Slouching Away From Park City, 1/19.

It started to kick in about two weeks ago. Up until that point, I had taken the stubborn but empowered position that I had liberated myself from the Sundance cycle. "I'm not going this year," I'd tell people. "I can take a break from it."

Yes, I didn't need to witness Los Angeles trucked into Park City, UT for ten days. I didn't need to get the indie film jump on the rest of the world. I could do without the freezing temperatures, the lack of sleep, the uncomfortable screening rooms, whichever heiress or celebrity couple or bad boy arriving in need of some photo ops while wearing mukluks.

But. Press releases and party invites started to flood my email inbox. More info about movies came out (the recent New York Times article on An American Crime with Catherine Keener put me in a near panic: I'm going to miss one of my favorite actors do that?!?). Colleagues, many of whom I only get to see face-to-face at Sundance, wondered why I wasn't going. So now I'm feeling the withdrawal.

Sundance is the festival you love to hate. It's over-hyped, over-sponsored (well, not the festival itself, but product swarms to the place to rub against that movie magic), over velvet-roped. It's not a comfortable festival for journalists - for anyone, really - by any stretch of the imagination. We shuttle from makeshift screening room to tented waiting lines, wearing too little clothing for the cold mountain air, too much for the packed buses that take festival-goers from one end of town to the other. The party scene is considered by some as newsworthy as the films themselves, so we get no sleep in fear of missing the next big story. Good, quick food is hard to come by and it's expensive. People show up at your lodging unexpectedly, wanting a place to crash or party. I once had an entire film crew, in town with their dramatic competition film, show up, consume all the liquor and food in the place, and throw up in the sink (well, not all of them) while two aspiring producers tried to sleep through the melee in the next room.

While all these sorts of things are happening, I am actually trying to work. I've got to retain the images, sounds and plots from the four screenings I saw that day while in different stages of sleepiness and hunger. I have to decipher my chicken scratch notes as I type up something at three in the morning. Before a fitful few hours of sleep, I struggle to figure out what to see the next day - a nearly impossible task given the Sundance film catalogue's famously cryptic synopsis of the movies in the lineup. Sometimes this works. Imagine my surprise when the first rage zombie went cuckoo ka-ka in 28 Days Later. Sometimes it doesn't. I skipped Little Miss Sunshine last year as the write up emphasized the dysfunctional-family-on-a-road-trip angle. Ouch.

I'm sure Sundance will do just fine without me, but can I do fine without it? It's the time to see the movie trends for the upcoming year (looks like one emerging theme is "super screwed-up domestic situations" - see Black Snake Moan, the aforementioned An American Crime, Crazy Love, Hounddog), and my time to check in with film colleagues from around the country. Sure I can read them all online, but there's nothing like sitting next to a fellow critic during a particularly good or bad screening and then gage our initial reactions before scurrying off to the next film (it's fun to share opinions... and power bars!) I am going to miss an opportunity to see Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait for the third time, but I'm not going to miss this new spin trend for 2007, the pre-Sundance deal press release. (Woe is the film that is so hot that it has eclipsed its ability to generate buzz by getting picked up before the festival.) So I guess I'm going to have to give up this year's visit to the Airborne Lounge, test-driving VW Touregs off road with the stars, discovering the next big indie film and sitting through the next awful one. Whether I'll be fine or not, I'm sitting this dance out.

Posted by dwhudson at January 19, 2007 1:45 PM