I (Heart) Not You: Sundance 2008, R.I.P.

This was the second year I volunteered at Sundance. You may remember when I wrote about my first year volunteering at Sundance on my old blog Beat Jeremy Coon.

I don't plan to volunteer a third time. Enough is enough. I didn't have a bad time or anything, but I don't want to go back unless I'm going as a filmmaker. Why should I be de-icing sidewalks when inferior filmmakers like Clark Gregg are walking down the path I cleared with a cocky strut? They should be slipping and I should be strutting.

I know everyone wants me to compare this year to last. That's how people make sense of coincidental and random happenings. This year I networked with two film guys, a significant improvement over last year, when I networked with one. Especially since the guy I networked with last year mainly just seemed afraid.

I met a filmmaker this year who lives a few blocks from me and, incidentally, called me handsome almost immediately after I introduced myself. A far cry from terror, and hopefully we'll collaborate on something, though we haven't met up in Brooklyn yet.

All I can say about Sundance 2008 is "attack of the doppelgangers, people!" This year most of the people I met looked almost exactly like people I knew last year. That wouldn't be so strange, except that as soon as I saw the similarities, the original version would come up and start talking to me and the doppelganger! Not supposed to happen. Only in Utah, right?

Last year I had a brush with death on the icy Utah highways when a car slipped into my lane from the wrong side of the highway, and I tapped my brakes and spun out, almost into a ditch. This year I had a less dramatic brush, but one that left a bruise. While walking up Main Street, where all the free junk is, I heard a creaking noise, then a crashing noise, then felt a sharp pain in the back of my jawbone.

A monster icicle had fallen and exploded, sending frozen water shrapnel everywhere. It could have murdered someone if anyone had been closer. A father next to me even took some perverse pleasure in this, telling his little children, "You kids were lucky today, you almost got killed, ha ha!"

Oh, and I was in the New York Times!

My first day on the job, I was out putting Sundance banners on barricades, The Times was there, and I finally got my close-up, Mr. Demille.

I guess it's not soooo close. That's me in the brown coat, watching someone work.

I have to admit that my new position this year as a barricade dresser, de-icer and propane tank replacer worked out better than I imagined.

The first couple of days were bad. I had almost nothing to eat both days and as a consequence, I was turning into a misanthrope. Plus, originally I was told I'd be working four hours a day, and then when I signed in, they told me 8. It ended up being more like one to two hours a day. It was worth it.

The housing meant I could see more movies this year, so I saw 41 instead of the 20-something in '07. So this entry may be longer than last year's. To mitigate that, I'll try to write only short capsules for each film. Like last year, I'll order the movies from best to worst. That way you can stop reading after 39 or so.

American Teen: You should always start a film festival by watching the the second best movie in the festival, and end the festival by watching the first best movie. I messed up that rule in regards to the start of the festival. I saw "I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster" first (the 36th best movie) when I should have seen "Towelhead." But at least I did finish with the best movie, American Teen.

The premise of American Teen is: "look, teenagers in a high school." Not too original sounding, I grant. Centenarians in a high school would be more surprising, or even babies in a high school. It's like, number one, who put the babies in the high school? And two, do they still have cliques in baby high school even though babies can't talk or think yet? Well, they should, because then there would be the punk/skater babies, and everyone loves a baby with a mohawk.

But American Teen is a documentary, and a documentary about baby high school would be unethical, because it would be a lie.

Real though it may be, American Teen is fascinating. Director Nanette Burnstein picked her location and her characters flawlessly, discovering the previously unmapped town of Warsaw, Indiana (not to be confused with where I grew up, Jastrzębie Zdrój, Texas) and recruiting Warsaw High School's "queen bee", basketball star, most awkward nerd, and most dynamic "arty misfit" to be followed by cameras almost every single day of their entire senior year.

What she discovered is that high school reality, if condensed, is just like high schools in the movies. Well, maybe more "My So Called Life."

I loved every second of it, so I was surprised to see that Variety's review had some complaints: "one thing missing is any sense that 'American Teen' has something specific to say about teenagers now. There's nothing about the cliquishness, personal problems, alcohol usage and apparent sexual activity here that's any different from the Middle American teen experience a generation or more ago."

Fool, of course all that stuff is the same; high school doesn't change! Even Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary "High School" resembles high school today. And surely when that came out, people complained that Wiseman's depiction was too reminiscent of high schools in the 1940s.

