon. Not a bad film, overall.

There were two BlackBerry offenders during this screening, one over my right shoulder and down a few seats (so I could see it in my peripheral vision every time it lit up), and one just in front of me. The guy behind me, a youngish fellow of South American or perhaps Mediterranean descent, left before I could see his nametag. The one in front of me, a thin, dark-haired woman, exited with me … but her badge had flipped around so I could only see the back of it. Curses! My plan to expose BlackBerry abusers was being foiled at every turn!

I had lunch with a couple people at Used To Be a Burrito Place, and then went up to Main Street for some wandering around and writing. I wanted to give the Sundance House — noted in a previous entry for having a lack of places to plug things in — another try. Maybe it would be less busy today, as a lot of people leave the festival after the opening weekend.

Things were much slower, to be sure: The Internet lounge was closed for a private function of some kind. I didn’t need their laptops, but I did need a place to sit down and use some wifi. What’s the point, dear Sundance friends, of telling us how cool the Sundance House is, and how we should totally stop by and chill whenever we feel like it, if it’s going to be randomly closed sometimes?

I asked a young woman at the front desk if there had been a notice at the press office that I’d missed, though I suspected the answer was that there had been no notice, and that we were supposed to know about the closure via ESP. The young woman actually works for the Kimball Art Center (which is what the Sundance House is the other 50 weeks of the year), so she wasn’t sure what Sundance’s deal was. I told her I just needed a place to sit down and use some wifi. She saw my press badge and said, “You work for City Weekly?” I told her I did. She smiled in an “I’m cool; I’ll do you a favor” kind of way and led me to the back office, where she set me up with a desk and a chair and a phone line and everything! I don’t know what City Weekly ever did to curry the Kimball Art Center’s favor, but I’m glad they did.

The helpful girl’s name is Annie Kennedy, and she is an artist her own self. I bet if you went to www.AnnieKennedy.net, you would find some representations of some of her work.

I still had time before my next screening, so I headed back down the hill and parked myself at a Starbucks for a while, enjoying some hot chocolate and a piece of crumb cake while I wrote, read, and relaxed. I can’t think of anything funny to say about that, so maybe I’ll just omit this paragraph.

Back at the Yarrow at 7:30 was “Padre Nuestro,” an American-made but Spanish-language drama about two teenage boys from Mexico, one honest and one dishonest, who go to New York. One is looking for his father; the other is looking for easy money. There was lying, deception, manipulation, fraud, and prostitution — and that was just in the lobby before the film started! (That joke is so stupid I’ll probably cut it out before I post this.) Great performances, but the film is too bleak for its own good.

Afterward, Weinberg and some of his Internet movie buddies were congregating in the Yarrow’s bar-and-grill. It’s normally called Charlie’s Place, but during the festival it’s Rocket 88 Burning Man Bar, whatever that means. It sounds like what happens when Japanese products are translated into English, though there is no Japanese influence detectable in the decor or menu.

Anyway, I joined Weinberg and the gang — folks from Rotten Tomatoes and Film Threat — for some junk food, and was about to call it a night when Weinberg mentioned he was going to a midnight public screening of a horror flick called “The Signal,” and did I want to go?

In previous years, there might be as many as six or seven horror films among Sundance’s 120-ish offerings. Gems like “The Blair Witch Project,” “28 Days Later,” and the first “Saw” premiered here. But this year, “The Signal” is the only true out-and-out horror flick on the docket, at least as far as we’re able to determine by reading the film guide. There’s a press screening later in the week, but it conflicts with something else I want to see — and besides, a midnight public screening is almost always going to be more fun than a midday press-only affair, if only for the absence of BlackBerrying a-holes.

So Weinberg and I set out for Main Street. We waited for the shuttle bus for a few minutes, but time was of the essence, and the shuttles are only dependable up to a point, so we opted for a cab instead. There were a bunch of other young movie-goers at the shuttle stop, too, so we asked if any of them wanted to split the cab with us. Four did. The six of us crammed in, split the cost, and paid about a dollar apiece. From an economic standpoint, it was a brilliant maneuver.

The screening was at the Egyptian Theatre, a charming old playhouse near the top of Main Street that can serve as a movie theater when called upon to do so. Weinberg and I got seats up front (there’s a good distance between the screen and the front row) with a couple of Weinberg’s buddies from Ain’t It Cool News, and I went to the bathroom.

In the bathroom, whom should I run into but Hubbel Palmer, an old acquaintance from my Brigham Young University days who appeared in “The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang” (an audience favorite at last year’s Slamdance festival) and who this year has written and starred in a Slamdance comedy called “American Fork.” I’d heard about the existence of this film and was curious to see it. American Fork is a small city in Utah, near Provo, and having lived in that area for several years, I am well aware of the heights of comedy that can come from examining such a place.

Hubbel invited me to a screening of “American Fork” on Wednesday. He was at “The Signal” with “American Fork” (and “Napoleon Dynamite”) producer Jeremy Coon and “American Fork” director Chris Bowman. These guys were all in BYU’s film department around the same time, along with “Napoleon Dynamite” director Jared Hess and star Jon Heder, and I sort of knew some of them back in those days. I was at least familiar with a lot of the short films they made; Bowman’s “The Wrong Brother,” about Orville and Wilbur Wright’s less famous younger brother, is still one of my favorite shorts ever. (I looked for it on YouTube, but it’s not there. You’ll have to take my word for it, I guess.)

But back to the matter at hand: “The Signal.” It’s about a city where suddenly all the TVs, radios, and phones start producing a strange signal that causes people to lose their minds and become murderous. That sounds a bit like Stephen King’s novel “The Cell,” but to be fair, when you write 100,000 novels, people are bound to duplicate some of your ideas at some point. It’s just the law of averages.

“The Signal” is great. It’s divided into three chapters, all following the same story but from different points of view. The first chapter is tense and frightening, the second has a lot of great comedy, and the third wraps things up, but all three are thrilling and terrifying and fun. It’s definitely R-rated (so what were all those BYU alumni doing there?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!??!?!), but if it were marketed correctly, it could easily make millions from the horror fans.

I would like to have stayed for the Q&A afterward, but I was parked in an area that says no parking after 2 a.m., and it was now 1:50. Having been towed in Park City before, I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience, so Weinberg and I dashed out to the shuttle, which luckily was running quickly and smoothly at that time of night, and made it back to where I was parked at 2:05. Success! Except now I’m a little afraid to turn on the TV.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Sundance Film Festival. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.