Another Sundance come and gone. Different. Good. What's next.

I flew into SLC on Saturday night, the 17th, picked up my rental car (a fabulous Kia Rio - that's how I roll) and headed to Provo. After setting up in the generous accommodations, I waited to hear from Richard and the Birdmonster contingent, who planned on arriving around 1 am. Well they ran into issues in Nevada and never made it that night. So eventually I gave up and went to bed. The next morning, I still could not get in touch with Richard or the Birdmonsters and even though I was the keeper of the keys, I gave up on waiting and headed to Park City to start doing what I came for - watching movies. The waiting meant I missed a chance to see Cold Souls, so I'll have to be on the lookout for that as a future release, but I was able to pick up a ticket for Children of Invention. It was a story of two children, an Asian American brother and sister ages 10 and 6 respectively. Their parents are split (although only the boy understands this), the father is back in China and the mom is going from pyramid scheme to pyramid scheme trying to keep the family solvent. They lose their Boston house and move into an apartment complex still under construction by Chinese friends. When the mother gets arrested in one of her get rich quick pipe dreams, the children are left to fend for themselves and presume themselves to be abandoned. The brother sets a plan in motion to raise money and buy back their old house, by selling the inventions he and his sister have devised. The family is eventually reunited, but still in financial hardship. Impressive performances by the child actors (both first timers). Later in the week I would ride in the bus with both the kids and their dads. This was a strong start to the festival for me. While waitlisting a second film, EndGame, I got ahold of Richard and made plans to try and meet them, Shep and Pat at the Sundance Resort at 9pm to try and see Boy Interrupted. EndGame was a great movie, telling the backstory of the early negotiations between the ANC and the Botha/De Klerk government in South Africa, prior to the fall of apartheid. I appreciated learning more about that situation and the performances of William Hurt and Jonny Lee Miller were strong. The Q&A went long and I missed everyone at the Resort, but apparently they skipped Boy Interrupted anyway.

Monday was a three movie day, squeezed around a number of other events. Started out early with a showing of Old Partner, which turned out to be one of my favorites. It was a South Korean documentary following a 79 year old rice farmer and the ox he had worked with for 40 years. To see the relationship between man and beast was touching and to see the juxtaposition between the old ways and the new (with neighboring farms using tractors/pesticides) was heartbreaking. The there was quite a bit of humor in the guise of his wife's constant commentary. A very meditative film that got to me emotionally. Second I saw Everything Strange And New. Taking it's title from the pied piper story this followed a man who had the 'American Dream' and now was confronted with the realization that maybe it wasn't what he wanted after all. With very deliberate pacing (which I like, but I know many others think is too slow) he watches the relationships of his coworkers and friends and learns that what we want and what we need are usually not the same thing. Ultimately, he realizes he has what he needs and can ignore the pied piper that tells us we need more more more. I think this would be a hard sell for commercial success, but it was a film that I liked alot. After the film I met up with Richard, Pat and Shondene at the ASCAP music space to see Birdmonster in action. After their set and most of Meisha's we left to get something to eat. Returning from snacking we hung out in the green room and got to meet Wynonna Judd. She was extremely nice and spend close to half an hour talking with the Birdmonster guys. Then we all walked up Main Street to the Gibson Guitar Lodge for a photo shoot. Paparazzi galore, which translated into pictures/video of me on Defamer.com and Radar magazine's website (in the background of course). Here are a couple of my pics of it. Zack (of Birdmonster) is a cousin of Benjamin Bratt, so we headed to Prospector Square to see if we could get into his new film La Mission. There were six of us and we only managed to get three tickets. The others headed over to Eccles and got in to The Messenger. La Mission was a good film, set in SF's Mission District, dealing with violence and exclusion in the Hispanic community there. As it turned out those were the only films the band got to see, so it made their Sundance experience that much more memorable.

Tuesday started with Beyond Tomorrow, an Inuit movie by the same collective that created The Fast Runner. A very deliberate and emotional film. There is an anthropological element to these films as they preserve on film the survival skills of these people groups and showcase their tools and culture. The film itself is the story of two older women and the grandson of one who are given the task of drying fish on a separate island for the summer. They would be picked up at the end of summer and this was not an uncommon situation where some members of the tribe would be out of communication for several months on their given tasks. Drying fish on an island removed the chance of wild animals (or their domesticated dogs) raiding the food stores. Well one old woman dies and the other too are not picked up at summer's end. They make the journey back to the main camp to find that everyone has been killed by a disease and must face the harsh winter on their own. This forces them to make some very difficult decisions and brings us to a painful climax. Next I saw the documentary End of the Line, with Richard. It dealt with the dilemma of overfishing that is gripping the entire world. Some fantastic underwater cinematography paired with powerful information makes this an inspirational and action inducing look at where we could be headed if we do not take a hard look at our stewardship of this planets resources. Afterwards, Richard and the band had to head to SLC for another gig and some TV interviews, so they gave me the six tickets they had for Push and we said our goodbyes. I quickly sold the extra five tickets and settled in to see the eventual Grand Jury and Audience prize winner of the festival. This was a gutcheck movie about an obese 17 year old black girl in New York, who has undergone and continues to undergo tremendous abuse of all types and yet still looks at life positively. With the support of a few teachers she is able to overcome her horrific upbringing and progress down the road to vast improvement for her and her children. My final film for the day was Manure, for which I had high hopes, as it was the latest by the marvelous Polish brothers of Northfork and Twin Falls Idaho fame. It dealt with fertilizer salesmen in the 1950/1960's in the American midwest. It had the look and much of the oddness that I expected, but was disappointing to me. Some definitely funny moments, but it felt very flat in the long run. For the rest of the week I got to masquerade as Birdmonster's manager, since they bestowed his credential on me when they left. Definitely beneficial in getting into the various filmmaker lodges/passholder areas.