What has changed in the lives of teenagers, if "American Teen" is to be believed, is that technology seems to have given them some amount of freedom. The best example of this is when a topless photo of one of the students gets emailed to just about everyone in the school. Just kidding, that's an example, but not the best one.

Also, the students here seem a little more self-aware and conscious of their world and how it manipulates them than I remember most people in school being. At times they act like the characters from Scream, who know they're in a horror movie, so they study the classics to learn the rules. Of course everyone is aware of cliques in high school, but these kids seem especially articulate about the impossibility of escape and quite accurately predict the failure of one romance because it crosses clique lines.

As I said before, Burnstein picked her stars well.

The most powerful girl in the school, Megan Krizmanich, has a dark side that gets her in trouble and threatens to undo her dream of going to Notre Dame, the school where her dad and almost all of her siblings went. Colin Clemens, the sports star, is a lot like Chris Klein's goofy and amiable jock from Election, but smarter. And with dire consequences looming.

Jake Tusing, the geek, is paaaaaaainfully awkward yet certifiably girl crazy, sabotaging himself every second there is in a minute. "Boy, I'm such a loser, aren't I?" he'll say to his date when he brings her to the dance slightly early. Even worse, he'll up the ante with something like, "at least you're a loser too!" No wonder jocks are popular. What is a girl supposed to say to someone who says, "There's a grease spot on the table because I put my face there"? Nothing. And that's exactly what she does say.

He doesn't even have the nice guy thing going for him, as he discloses his strategy of going after a Freshman transfer student because she hasn't met anyone yet and thus wouldn't have realized how much of a loser he is compared to everyone else.

The star of the movie is unquestionably Hannah Bailey, the "arty misfit" who seems to be the victim of a horrible mix-up. What is she doing going to high school in this dead-end small town? What's she doing in high school, period? In just about every scene, she bursts with giddy energy, wit, emotion, spontaneity and talent, qualities generally looked down upon in school.

In all respects, she's above the world she's been unjustly sentenced to. Yet interestingly, she's not immune from its machinations. She actually appears to be the most vulnerable of all.

Even hopeless Jake fares better after his break-up with the Freshman transfer student than Hannah does with her own heart break. After she's dumped, she's so traumatized, she doesn't go to school the next day. Or the day after that. Or after that. Until she's been gone so long, she's in serious danger of being kicked out. No! Don't throw Hannah into the brier patch!

She's the sort of high school oddity that other students tend to not understand at the time, only to later grow up and realize she was obviously the best girl there.

That could be why the audience - mostly men past high school age - seemed to fall so in love with her. One guy shouted, "We love you Hannah!" almost every time she came on the screen. "You fool!" someone else shouted at a guy in the movie who turns down Hannah's offer of a walk. Nobody said "Marry me, Hannah!", but would I be shocked if some people were thinking it? Hardly.

I liked Hannah too, but as a movie character. That's as far as my affection ever goes to anyone on the silver screen, whether fiction or documentary. There is a strict line between audience and movie characters that literally and physically cannot be crossed. What are these people thinking? That she's going to crawl out of the screen and propose to some random audience member who yelled out something idiotic? If she did crawl out, it would be to laugh at these people. Nobody tried to climb into the screen to marry Hannah, though, probably because they didn't want to be stuck in Warsaw, Indiana.

What's most amazing about the film is how perfectly it follows Hollywood story structure. There's all these problems in the beginning, and by the end, all of them are resolved in the most audience friendly way possible.

The story thread with Colin, the star basketball player, even has a distinct moral. By about the middle of the movie, his fame is dimming; his dad has been pushing him to act like the star he is and dominate the court, but he starts to falter, and dad warns him in an American Soldier type development (see my review below) that he can't afford to pay for his college without a scholarship, so if Colin doesn't improve, he'll have to join the army. Which Colin really doesn't want to do.

How Colin improves - if he does, since I don't want to give anything away - is how just about everyone improves in sports movies. But it's more satisfying and hilarious here because it's real.

Also impressive is the sheer volume of intriguing details and surprising foreshadowing Burnstein was able to capture because she filmed non-stop. In one quick shot, we see a subtle facial expression on one character and we know someone else is about to be dumped, and then that's what happens.

In another case, we see the beginnings of a relationship between two people who have never met just by a character's smile. Variety blames the magic of excessive filming and editing for this, suggesting some of the footage may have been manipulated. If it was manipulated, that's still a credit to Burnstein, because that makes her the most brilliant manipulatress at Sundance this year.

