Day 4 (Sunday, January 20):

Three days in a row, people. This is unprecedented. I arose at 8 a.m. AGAIN today. I was the last one in bed last night and the first one up this morning. I am the most industrious person in the condo. I have never been in a group of people before in which I was the most industrious. What is going on here?

As I was getting ready to leave this morning, I chatted with the strangers who had slept in my bedroom. (The refugees on the fold-out couch were gone by the time I got out of the shower.) They’re documentary filmmakers who made a film called “10 mph” about a guy who rode a Segway across America. They were very nice. They gave me a DVD copy of the movie, proving once again that if you speak to an independent filmmaker in Park City for longer than five minutes, you will walk away owning a copy of his or her movie.

Perhaps as karma’s way of balancing out my awesomeness, today I started having chest pains whenever I exerted myself, e.g., by walking kind of fast or going up a slight incline. I thought it might be the high altitude, except that it’s never been a problem before. Is this nature’s way of telling me not to walk anywhere, ever, for anything? Or is it nature’s way of telling me not to eat at Burger King every day? Either way, I plan to continue ignoring nature, which has rarely been useful to me anyway.

My 9 a.m. film was “American Son,” starring Nick Cannon as a Marine with a 96-hour leave before being deployed to Iraq. You might not take Nick Cannon very seriously, and you’d be justified in feeling that way, but he has oodles of charisma. He’s actually very good in this role, with more depth than you’d expect. Also, “Nick Cannon” is a pretty cool name. It sounds like a private detective.

Speaking of cool names, the coolest name of any journalist covering the festival is this: Valentine Ding. I saw it on his press badge a couple years ago, and I saw him again today. I don’t know Mr. Ding, but if he ever Googles himself to see if people are commenting on how great his name is (I know I would), here’s another testimonial for him.

I took a shuttle bus over to Sundance headquarters at the Park City Marriott, the first time I’d had to make use of the system this year, what with the press-screening venues all in one place. I kind of miss taking the shuttles, actually. It’s time-consuming and inconvenient, and the bus drivers seem to choose their routes and schedules by some complicated calculus known only to them, but it’s fun to be out among the festival-goers, overhearing conversations and picking up tips on which movies to see or avoid. Also, people very frequently say things that are bizarre or hilarious, and that’s always a treat.

The reason for my visit to headquarters was to pick up some press kits for the movies I’d seen, and thereafter to walk to the nearby Grub Steak Restaurant, site of the Outfest Queer Brunch. This is an event held every year, sponsored by one of the gay cable channels — Logo, or Here, or Bravo, I don’t know — for the purpose of … um … having brunch, I guess. I don’t know. The gays invented brunch, so that part makes sense. I’d never had any interest in going before, and continued not to have interest this year, except that Kim had said it would be super-fun if I went with her, and I thought it might be an amusing experience. Then Kim bailed out and sent someone in her place, and also told us we had to “cover it,” i.e., do work instead of just eat brunch. It was a total bait-and-switch.

In her place was Erik Davis, Cinematical overlord and native of Queens, New York, a fact which produced fodder for several puns that never made it out of my mouth. We met up at the restaurant and were admitted into the queer brunch. The brunch itself wasn’t particularly gay — your basic scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, and so forth — but they did make sure to have an open bar and dance music playing at an unreasonable volume. There was an actual DJ spinning the tunes. Only the gays would hire a DJ to play breakfast.

The place was packed, with everyone sitting at long banquet tables with very little room between them. The music was so loud, and the space so crowded, that conversation or mingling wasn’t really feasible. It was like going to a dance club, with the added awkwardness of trying to navigate with a plate of food in your hands.

The funny part was that we’d gotten an e-mail reminder the day before, and the e-mail included a list of celebrities who were “confirmed” to be attending. These included Paris Hilton, Winona Ryder, Quentin Tarantino, Kirsten Dunst, Sharon Stone, Sean Combs, Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Hugh Dancy, Wes Bentley, Nick Cannon, Ray Romano, Nick Stahl, John Foster, Saffron Burrows, and Reichen Lehmkuhl. In actual fact, the only one who showed up was Reichen, who I guess was on “The Amazing Race” and was subsequently famous for being Lance Bass’ first post-coming-out boyfriend. I don’t consider reality show contestants to be celebrities any more than I consider people who get arrested on “Cops” to be celebrities, so it turns out there were zero celebrities there.

