Day 7 (Wednesday, January 24):

With City Weekly’s festival coverage finished, we were no longer justified in staying in our cozy condo, and this morning was check-out time. So sad. We’ve stayed there two years in a row now, and I’ve still never used the hot tub.

Went to press headquarters to write for a bit, then walked over to the Holiday Village Cinemas for my first screening, “Fay Grim.” It’s from veteran indie filmmaker Hal Hartley, who is loved by many but whose only film I’ve seen is “The Girl from Monday,” and it was one of the worst entries in the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. So while I was entirely in favor of giving Hartley another chance — we all have our “off” days, after all — I was wary of “Fay Grim.”

It’s a sequel to a previous film, “Henry Fool,” but seeing it doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite to understanding the new one. (I guess when 99.9 percent of the American public has never heard of you or your movies, you can’t really get away with making sequels that demand familiarity with their predecessors.) It stars Parker Posey as Fay Grim, a New York woman who is enlisted by the CIA to retrieve some of her dead husband’s notebooks, as they are believed to contain state secrets. It’s a comedy to begin with, then it gets kind of bogged down in its espionage stuff, but it’s fairly entertaining overall. I’ll have to see another Hartley film sometime and do a best-two-out-of-three sort of thing.

Sitting behind me at “Fay Grim” was none other than Leonard Maltin, who I don’t recall ever seeing at Sundance before. He and a couple other critics were chatting about what they’d seen, and one of the fun things about Sundance is that it’s not considered rude to join a conversation if you have something relevant to add. (Well, a movie-related conversation, anyway. I guess if people were talking about their colonoscopies, it would be rude to butt in and talk about yours, just as it would be anywhere else.)

After a few minutes, the others left, and Maltin formally introduced himself. I told him I was familiar with his work, and we chatted about movie reviewing and so forth. Somehow we got to the topic of quote whores (the lousy critics who will claim to like anything as long as it gets them quoted in the ads), and he made some amusing comments about that practice, and how TV commercials will say “The critics are raving!” when in fact they only have quotes from one critic. Maltin is plenty famous and plenty rich, but I was impressed by how friendly and chatty he was. Nice guy.

I had a bit of Burger King for lunch before heading up to the top of Main Street, where I was to see a Slamdance film at 3:30. Slamdance, if you’re not familiar, was launched several years ago as an alternative to Sundance. Sundance used to be cool, man, then it got all bogus and corporate. Slamdance is what Sundance USED to be, dude, before it sold out. Or so they say. Whatever.

Thus far, the only film to be launched at Slamdance that has gone on to significant notoriety is “Mad Hot Ballroom” — and even then, the national media were so surprised that many reports mistakenly said it had debuted at Sundance. Doh! Poor Slamdance. It’s like Sundance’s stoned little brother, tryin’ to make it in this big, crazy world, but never being taken seriously.

As I mentioned in a previous report, I’d been invited to a screening of “American Fork,” made by some of my fellow BYU alumni and playing as part of the Slamdance festival. I knew some of the people involved to be very talented, and there wasn’t anything happening at Sundance this afternoon that needed to take priority, so I went a-Slamdancin’.

The small, uncomfortable screening room was packed with friends, family, and regular Slamdance-goers, and many of the cast and crew were on hand for questions afterward. The film, about an overweight loser living in a medium-sized Utah town (American Fork, presumably, though the name is never mentioned), has a lot of good laughs and some nice dramatic turns, too. Much of the humor is character-based, similar to “Napoleon Dynamite” (also made by BYU alumni, and sharing a producer, Jeremy Coon, with this film), and the plot is similarly thin and meandering. “American Fork” is a thematically richer movie, though, with characters actually learning and changing. It’s not brilliant work, but it’s good. It deserves to be seen.

My problem all week, as you know, has been finding an electrical outlet and some wifi. I can usually find one or the other, but not both. Imagine my Christmas-like surprise, then, when I wandered into the galleria on Main Street after seeing “American Fork” and found 1) a place to sit down, 2) an electrical outlet, and 3) wifi! I nearly wept with joy.

There’s a movie playing at Sundance called “Chasing Ghosts,” a documentary about the Pac-Man craze of the early 1980s. To promote it, they’ve rented out a space in the galleria and filled it with arcade games that you can play for free. I didn’t have time to indulge, but I was amused to see someone come out of the place dressed in a Pac-Man costume. He was walking around the mall, cheerfully saying to people, “Hey guys! I’m Pac-Man!” I thought: When you’re dressed in a big yellow Pac-Man costume, do you really need to tell people who you are? Seems like if they don’t immediately recognize you, telling them your name isn’t going to help.

I headed back down the mountain next for a press screening of “Waitress” at the Holiday Village Cinemas. The film was written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, an actress whose name you might recognize because she was murdered on Nov. 1, 2006. (The story was noteworthy because the guy who killed her had arranged the body to make it look like a suicide, initially fooling investigators.) It’s already been picked up by a distributor, but some of us wondered whether that was because it’s good, or because of the backstory. (”See the film she was working on when she died!”)

I loved it. Weinberg, Childress, and several of our other Sundance buddies were in attendance, and we all absolutely loved this movie. It’s a comedy about a Southern small-town diner waitress (played by Keri Russell) who’s stuck in a loveless marriage to a possessive jerk. Her plan to leave him is complicated when she gets pregnant. Further complications arise when she starts having an affair with her doctor (Nathan Fillion, from “Firefly” and “Serenity”).

So, um, yeah, it doesn’t sound funny. But it is! Trust me! Nathan Fillion and Keri Russell are both wonderfully funny and charming, and guess who turns up in a pivotal supporting role as the owner of the diner? Andy Griffith, ladies and gentlemen.

Griffith has very seldom appeared in theatrical films over the course of his career, and nothing since his bit part in 1996’s “Spy Hard.” Why he chose to do this little independent movie, of all things, I have no idea. But thank goodness he did! His character is an ornery, demanding old man, but thoroughly lovable and good-hearted.

The film is about finding happiness. It doesn’t judge its characters for their somewhat questionable behavior (there’s more than one adulterous affair in the story), but it doesn’t condone them, either. It just lets them be who they are — flawed, beautiful, and funny. It’s one of the sweetest, most delightful films I’ve seen in a long time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 12:38 pm 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.