Thanks to the magic of theatrical distribution, you can see American Teen in theaters in July. You should. Not only will you be seeing the best movie at Sundance, you'll be seeing one of the best movies of the year.

Towelhead: Apparently this movie was a bomb at the Toronto Film Festival, so they must have totally redone it from scratch, because it's a masterpiece now. It's the directing debut of Alan Ball, who wrote American Beauty and Six Feet Under. I saw American Beauty kind of recently, and you know what? As much as I loved it when it came out, it doesn't hold up at all. It's embarrassingly self-conscious in its suburb hate and worship of beauty, and it just doesn't work now.

As for Six Feet Under, I've only seen two minutes of that show. The first minute was a guy being split in half by a malfunctioning elevator. I changed the channel after that, but then came back later in the show to see someone describing that death and someone else puking in response. So it wasn't Alan Ball that drew me to this screening. It was the title: Towelhead. This being Sundance, I figured they'd be handing out free towels at the screening. They didn't, but so what? I loved the movie anyway.

Towelhead is based on Alicia Erian's novel of the same name, even though as I was watching the movie, I thought Alan Ball had come up with all the insane stuff that happens in it on his own. It's good he didn't. It would have been nothing but elevators splitting people in half and floating plastic bags. Instead, Towelhead is about a newly pubescent half-Lebanese girl named Jasira whose mother sends her to live with her Lebanese father in Houston after finding out that her own boyfriend helped Jasira shave her bikini line.

But Houston isn't free of predatory men either, and they all kind of descend upon Jasira and try to control and exploit her in some way. There's the racist army reservist next door (Aaron Eckhart) whose fear of Arabs has its limits - his attraction to Jasira. The kid at school who wants nothing more than to take Jasira's virginity. Jasira's father, who feels obliged to be the strict Arab father, even as he attempts to embrace American culture. And the do-gooder neighbor couple, who wants to protect Jasira from all of these people.

One intriguing thing about the movie is Jasira's reaction to all these people. She is a victim, but somewhat culpable in her own mind because she she's not asexual, and though she's not happy about the things that happen to her, she is able to deal with them.

What pisses her off the most is probably when the kid next door calls her a "towelhead," which is not only offensive but totally absurd, since neither she nor anyone else in the movie ever wears a turban. Even if someone did, it wouldn't be her, since women don't wear them. That's what's great about the title. Not the free towels it promises, but how perfectly it sums up the stupidity of stereotypes.

Jasira's father (Peter Macdissi), who is trapped between Middle-Eastern and Western culture and hilariously besieges Jasira with constant contradictions - including his own racism against her African-American boyfriend - is one of the movie's highlights.

Horton Hears a Who: This wasn't at Sundance, but my brother Miles was an animator for it, so I wanted to give it some publicity before it comes out on Friday. I saw it at the "premiere" at the Ziegfeld, and I have to say, I really liked it. I hadn't read the book in a while, so I forgot what a profound story it is. Horton is an elephant who discovers a flower with a spec on it: a spec that turns out to contain an entire world, Whoville. Substitute "earth" for "Whoville," and you've got the story of our planet.

Horton Hears a Who, the book, was the precursor to Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and the last shot of Men in Black, when the camera pulls back and keeps pulling back out of the planet and galaxy until we see that our universe is a small part of an alien's toy marble. It's all about perception, folks, and Dr. Seuss knew that better than anyone. Now someone - my brother - has finally done the good doctor justice.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster: A documentary about steroids in America. I didn't particularly want to see this at first, because I don't really care about steroids, but this movie made me care. Filmmaker Chris Bell puts himself in front of the camera as he investigates the truth about steroids, what drives people to use them (the American obsession with being number one is one culprit), and even how steroids has affected his own family, as both his brothers use them.

When there's a documentary with the filmmaker in the movie, Michael Moore comparisons are inevitable, and Chris Bell puts the one-sided muckracking of Michael Moore to shame. Bell has some tough interviews with people, including with a father on a foolish anti-steroid crusade because his son had used steroids before committing suicide (he was also on anti-depressants known to have suicide as a possible side-effect).

But Bell doesn't ask questions to piss people off, agitate them, or make them look stupid. He asks questions to try to figure out the truth, and as I've heard two people comment, Bell asks exactly the questions the audience wants him to ask.

One of his most memorable interviews is with Congressman Henry Waxman (D, California), the man most responsible for holding the Congressional hearings on steroid use in baseball. As Bell asks the most basic questions about steroids, Waxman strains to show even the slightest hint of knowledge about the drug he has essentially put on trial, and has to keep asking his assistant for information. Amusingly, or maybe disturbingly, Waxman even believes the drinking age to be 18, until his assistant corrects him (it's actually 21).

