We Can Sundance If We Want To

Of course Melissa beat me to the blogs about our adventures at the Sundance Film Festival. I've wanted to go several times in the last 13 years that I've lived close enough to go, but I've never had anyone to go with. (Go go go in that last sentence, eh?) As it turns out, I am not smart enough to buy tickets to a Sundance film and I cannot read a map to stop me from parking 10 miles away. I am smart enough to take Melissa, though. :)
After I looked over our 148 (or something) movie choices online last month, Melissa bought our tickets to "Arlen Faber" from the box office at Trolley Square. I didn't need to stay up until midnight on January 11th to be the first one in line to buy movie tickets online and then not be able to figure it out and go to bed hating myself, but it added to the Sundance experience. We picked it (and many others in case we needed a back up) because of Lauren Graham. That's why, right Melissa? So! Our date was set, babysitters were secured (and then abused when it took a lot longer than we thought) and we were off! (Wait, first I read Eric Snider's snide, two sentence review of Arlen Faber in which he concluded it was "poo." Awesome.)

We parked at the Whole Foods in Park City and waited nervously at the shuttle stop. We were correct in thinking we were doing it wrong, but we listened to the homeless woman who told us to wait for the brown bus. She was wearing the uniform, after all, and she talked about liking documentaries, so she clearly knew what was going on. (I found a photo of Bob Redford and Marisa Tomei wearing the Sundance uniform. The photo is complete with the celebrity stalker watching them in the background. Thanks to Melissa it was impossible for me not to notice that Mr. Redford and Ms. Tomei resemble a comfortable old lesbian couple. Nice.) I felt like everyone was looking at everyone else very closely to make sure they weren't in the midst of a celebrity without knowing it. We caught the second bus to the Eccles theater at 12:05 and our movie started at 12:15. We got there just in time to get seats at the top of the balcony.

"Arlen Faber" was not the best movie I've ever seen, but it also wasn't "poo." Melissa gives a great story summary on her blog, so I'll skip that. I laughed a few times - not as many times as the writer/director probably hoped. (I would have been louder if I'd known beforehand that the writer/director was in the audience watching his movie with us. The woman in front of us probably knew - she was laughing and throwing her head back like she was auditioning for Best Audience Member.) My favorite was Arlen buckling a 7 year-old kid into his unbelievably complicated car seat and wishing him luck on his trip to the moon. It was unexpected, so kind of funny to me. The story was pretty disjointed and the characters weren't consistent in their actions, but as Melissa pointed out, Beverly Hills Chihuahua made it to the theaters... The last scene was especially predictable and lame. Sadly, I read an interview with John Hindmann in which he expressed great pride in the last scene because he and Jeff Daniels (the star) wrote it together. Um. Good job, guys.

My favorite part of the whole thing was the question-and-answer session with John Hindmann (the writer/director) after the movie. He was so important! It was fascinating to hear about how and why he made the movie and yet I wanted to roll my eyes. Fun. I sort of got a picture of it.
It was standing-room-only in the buses on the way back to our car. We could have made a documentary of our journey back to the car and it would have been longer than half of the movies at Sundance. We hurried and bought snacks in between buses so that I could add Gross Pop Tart to all the conditions necessary to give me a nasty headache. (Stinky bus full of teenagers swearing and throwing pennies? Check. Smell of cigarette smoke and bus fumes? Check. Nothing to drink since breakfast? Check.)

Overall it was a very fun experience and I'm so glad Melissa was willing to go with me. Now I know how not to do Sundance, too. :)