It's a measure of how successful the Sundance film festival has become that even my mom has heard of it. "When are you going to get to go to Sundance?" she'll ask at family dinners, and through a mouthful of potato casserole I'll mumble something about how I wouldn't want to go anyway because I've heard it's too cold, too crowded, the air's too thin, the movies are weak and it's all about celeb-watching now, not cinema. But I'm lying to her, naturally. Yes, I want to go to Sundance. What movie buff wouldn't? To be one of the first people to see something like sex, lies and videotape, Reservoir Dogs, You Can Count On Me, The Squid And The Whale or Once? C'mon. That's worth any case of the sniffles.
This year will be my first trip to the 'Dance–in fact I'm posting this from Park City, less than 24 hours before the first screening–and given how strong the programs have been over the last few years, I'm pretty excited. There are some films on this year's schedule that look pretty intriguing, including Sugar, a baseball drama from the creators of Half Nelson, and Man On Wire, a documentary about a man who once walked between the World Trade Center buildings on a tightrope. Just a month into the year, and I'll likely have seen some of 2008's most significant films, not to mention getting a nice week's vacation barely a fortnight after cleaning up Christmas. The only possible stumbling block is the heavy weight of expectation.
Of course I'm no festival virgin. I grew up in Nashville, former home to Sinking Creek, the kind of low-key regional fest that Sundance used to be, full of 35-minute 8mm documentaries about hard-luck Appalachian folk artists. And shortly after college, I trailed my future wife up to Charlottesville, VA, where each October the Virginia Film Festival combined (and still does) vintage Hollywood classics, odd new experimental films and premieres of late-fall awards-bait. After we got married and moved to Arkansas, I started driving one state over in March to check out Austin's SXSW film festival, the bastard child of its better-known music fest, and a good place to see some of the high-profile films that were a hit at Sundance but didn't get accepted at Cannes. And since 2002 I've been a regular in Toronto, the festival of festivals, where the best of Cannes and Sundance share space with the first wave of Oscar candidates and the superstars of world cinema.
So I consider myself something of a fest-vet, and I look forward to seeing how Sundance stacks up to the competition, in terms of organization, programming, and between-fest cuisine. I doubt I'm going to eat anything as satisfying as the street vendor hot dogs and Asian noodle bowls I pound down on the fly in Toronto. But here's what I do expect:
1. Temperatures as cold as the teats of the chilliest witch. I packed long-johns and thick socks and every handmade scarf my wife has ever knitted. I'm a southern boy, and I don't function so well amid the icy. However I did snip the right index fingertip off my gloves, so that I can operate my iPod Touch.