The anti-steroid hysteria comes across as a farce here, but then there's the family aspect, which adds an emotional depth to it. Bell's mom struggles to deal with the fact that all of her kids have experimented with this drug, and one of her big goals as a parent was to make sure her kids never did drugs. And Chris's brothers lament that steroids may have helped them get bigger and stronger, but they still haven't achieved their dreams.

Documentary Shorts Program: I didn't go out of my way to see short films this year, but I'm glad I stumbled into this program. Probably the best of the bunch was "La Corona," about a beauty pageant at a women's prison in Columbia. Each cell block nominates a representative, and the contestants battle it out in beauty and talent competitions, the standard beauty pageant things, except they're in jail, which steals a little from the joy of winning. The other shorts verged almost to the experimental, but just enough to be innovative yet not unwatchable. I liked them all.

The biggest crowd pleaser featured two old Irish women smoking and debating with each other about whether they should quit smoking. Another was about a paralyzed guy who has learned to find as much pleasure in a kiss as he used to through sex.

And I really loved "Kids & Money," a collection of interviews with kids in Los Angeles from different economic backgrounds and how having or not having money affects them. All of the kids come across as intelligent, but my favorite was Emmanuel, a relatively poor Jewish kid who confesses to a predilection toward designer clothing that his family can't afford.

At one point while he's talking about how his family used to have money and then suddenly didn't, a chicken walks into the screen in the background, pecking the ground for food. Funny how having a chicken makes someone seem especially poor, when if you think about it, someone who has a chicken is one chicken richer than someone who doesn't.

Man on Wire: A documentary about Philipe Petit, the French guy who did a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the 70s, without getting permission first.

The movie has extraordinary original footage of his less ambitious earlier high wire walks, like at Notre Dame, but for some reasons his co-conspirators didn't bother to film his big climax at the twin towers. No matter, they got some beautiful photographs, and the recreations do an excellent job of showing how they sneaked into the towers and put up the wire without being caught.

This is the sort of movie that makes you wonder, "hmm, am I really doing everything I could to squeeze the marrow out of life?" Because you're not. And the World Trade Center being gone is no excuse. Stop reading this and go squeeze that marrow. And Rhys, you stop writing this. Go. GO!

An American Soldier: A documentary about one of the most successful Army recruiters in the country, Clay Usie. Besides being powerful and charismatic, one of his main advantages, the movie suggests, is that he's based out of a poor small town where the kids don't have prospects or money or anything else to do.

But we see it's not only about that in the brief subplots about the other recruiters at his station, all of them miserable failures in face of the unpopularity of the Iraq war. Unlike them, Usie exudes a confidence and a genuineness that had me about ready to enlist. Even his verbal gaffes like, "Let's call an ace of spade an ace of spade" - which he has a lot of - are charming. He may be sending these kids off to their likely demise, but he does seem to care about them and believe in the foolhardy mission eager to gobble them up.

He believes so much that at the funeral of one of the soldiers he recruited, he tries to recruit the surviving younger brother of that soldier. He's downright unflappable. He'd probably recruit someone even if he knew for a fact they would die in the war. He'd probably go back to the war even if he knew he was going to die. But for what?

It reminds me of the stunt woman who died for Gone Fishin', the worthless Joe Pesci/Danny Glover comedy that gets a 6% fresh on rotten tomatoes. That film was not a worthy cause for anyone's death, even someone who signs up knowing they're putting themselves at risk. The Iraq War is the Gone Fishin' of international relations. And Clay Usie is the Joe Pesci.

The Wave: A German film about authoritarianism, the suppression of individual identity, how easy molded are the youth, the demonization of outsiders, the willingness to commit atrocities against your better instincts in order to fit in, the lust for power, and group-think that leads to extreme violence. Not a very surprising theme coming from the country that produced filmmakers like Fritz Lang, Werner Rainer Fasbinder and Werner Herzog. And Nazis.

A rebellious teacher in a German high school who believes in "rock and roll high school forever" is ready to teach a class on anarchy for the school's "project week" when he learns he has to teach autocracy instead. At first he's bummed, but when he figures out how to make authoritarianism fun and interactive, he gets into it. So too do his students, who are disturbingly quick to become obedient subjects of the regime he cooks up, The Wave.

