Hey look, it’s day 1 of my Sundance diary! And today’s only day 4! http://bit.ly/4F9x92 #sundance #slacker

We’re making the new guy, @foxtotally, stand in line for veterans such as @scotteweinberg, @drewathitfix and myself. Yay for noobs!

I’m enjoying the new Mexican place in Park City, especially since @Laremy is paying! And @rejects is here too! ¡Olé! #sundance

Day 1 (Thursday, Jan. 21)

Let us hie to Utah’s icy climes and the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, held each January in the frozen, picturesque wasteland of Park City and founded by a friend of Paul Newman’s named Robert Redford. This is one of the world’s premier festivals, and I’ve been lucky enough to cover it every year since 2000, when I was a young lad of 25. Now I am an old lad of 35, and while the festival has evolved in that time, one thing has remained constant: It is still very cold here in January. My efforts to increase global warming through massive overuse of styrofoam have been futile.

For the members of the press, a couple of changes at this year’s festival were evident immediately. There were no opening-night press screenings, for one thing, leaving those of us who couldn’t get into the public screening (i.e., most of us) with nothing to do, alone and unsupervised in Park City. The other change is that our beloved Yarrow Hotel, once home to two of the press screening rooms, is now home to zero of them. They’re using the space for public screenings now, and all the press screenings are across the parking lot at the Holiday Village, which is an actual movie theater, with actual movie theater seats and hilariously overpriced popcorn.

This year I’m staying at a rented condo with five other movie-website people, all of them strangers to me. It’s just like MTV’s “The Real World,” only fatter. From the aptly named site We Are Movie Geeks there’s Scott, A.J., and Jeremy. From Criterion Cast we have Travis and Rudie. Then there’s me, from all the places I’m from. Oh, and we have a seventh cast member, a female lady girl woman, who isn’t a critic or blogger but just wanted to come to Sundance to go to parties and movies and stuff. Since she’s of the opposite gender from the rest of us, she gets her own room. Scott and Jeremy are on the living room couches, and the other four of us are in bunk beds in the second bedroom. Long-time readers may recall that I’m something of a snore monger. Will sharing a room with three other people lead to controversy or murder? Find out!

Continue reading…

Misunderstood HOWL; thought it was HOWELL, about Thurston. Turned out to be OK, though.

And behold, on the third day of Sundance, Eric was smitten with nosebleeds, notwithstanding his cocaine consumption had been minimal.

For it is written in the Code of Douchebags that if you really hate a movie, that makes it OK to ruin it for everyone else. #sundance

If you’d like to have major parts of SPLICE deliberately and spitefully spoiled for you, follow @current_movies or @jlichman!

Hey, if any of you tweet peeps who follow me are in Park City, you should say hi. I can often be found at Burger King.

SPLICE is like Darwin’s Origin of the Species as interpreted by David Cronenberg. By which I mean it’s awesome.