A Sundance-snowboarding pilgrimage had been beckoning me for years, and I was super excited to finally be there. So excited that I scarcely noticed the vultures circling as I approached a wall of ice on Park City’s “Glory Hole” run. One completely unglorious wipe-out later and I’m showing off my 5 new collarbone fragments in the medical tent.
From then on it was me vs. the Sundance “10-step test-your-will ticket groveling system”, ice pack in my shoulder sling, screening schedule in my back pocket. Here’s a video clip of the director and lead actor speaking to the audience after a screening of Sugar:
Park City’s an adorable little ski town, and most of the people I met on the shuttles or in line during my vicodin-dazed weekend were chatty and friendly. I suppose that’s par for the course when you’re the guy with the arm in the sling, and when you’re forced to cozy up to strangers for 45-minute waits in subzero temperatures. The colored numbers in the ticket picture testify to some of my failed wait-in-line episodes.
It actually took a day and a half for me to realize the best strategy to get day of tickets was NOT the number-queuing system at the cinemas themselves, but rather to hit the central box office every morning when they’d release leftover tickets for that day’s shows at every theater. Apparently the ticketing system was radically revamped this year – for the better overall, but with the side effect that a lot fewer people were stuck with tickets they didn’t want, hence the old “just show up” strategy didn’t play as well for last-minute hangers-on like me.
I Always Wanted to be a Gangster - four loosely intertwined sketches of wanna-be criminals failing adorably. Felt like a quintessential “light-hearted French comedy” film, though I can’t claim to have seen many French comedies. Black and white with subtitles, a little slow-paced but it suits the overall style. Never thought five aging nostalgic gangsters could be “cute” till I saw this.
No celebrity sightings, but I did manage to catch four films:
- Sugar – looks at the process a baseball player from Dominican Republic goes through when he’s recruited into the MLB farm system. Subtitles (Spanish) for parts of it. Solid film, great characters, earnest drama-documentary that doesn’t sell out for its rah-rah adrenaline rushes.
- I Always Wanted to be a Gangster - four loosely intertwined sketches of wanna-be criminals failing adorably. Felt like a quintessential “light-hearted French comedy” film, though I can’t claim to have seen many French comedies. Black and white with subtitles, a little slow-paced but it suits the overall style. Never thought five aging nostalgic gangsters could be “cute” till I saw this.
- Time Crimes - an ordinary guy relives the same sequence of events over and over again, gets caught in his own cross-hairs, and morphs into a criminal in order to keep people alive without altering events. Airtight time travel script, one of those puzzles where you begin connecting the dots along the way without it becoming predictable. Acting was descent, had Spanish subtitles – but hey, the rights to remake it have already been bought by a major Hollywood studio. Hopefully they’ll find a naked girl as smoking hot as the original one.
- Frozen River – a mother on the brink of losing her home gets entangled in, and financially addicted to, the smuggling of illegal aliens across the frozen St. Lawrence River. Good characters, plausibly dark/lurid scenario, though I felt the inconsistencies between her relentlessly selfless pursuit of family harmony and her apathy for the well-being of her cargo were tough to swallow. I guess they weren’t playing her up to be a saint, just someone we could sympathize with.
The busted bone was (is) a complete drag, but once I figured out how to tie my shoes and learned to avoid EVER putting on or removing a shirt (buttons acceptable, snaps preferred) I was good to go. Thanks to Jeremy for letting us use his place and to his dad for donating his button-up shirts to suit my new dress code!