They are soon dressing in white button-up shirts, excluding outsiders, and greeting each other with their secret hand signal: pointing their hand toward the sky, curving it back down, then flattening it out - a literal wave, unlike the sloppy and inefficient American version of flapping our hands from side to side. And that's just the beginning of the week.

The depiction of German youth seems right on. The dialog is natural, the characters are distinct even as they're trying to blend into a mass, and the burden of their Nazi heritage and their subsequent anti-patriotism weighs on them; when Herr Wenger asks them to name one authoritarian government on the first day, and nobody answers, he chastises them, "Oh, come on." "The Third Reich," they groan, leading to what must be a common debate about their responsibility for something that happened before they even existed.

Having a national past like the Germans do can encourage skepticism of authority and a healthy self-awareness, but it can also lead to resentment and a longing for a group identity to be proud of. This could be why The Wave quickly takes on a dangerous life of its own.

I like movies that are about ideas, and this is a smart and entertaining exploration of how far humans will go to find and maintain some kind of identity. At times, rarely, I thought The Wave was almost too much of an idea movie, just out to prove its thesis. But I shouldn't complain. At least it has a thesis.

Yasukuni: A fascinating documentary (what documentary isn't "fascinating"?) about Yasukuni, the controversial shrine in Tokyo dedicated to Japan's fallen soldiers. If it weren't for Japan's aggression during WWII and the Rape of Nanking, nobody would mind this shrine so much.

But because even Japanese soldiers who decapitated civilians all over Asia are enshrined at Yasukuni, as well as non-Japanese people who were forced to fight for the Japanese, it is quite controversial. Especially when the Prime Minister considers a visit.

The Chinese film crew, perhaps aware of their perceived bias, take a very observational approach. There are hardly any interviews, and the main interview they did do isn't illuminating at all. The subject of the interview, the man who forges swords at the shrine, is like a prole in 1984, completely unable to say anything helpful or remember anything interesting about the shrine's past. Yet just seeing him for minutes just thinking, unedited, is remarkable.

But beyond this, there is less editing here than I can remember in any documentary. Instead of cutting back and forth between various stories, Yasukuni follows individual sequences from their beginning until their end, and then moves to then next one.

One involves an American who comes to the shrine to protest in favor of the Prime Minister visiting the shrine. He expects to be a crowd pleaser, and he does accumulate some fans, but his American flag upsets the hard liners who don't care if he's pro the shrine if he's waving a non-Japanese flag around there. Eventually the police come and make him leave because he's causing a disturbance.

In another sequence, some protesters chant against the shrine during a performance there, and angry shrine partisans chase them down and try to attack them. The movie follows the slow-paced chase the entire way until the protesters (accused by one angry man of being Chinese) are cornered, and then saved by the police.

Unfortunately, this will probably not be distributed here, not even on TV. It's just too controversial. Just kidding, it's too poorly shot. One reason documentaries have editing is to disguise shaky shots and blurry moments and parts where nothing is happening, but Yasukuni avoids making those cuts. There's even one long segment in the rain at night where something was going on at the shrine, but I had no idea what. Yet for me this was part of the appeal. I guess I'm probably not the only one who feels this way, but I'm not sure if there's enough to merit distribution of any sort.

The material really is fascinating, though, and the shrine comes across as fairly harmless, despite all the screaming. Like an inanimate Jim Holt, people make the shrine into what they want it to be, and they judge others by how they see it.

If you're against the shrine, you have no patriotism and you don't understand what it means to be Japanese, and if you're for the shrine, you are a historical revisionist and a war monger. Yasukuni is about the contradictions of growing up in any country that doesn't have a spotless past. Which is every country. Except Switzerland.

Besides Nazi gold.

The Wackness: Don't worry, the title makes sense when you see the movie. The Wackness is about a hip-hop-loving recent high school grad/small-time drug dealer in Manhattan in the 90s (Luke Shapiro) who trades pot for therapy sessions with Ben Kingsley and falls in love with the daughter of his shrink, that other girl from Juno. This was a lot of people's favorite movie at Sundance. I liked it too, but not as much as I liked American Teen, Towelhead, Bigger Stronger Faster, the Documentary shorts program, Man on Wire, American Soldier, The Wave or Yasukuni. But I did like it more than all the movies below.

Smart People: With Juno and now Smart People, I could be convinced to see just about any movie with a role for Ellen Page. Or Thomas Haden Church, for that matter. They steal the show from Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker in this story about a professor (Quaid) who is over-analytical yet totally self-absorbed and thoughtless.