If you cover Sundance, you get a lot of e-mails like that, where various famous people are “confirmed” to be attending, which of course is a ploy to get YOU to attend. But think about it: Celebrities do whatever they want, whenever they want. You think Paris Hilton was like, “Yes! I definitely want to attend the crowded queer brunch and be wedged into a restaurant with hundreds of strangers!”? Please. The only thing “confirmed” about Paris Hilton is that they’re naming a new venereal disease after her (”Hepatitis P”). All “confirmed” means is that the stars’ publicists RSVP’d to every invitation they got, and the stars could show up to all or none of them.

I will say this for the queer brunch, though: The food was good, free, and did not come from Burger King.

Next I headed back to the Yarrow for a screening of “Just Another Love Story,” which the catalog suggested was a Danish film noir. Danish film noir! That is something you don’t see every day. Unless you get the obscure Danish Film Noir satellite TV channel, I mean. It’s a visually interesting movie about a married man who stumbles into a situation where he’s pretending to be the boyfriend of a blind amnesiac car-accident victim. I enjoyed it up until the last 20 minutes or so, where it went over-the-top with strange twists and revelations. But hey, Danish film noir.

An irksome element was that the catalog declared the film to be 90 minutes long when in fact it’s around 105. I’m starting to realize that if the book says “90 minutes,” that means they don’t know and they’re guessing. Or maybe “90 minutes” is the default value in the template they use when they prepare the film listings, and if the filmmaker doesn’t provide them with the actual time they just leave it. You can trust odd times like 88 minutes or 97 minutes, but if it says 90 minutes, forget it. It could be anything.

Also irksome: the jackholes sitting behind me who kept talking during the movie. They were speaking either Spanish or Italian, I couldn’t make out which. These guys were not press; they were “industry,” meaning they work in the movie business in some capacity that does not require them to exercise common courtesy or professionalism. (In other words: They work in the movie business.)

We had a big problem last year with people using their BlackBerrys during screenings, but that epidemic has died down considerably this year. Oh sure, there’s still the occasional industry type (it’s rarely a critic or journalist) who has to check his BlackBerry every two minutes, lighting up the theater as he does so. But for the most part, the novelty of the BlackBerry has worn off and people are behaving themselves.

Next up was “Sleep Dealer,” a futuristic sci-fi film from Mexico. Of course, coming from Mexico, “futuristic” could just mean they have running water. (ZING!) But I kid Mexico. I sure wanted to like the film, which has some very clever sci-fi ideas, but it’s slow and not very well executed.

[More about the "Sleep Dealer" press screening, and how it was packed to the rafters.]

In the 7:30 p.m. slot, Weinberg, Kim, and I joined up for “The Broken,” a horror movie where a lady sees her Doppelganger and then scary stuff happens. Scary stuff beyond seeing her Doppelganger, I mean. I think I liked it, but I was kind of dozy and I’m not sure I caught the full effect of it. It sure made Kim jump and squeal like a schoolgirl, though.

The best part was that while the book said it was 110 minutes, the actual running time was 88. They announced this beforehand, and the screening room burst into applause. See? I’m not the only one.

Speaking of Kim and Weinberg, there were more developments today concerning movies they saw on previous days. First of all, Kim said the more she thinks about “Savage Grace,” the more it grows on her. (I had the opposite reaction: The more I think about it, the more I want to push it in the fireplace.) And Weinberg’s negative review of “The Wackness” continued to draw incredulous responses from people who loved it. I decided I need to get in to a public screening of it sometime this week so I can see where I stand on this hot-button issue.

“The Broken” was it for me. Though it was barely 9 p.m., I had plenty of writing to do, and none of the late screenings particularly interested me anyway. I picked up my daily supply of Burger King and walked back up to the condo, munching on fries and wondering what it would sound like if my heart literally exploded. I think my ribcage would muffle the sound, and that’s a shame.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 5:32 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.