Day 2 (Friday, January 18):

I arose at 8 a.m., an early hour that readers of previous years’ diaries will recall is typical of the first day of the festival and much less typical of subsequent days. But this year we are being very diligent and professional and will arise by 8 a.m. every day! We are even referring to ourself in the plural, that is how professional we are.

First on the docket was a documentary I was very eager to see. It’s called “Stranded,” and it is the story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes Mountains in 1972. You probably remember this story because it involves cannibalism. I know that’s why I remember it. My whole life I thought it was a Chilean soccer team, not a Uruguayan rugby team, but you can bet I got the cannibalism part right.

The story has been told numerous times, including several fictionalized versions, but this is the first time the survivors have been interviewed themselves for a documentary. They tell the story in remarkable detail, and the filmmakers even take a few of them on a trip back to the site where it all happened. No doubt this was hilariously fun for everyone involved.

[More about "Stranded," particularly its running time.]

We got out of “Stranded” at around 11:10 a.m., by which time a long line was already forming for the 11:30 screening, which I had been planning to attend. But I was really hungry — so hungry I could eat a Uruguayan rugby player, as the old saying goes — and knew I could not obtain food and still get into the soon-to-be-packed 11:30 screening. So I skipped the movie and got lunch at Burger King, which is practically adjacent to the Yarrow and is the only fast food place within easy walking distance. It might as well be an official Sundance venue.

After lunch I used the Yarrow’s newly accessible wifi to do some work while sitting in the lobby. I recently retired the ancient laptop I’d been using at Sundance since 2001, a dilapidated steam-powered iBook that was so old it had been manufactured before the advent of the letter “J.” Now I have a newish iBook whose battery lasts longer than 10 minutes, so I no longer spend all my Sundance down time in search of an electrical outlet. This is a great luxury, and it will reduce the number of tedious outlet-searching anecdotes that used to fill these reports.

The next flick was at 2 p.m., a documentary called “Traces of the Trade,” in which descendants of what was once America’s most prolific slave-trading family retrace their forefathers’ misdeeds and find ways to assuage their guilt without actually, you know, doing anything. (I am oversimplifying the film’s content.) At one point very late in the film one of the family members worries that what they’re doing is self-indulgent, and many of us in the audience chuckled ruefully. White people are so lame.

Next I grabbed a snack at the concessions stand, which in previous years has had a sign that said “CONCESSION’S,” requiring me to stealthily remove the offending apostrophe. This year there is no sign at all, leading me to believe that they have given up on ever getting it right. I applaud their admission of failure.

There was a short recess before the next film, “Slingshot Hip Hop,” a documentary about Palestinian rap groups. Apparently there are a lot of them, all inspired by American hip hop artists like Tupac and Public Enemy. The struggle of Palestinian youths living in Israeli-occupied zones parallels the lives of black kids in American ghettoes in some ways, so you can see how the Arab rap trend would emerge. On the plus side, Palestinian rappers seldom talk about bling, nor do they advocate the sipping of Bacardi as if it were one’s birthday.

I had some time for dinner next; strangely, none of my usual Sundance pals were around, as they had chosen different screenings from me, maybe even intentionally so as to avoid spending time in darkened rooms with me. There is a Quizno’s up near the Burger King, and I think it’s brand-new this year, although you may recall that I also thought the long-standing opening-night press screening was brand-new, too. I am what they call an unreliable narrator. Anyway, I ate at Quizno’s, did some writing, then headed to the Holiday Village for another screening.

Holiday Village is an actual movie theater that Sundance invades and occupies each year. (I imagine the theater owners being tied up and locked in a closet for 10 days.) Three of the auditoriums are for public screenings, and the fourth is a press venue. It’s the only press venue with actual theater seats instead of uncomfortable hotel-conference-room chairs, so that’s nice.

The film was my fourth documentary of the day, “The Recruiter” (formerly known as “An American Soldier”). It follows the efforts of one of the U.S. Army’s top recruiters in a small Louisiana town; in the second half, it follows four of his proteges through basic training. The film raises some interesting questions about how our military finds soldiers, and the reasons people have for signing up, and the qualifications necessary. (Hint: It’s OK if you talk like a hillbilly. It’s also OK — perhaps even mandatory — to fight in Iraq while mispronouncing it “eye-rack,” a mistake even President Bush doesn’t make.)

Six National Guardsmen from this little town died in one attack in Iraq. At the memorial service, the recruiter expresses his condolences to the family of one of the soldiers — then tries to recruit the dead soldier’s little brother. I couldn’t decide whether this was patriotic and inspiring or tacky and appalling.

There’s also a lesbian white trash girl named Lauren who wants to join the Army as a means of going to college. She is disappointed when basic training isn’t what she expected. “I wanna learn about art,” she says. “I wanna learn histories, I wanna learn Englishes — I wanna get smart!” Yeah, good luck with that.

The first Friday of the festival is always a big night for parties, and Scott had made sure we were all invited to one in particular. It was sponsored by Magnolia Pictures in conjunction with a movie called “Timecrimes” that’s playing in the fest’s midnight series, and somehow Austin’s legendary Alamo Drafthouse theater was involved, too. The party was being held at a condo up in the hills. A taxi would be needed to get there. Even if you had a car in town, you wouldn’t know where the place was.

What I had temporarily forgotten was that Park City cab drivers don’t know where anything is either. A lot of them swarm in from other cities just for the festival, and they don’t know any more about Park City streets than the festival-goers do. Scott and Erik and I, plus a couple other Cinematical folks, piled into a taxi-van armed with Mapquest directions, then had to convince the driver that he had missed the turn onto the street where the condo was. The drive was 2.1 miles from the Yarrow; for this we paid $13, with no discount for having to provide our own navigation.

The party was a rager, packed with dozens and dozens of attractive young people, a lot of fantastic food courtesy of the Alamo’s chef, and free-flowing booze and karaoke (which enjoy a symbiotic relationship). Comedian David Wain and “Super Size Me” director Morgan Spurlock were there, but the presence of celebrities didn’t matter. Someone accidentally fell into the hot tub on the patio. The smell of marijuana hung heavily in the air. When the karaoke started, someone turned on a fog machine to add to the ambience. The fog quickly filled the huge, three-story condo and then, in a completely unforeseeable turn of events, set off the smoke alarm. The fire department responded by sending a truck and three firemen, who went from room to room making sure there was no actual fire, followed closely by a handful of trashy and flirtatious drunk girls who evidently believed they were living out a scene from a porno.

I am not built for heavy-duty partying, and I really wanted to catch tomorrow’s 9 a.m. press screening — of “Timecrimes,” actually, the very film we were celebrating. So at about 1:30 a.m. Erik and Cinematical’s Kim and I shared a taxi-van with two other party-goers (well, party-leavers, I guess) back down to our lodgings. This time I was so tired it didn’t matter which of my three beds I slept on.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 5:56 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.