Quaid's pretentious professor finds potential love with Sarah Jessica Parker, a nurse who treats him for a concussion he achieves through sheer arrogance, but his affection for his dead wife, his instinctive elitism and his meddling young republican daughter Ellen Page threaten to undermine the one thing that can save him. Thomas Haden Church is Quaid's parasitical and mostly carefree adopted brother whom Quaid hires as his driver after the concussion.

Disturbed by Ellen Page's determination to exclude everything fun about life in her quest for the perfect SAT score, Church sets out to teach her how to live, which backfires horribly when she falls in love with him. How he solves this - by hiding - is one of the many funny surprises in the film. I don't mean to take away from Quaid. He's good too. But the real reason to see this is Ellen Page in her Juno riff and Haden Church in his Sideways spin-off.

Fear(s) of the Dark: Essentially a collection of animated nightmares. The only one I can remember right now takes place in a small town in Japan, where the new girl to school is picked on, so to prove her cred, she goes to a graveyard known to be haunted by the ghost of a murderous Samurai. Yes, the ghost exists, and unfortunately, he's still murderous as ever.

I liked the other segments too, even if I can't remember them right now.

The only one that didn't quite make sense for me was a segment interspersed throughout of a woman's voice describing fears that can only be described as liberal guilt. She's worried about contributing to global warming, having more money than other people, possibly being racist, etc. This would make sense as a single realistic segment to contrast with the more outlandish and violent fears people have, but as a sort of narration to the movie, I don't understand its purpose.

Slingshot Hip Hop: If you thought all Palestinians were suicide bombers, you're obviously a fool because there would be no Palestinians left; but if you're a hip-hop loving fool, you might learn something from this political doc, which argues that not all Palestinians blow themselves up or fire deadly rockets into Israel. Some fire verbal rockets and strap on verbal suicide jackets instead.

Slingshot Hip-Hop follows the lives of rappers in the West Bank, Gaza and The Territory of '48 (what Palestinians call Israel). Most of you are going to stop reading here, as the dominant view in the United States is that the West Bank and Gaza are illegitimate rebel provinces that must be reined in by the only legitimate country in the Middle East, Israel. While I agree with this position, at risk of alienating all of my readers, I must admit this is too simplistic a view.

Then again, the view of this movie - that Israel deserves to be slandered ceaselessly in scathing hip-hop attacks - is simplistic too. The hip-hop artists profiled in this film, some of whom live in Israel, are pretty relentless in their hatred for the Israeli occupation, and the movie is on their side the whole way.

Some Jewish leaders said Steven Spielberg was "No friend to Israel" after he made Munich, a not-so-flattering portrait of Israeli-vengeance in the face of Palestinian terrorism. Well, Jackie Salloum, director of Slingshot Hip-Hop, is even less of a friend to Israel, if such a thing is possible.

The documentary opens with the group that purportedly initiated Palestinian rap - DAM - which lives in Lyd, in Israel. The founder of the band saw a Tupac music video as a teen, immediately related to him and his hood, and learned English so he could rap like Tupac. Eventually he realized his English rapping was horrible, decided to rap in Arabic, and DAM was born.

Young, hip Palestinians soon love them for their break-out song featuring the refrain"Who's the terrorist? You're the terrorist!" By that DAM means Israel, not their fans. I guess a more nuanced rhyme like, "Who's the terrorist? Not Palestinians and not Israelis, only Hamas and Hezbollah" isn't as crowd-pleasing.

In one of the movie's best scenes, a member of DAM keeps calling over a random little kid to hang out with him and the film crew, but the little kid just ignores him. "His loss. I was going to give him a fish," he jokes. Well, Israel's cool, but these guys can't be so bad either, you realize.

Other Palestinian rappers - inspired by DAM - grow big in The West Bank and Gaza, and one of the most damning critiques of life as a Palestinian is that none of these rappers are allowed to meet, as influential as they are on each other. That's because Gazans can't leave Gaza, West Bankers can't leave The West Bank, and the '48ers in Israel can't go to either.

Gazans are the worst off, as they can't even drive the few mile distance between the two major cities in 26-mile long Gaza without waiting 5 hours at a checkpoint. You can see why Palestinians resort to hip-hop. What a hellish existence. There can't be many worse places to live.

But is hip-hop really the answer?

Well, I'd much rather see DAM Vs. Matisyahu in a rap/reggae-off than rockets, suicide bombings and school massacres vs. military retaliation. But that wouldn't accomplish much either.

