Blogging Sundance 2009

On Thursday night, the annual party/fiasco/event for Park City began. The generally accepted expectation was that the recession (depression?) would hurt attendance quite a bit. That doesn't seem to be the case. Once again, our town of 8,000 has filled up with 40,000 visitors, very few of whom seem to know how and where to drive. Restaurants and bars are full and there are no parking spots in the city. Just the same, it can be a lot of fun.

Julie is volunteering again this year. She works over at Eccles Theater, which seats about 1250 people. This means that it gets used for the movies that are more likely to draw large crowds. She will get to see quite a few movies as she works four days, starting on Tuesday.

So far we have seen 3 movies. All were pretty good. None were outstanding.

Brooklyn's Finest: This was a violent movie about the lives and personal challenges of several policemen in Brooklyn. The story was good and the production was excellent, but the violence was hard to get passed. Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke and Wesley Snipes were all excellent. Richard Gere was good, but we all agreed he was the wrong person for the part.

The Yes Men Fix The World: These guys are great. Two men go around duping the corporate world in ways beyond most of our imaginations, in an effort to make the world a better place. As one example, they were frustarted that Dow (who bought Union Carbide), never did anything to clean up the Bohpal, India chemical plant disaster. They built a web site that appeared to be from Dow and sure enough, got invited to do an interview (as Dow PR people) on BBC World. In the interview, they said that Dow was facing up to what it had done and was committing $12B dollars for clean up and reparations. Dow stock lost $2B in an hour and Dow had to come out and deny the whole thing. Hilarious and impressive. Check out their web site at http://www.theyesmen.org/

World's Greatest Dad: Sad. Funny. Well acted. This was Bobcat Goldthwait's second Sundance movie. He is a standup comedian turned director. The main actor was Robin Williams and he did a great job. He played the role of a dad with a real troublesome son. He goes through a huge range of dispair and happiness in ways that were always conflicting. I won't give it away, but it was good. Even better was the Q&A at the end of the movie. Putting Robin and Bobcat in front of an audience is hilarious.

More movie reports as we see them.