Wednesday caught me at Zion and His Brother, a film set in Haifa following two teen aged brothers testing the boundaries of their relationship and taking on the rest of the world at the same time. Both the leads are first time actors and their performances were amazing. One of my favorites. The second film of the day was my personal favorite of the festival. With several parallels with Me and You and Everyone We Know from 2005, this film stars a performance artist/musician who incorporates her performance art in the film. When she reveals to some friends that she has never been in love and doesn't really believe in it, they propose a trip around the country to speak with people from many backgrounds on their ideas of what love is and to see if they can change her mind. This is a hybrid film because the interviews with real people is more documentary, she recreates some of the stories people tell with the use of puppets and performance pieces. She resists throughout, but this is a very cute film and I left with a large smile on my face. Third film of the day was a film noir called The Missing Person, with spot on performances, chain smoking detectives, things not as they seem, deadends, twists, etc. Michael Shannon has to follow a man from Chicago to LA and then back to New York and in so doing figure out who the man is and why someone wants him to return to New York. A great modern homage to the genre. I tried to get into Sin Nombre as my fourth movie and was shut out. It happens at least once each year. So, I went to plan B and hit Motherhood at Eccles. I should have given it a pass. I should note that it is not necessarily a bad movie, in fact it will most likely be a box office hit, but it was not something I would normally have sought out and did not ring true at all to me. Obviously, I am not a mother, but I could not imagine this being remotely realistic and I did not enjoy it. It starred Uma Thurman, Anthony Edwards and Minnie Driver, all of who were at the showing, but none of that changed my mind.

Thursday was another early morning, starting at 8:30 with Adam, a story about learning to love. The title character is a highly functioning Asperger syndrome sufferer who develops a friendship with his new upstairs neighbor Beth. We follow the story mostly from Beths POV. It never gets cheesy and everything is handled in a sensitive way. I really like this film. Next was Unmade Beds, which had an impressive soundtrack and followed two primary leads Vera, a Belgian girl and Axl, a Spanish boy who find themselves living in a London squat as they work out their issues and personal journeys. A creative piece with plenty of musical performances and a mostly satisfying story. I tried to get into Art & Copy, a documentary on advertising, at the new Temple facility, but was too far back in the waitlist to get in. The Temple is a beautiful building from the outside and I wish I had had a chance to see more of the interior, although I was told by others that it was very similar to the Racquetclub space. After missing out of that I got a ticket to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I should have give it a pass. It was a hodge podge of short films duct taped together to try and assemble something movie like, there was little to make it cohesive and several segments seemed totally random. The basic premise was that the lead tries to move past a recent breakup by interviewing and analysing all/most of the men she is in contact with. Stereotypes abound. Luckily, my final film for the day was BurmaVJ a documentary about the leader of a band of civilians who risked their lives to get footage out of Myanmar during the past couple years. Especially during the protests and uprisings of the citizenry and the Buddhist monks in that country. These are truly brave people and the doc showed just what the risks they face are. It was personally interesting for another reason: my cousin Daniel is married to a Burmese girl, I grew up with friends in SF who were Burmese, and I would love to visit the country.

Friday, turned into an epic. It started with a great political farce, In The Loop. As one of the festival programmers said, if it wasn't so funny it would be terrifying. We follow the back and forth between British government and US officials as they misspeak, spin, cover, deny, and generally stumble blindly along and make matters far worse. And it is all too plausible. Great performances all around and I was overjoyed to see "Sledgehammer" in a large role. I spent a few hours in the filmmakers lodge and then chose to see Dada's Dance instead of Peter & Vandy. Both had seemed interesting, but maybe I chose wrong. I have to make a concession - it is entirely possible that a bad set of subtitling greatly changed the flow/feel of the film, but as it was there were far too many gaps in the story and un/under explained situations to feel like a product ready for public consumption. Set in China, a young girl, already a flirt with a reputation in her town, is told by her mother's boyfriend that she is adopted after she spurns his inappropriate advances. She sets off with a neighbor boy to find her real mother. What follows is a disjointed and unfocused set of misadventures.

That should have been an omen for my own misadventures to come. I left Park City about 5pm, and on approaching SLC ran into HEAVY fog. I returned my rental car, dropped off my luggage and went to read my book in anticipation of a 9pm departure to SF. Well, the fog did in 29 flights by the time the night was over. Mine was first postponed 90 minutes, the plane could not land from Tampa Bay and was diverted to Idaho. Another 90 minutes and a second attempt to land at SLC failed with the plane now being diverted to Las Vegas. This repeated until they finally got a larger plane and we were able to leave at 4 am. Of course this screwed up my ride to be picked up at the airport and I had to wait nearly 3 hours in SF for an Evans bus to Napa. And once in Napa, it took another 45 minutes for a ride to get free and come to retrieve me. So, by 11 am I was home and could jump in the shower, change and get over to church. Luckily the rest of the day went splendidly and our Chamber of Commerce awards dinner at the CIA was nearly flawless. Sunday was a recovery day and this morning I got four of my vaccinations in preparation for my trip. I got the prescriptions for two more oral vaccines and my malaria medication. I will still have to go to the county for a Yellow Fever vaccine and then I'll be set for the next two years. And I narrowed down my options for travel insurance so it looks like that will be far less than I had expected.

More coming soon.....