It's unclear what the rappers in the movie are asking for exactly. Like people on both sides, they rap about what's wrong, but they don't have a specific solution. They don't claim to want the end of Israel, though I doubt that would upset them very much. It just seems like they're pissed. But instead of channeling that anger into violence, they bust rhymes. So that's good.

A Raisin in the Sun: This is an ABC TV movie, but Sundance premiered it, and I gotta say, to really appreciate it, you have to see it on the big screen. Not really, but I know I would never have watched it on TV, so I'm glad I saw it at Sundance.

Sean Combs stars as Walter Lee Younger, a working class man in Chicago whose get-rich-quick schemes always fail, and whose family is starting to doubt him.

Of course the major theme is racism in America in the 1950s and how it affects African-American identity and the struggle to survive. It opens with a voice-over from Morgan Freeman, which is the worst cliche in the world by now, but this is solid material and the cast (which includes Clair Huxtable) is good enough for it, even though Sean Combs probably wouldn't have got the part if he weren't the producer.

The Yellow Handkerchief: I would never have seen this movie if my friend hadn't dragged me, purely because of the title. It sounded disgusting. I mean, The Yellow Handkerchief? Why is the handkerchief yellow? Yuck! Luckily, it's not the reason you think, and the movie isn't as boring as it sounds. It opens with that most reliable of movie openers, a man getting out of prison. The man is William Hurt, and hurt is the best description for him. This man's soul aches.

With no apparent direction now that he's done the time for his mystery crime, he goes to a dinner (a man's gotta eat) and is intrigued by a just-dumped Kristin Stewart and her white-looking Native American acquaintance Gordy. The trio take an automotive odyssey across Louisiana in which hard truths are revealed, pasts are stirred, the future is just a spec on the horizon, and friends are the family that you pick.

Despite all that, the movie works. And seriously, you will not believe why that handkerchief is yellow! Or is it handkerchiefs (Spoiler Alert)?

Incendiary: Another movie from Bridget Jones's Diary director Sharon Maguire that stars an American actress as a Brit. Does Maguire believe that to be born female in Britain is to be born without acting chops?

Apparently so, but Michelle Williams is good as "Young Woman," a bored British housewife who cheats on her dull husband with mystery man Ewan McGregor. When her husband and child are killed in a terrorist attack at a "football" (soccer) match during one of her run-ins with McGregor, her life collapses.

The major flaw is Young Woman's voice-over that obnoxiously addresses Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden is the one person in the world who isn't watching this movie. If he watched movies like this, he would never have masterminded the cataclysmic events of September 11. So everyone in the audience feels left out.

Narrative Shorts Program III: The best thing about Narrative Shorts Program III is that the screening accidentally opened with a short from Narrative Shorts Program IV. But some of the Program III shorts were good too. They were all mostly about sex, except one that was about an Inuit who kills another Inuit over a radio (see what technology does to these previously pure people?), and then asks another Inuit to cover for him.

The Drummer: This is a crime thriller with a drumming in the mountains twist that stars Jackie Chan's son Jaycee. Most of the time I was just happy knowing that I was watching Jackie Chan's son. But at the same time I was sad, because he wasn't doing martial arts. Will the family tradition die with Jackie?

I liked this movie because it takes place in Hong Kong and Taiwan, two places I want to go. Jaycee Chan sleeps with the young wife of a Hong Kong gangster close to Jaycee's dad, another gangster. The cuckolded gangster wants spoiled and rebellious Jaycee's hands chopped off, since he's a drummer in a rock band and thus it would be the ultimate punishment.

But instead dad (not played by Jackie Chan, a real missed opportunity) sends Jaycee to the safety of a small town in Taiwan, where Jaycee is seduced by the sound of drums echoing from a nearby mountain.

He joins the group, cocky and sure of himself, but the discipline of the mountain drummers' way of life teaches him a lesson. A lesson that can perhaps help him to defeat the evil gangster. The movie kind of loses its way at the end, but so what? It's not bad.

Time Crimes: I woke up early almost every day at Sundance, and the midnight movies were the unintended victims of this policy. I kept nodding off in Time Crimes, and as a result, the movie made almost no sense to me. From what I gathered, it's about a man who accidentally travels back in time for half an hour, which causes mayhem when he runs into different versions of himself.

It was a decent movie to fall asleep to, because it's very dreamlike.

Anvil! The True Story of Anvil: I saw this documentary about Canadian heavy metal band called Anvil a couple of days before I saw Sling-Shot Hip Hop, and the contrast made the failure of these Canadians even more stark. Anvil was a popular Canadian heavy metal band in the 80s that never quite took off, but somehow is still at it.

