Day 6 (Tuesday, January 22):

I know a lot of readers are dying to know whether I got up early again today, bringing my streak of professionalism and efficiency to six days. The answer is that I got up at 9 a.m. I grant you that some people don’t consider 9 a.m. to be “early,” but in my defense, those people can eat me.

First on my agenda, naturally, was to hop on the ol’ Interwebs to see the Oscar nominations. The Academy changed its schedule a few years ago, moving the nominations up so that now they’re always announced during Sundance. It’s a way of making entertainment journalists’ heads explode from trying to cover two major stories at once. Before the day was over, many of those heads would explode a second time.

My first screening of the day was “Towelhead,” the directorial debut of Alan Ball, who wrote “American Beauty” and created HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” I was surprised to learn that “Towelhead” was based on someone else’s novel, as the subject matter seems very Alan Ball-ish, dealing once again with suburban hypocrisy and treachery.

It’s about a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl who starts to experience her sexual awakening in the midst of the Gulf War (hence the title, a slur she has thrown at her several times). Most of the adults in her life are immature and petty, and her strict father won’t talk to her about private matters. He won’t even let her wear tampons, which he says “are for married women.” That seems crazy to me, but hey, I’m not Lebanese.

I really liked the film. It has some troubling and potentially controversial elements, yet at no point did I feel like Ball was doing it solely for the sake of being shocking. It’s not exploitative in the least, putting it in direct contrast to “Downloading Nancy,” which IS shocking just for the sake of being shocking.

We exited that screening at the Yarrow and immediately found ourselves in line for the next one, a documentary called “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” This was a hot-ticket item, not just because of the subject, but because it’s from Morgan Spurlock, whose “Super Size Me” was a sensation when it premiered at Sundance in 2004. Everyone was dying to know if Spurlock had managed to do what the U.S. government clearly stopped trying to do long ago: find the world’s most wanted criminal.

As it turns out, that’s not really the point. The title and the first several minutes of the movie are kind of a bait-and-switch. Instead, the movie — which is mightily entertaining as well as informative — is a crash course in Middle East politics and religious conflicts. Spurlock goes from place to place, talking to regular people and trying to determine the roots of extremism. He hears frequently that Middle Easterners love Americans but hate America’s foreign policies. They also hate Bin Laden and everything he stands for. They hate that he gives real Muslims a bad name.

I was sitting next to Childress. About five minutes before it ended, he nudged me and showed me a text message he’d gotten on his phone. He was naughty for looking at his text messages during a screening, of course, but he told me later he’d gotten a series of calls and texts in quick succession, and he was worried that there was a family emergency or something.

The text message he showed me said this: “Heath Ledger is dead.”

When the film ended a few minutes later and everyone spilled out into the halls of the Yarrow, the news was already spreading like wildfire. Other people had gotten similar text messages. Journalists were whipping out their laptops to go online and see what details were available. It was all anyone talked about for the rest of the day.

I was heading to press headquarters to do some business and get some writing done. People on the shuttle bus were starting to hear the news, and false details were spreading at the usual astonishing pace. Kim from Cinematical called me to see if I wanted to contribute a few lines to the “in memoriam” post they were assembling. The TV in the press lounge, usually tuned to the Sundance Channel, was on CNN instead, where the mainstream news media once again demonstrated that being accurate isn’t nearly as important as being first.

Of course, things at Sundance continued as scheduled. In this case, that meant hustling back to the Yarrow for another in-demand screening, “Choke,” about a sex addict who works at a cheesy “colonial village” tourist trap and in his spare time pretends to choke on food at restaurants so that someone can save his life and feel like a hero. One minute you’re mourning the death of Heath Ledger, the next minute you’re watching a movie in which Sam Rockwell believes he might literally be the offspring of Jesus. Film festivals can be very surreal like that.

“Choke” is based on a book by Chuck Palahniuk, one of my favorite authors. I was glad that the previous night’s disappointment over a poor adaptation (of Michael Chabon’s “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”) was not repeated. “Choke” captures much of the lunacy of Palahniuk’s book, and Palahniuk has been in town to support the film. I would love to meet him. Of course, we both live in Portland, so it would be weird if I had to go to Utah to run into him. But I don’t know where he lives in Portland. Maybe I should find out and just show up at his house one day. Surely the man who wrote “Fight Club” would appreciate the inappropriateness of such an action.

I had a ticket for a public screening of “Be Kind Rewind” next, but everyone who has seen it has said it’s “good, not great,” often in those exact words. I’d have gone anyway if it hadn’t been for the fact that it conflicted with a press screening of “Sugar,” the new film from the people who made “Half Nelson” a couple years ago. I’d heard very good things about this, and “Half Nelson” was an excellent film, so I skipped “Be Kind Rewind” and did “Sugar” instead.

I’m glad I made the switch. It’s not a brilliant movie, but it is a very nice one, about a kid from the Dominican Republic who comes to America to play professional baseball. The story definitely does not follow the trajectory you’d expect. Also, even though it is about baseball, it is not slow or boring, nor are there commercials every three minutes.

It was about 11:30 p.m. when the screening ended, but more merriment was yet in store. Weinberg had procured DVD screeners of several films playing at Slamdance, Sundance’s goofier, weed-smoking cousin, so a few of us gathered in someone’s hotel room to watch “Paranormal Activity.” It’s about a couple who set up cameras to try to capture the weird stuff that’s been happening at night in their house; bad things happen; terror occurs.

The movie’s pretty scary, actually, or at least the parts I was awake for seemed to be. When it was over I was semi-conscious and was permitted to sleep on the extra bed in whoever’s room it was. It was not the first time I’d fallen into a coma in a strange hotel room, nor will it probably be the last.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 11:30 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.