This movie follows their attempt to revive the band with a European tour and a new CD. Their generic, dated metal style has failed to evolve with the times, however, which amplifies the This is Spinal Tap elements to an even more absurd level. The one place that still loves them? Japan. You can always rely on Japan.

Hamlet 2: A weird high school theater teacher who delights in staged versions of big hollywood movies like Erin Brokovitch is forced to try something new when the precocious brat who writes theater reviews for the school paper keeps trashes his latest effort, and the school threatens to take away his funding. So he writes a sequel to Hamlet that tries to put a more positive spin on the famously sad tragedy.

There's a lot of funny moments, but in a sense it's too easy. A lot of comedies end with an absurd play, because people always laugh at absurd plays, and obviously that's the only way this movie could have ended. But it's funny, so who cares if they took the easy way out? This was the most expensive purchase at Sundance, for around $10 million, but it's a little hard to see why. Maybe it will make its money back, but it seems like they could have got it for less.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired: Before I went to Utah, this was the one movie I'd seen in the Sundance schedule of films that I for sure wanted to see. I didn't end up seeing it until my very last day, but missing it entirely wouldn't have been that big a tragedy. I was intrigued by the description, which seems to promise a new revelation about Roman Polanski's statutory rape trial and vindicate him in some way. But it didn't really do that.

The main critique of his trial is that the judge didn't know how to sentence Polanski and was asking different people what he should do, even asking a reporter for advice. That certainly shows incompetence.

But once indisputable evidence turned up that made Polanski look unquestionably guilty, the judge still wanted to give Polanski the lightest slap on the wrist possible. But the annoyance of dealing with it all was too much, and Polanski fled. His decision isn't the movie's fault, even if is cinematically uncompelling. It's just like, dude, why'd you flee?

Animated Shorts: More short films, this time animated. One was nominated for an Oscar, and I could see why. It was the best one.

Mermaid: A Russian film that will remind a lot of people of Run, Lola, Run, because the protagonist is a girl who dies her hair a weird color, and is obsessed with fate. Mermaid is better than Run, Lola, Run, but I didn't like Lola, so don't get too excited if you love that movie.

Alisa, who isn't really a mermaid even though she swims a lot, grows up in a small seaside town in Russia. We learn through one of those cutesy Amelie-like openings that she was conceived through a one-day stand with a mysterious sailor, and now she's desperate to find out who her dad is. She's always on the lookout for boats, even though her overbearing overweight mom is always telling her it's a waste of time. Eventually she does give up on finding him, and then on life, so during an eclipse, she pretends to go mute.

Even though there's something cliche about a protagonist who becomes a self-proclaimed mute, I hadn't eaten anything for a little over a day when I saw this - my blood sugar was low and I was starting to go misanthropic as a consequence - so the idea of a mute hero was appealing to me. My only complaint was she wasn't totally mute, because she would still speak in voice-overs.

So she's a mute in this small Russian seaside town, but she starts to hate the town, so she blows into the ocean, causing a hurricane that destroys their town and forces her mom to take her and her Grandmother to to Moscow. She's still a mute, and thus is stuck getting crappy mute jobs in Moscow.

Obviously she soon wants to kill herself, but someone else jumps off the bridge before she can, and she dives in and saves him, mermaid-like. The next morning she wakes up in his bedroom and he's forgotten the whole thing and isn't interested in her, even though she's in love with him and even resumes talking for him.

The rest of the movie is mostly about her trying to woo this apparently worthless man who never quite warms to her. One problem could be that he's a grown man, and even though Alisa is supposed to be 18, and the actress is even older than that, she looks like she's 14. But I'm not sure if the movie is aware of that.

This film could represent the beginnings of a new Russian cinema that isn't just depressing realism. A cinema unfortunately overly-influenced by movies like Amelie and Run, Lola, Run. But not quite as shallow. Mermaid's hyper-stylization isn't as arbitrary as in those films.

One of the visual moments I liked was when a giant ad is put up on Alisa's new building in Moscow, covering all the windows. Alisa cuts out the section of ad covering her window, which happens to be a woman's eye. When Alisa stands in the window, she becomes the woman's eye, which, well, looks cool, even if it doesn't do much for the story.

Not all of this stuff works, though. Every time Alisa ages so much as a day, there is a title card announcing Alisa's age down to the day. Alisa ages a lot of days, so we have to suffer through these obnoxious cards too often. Writer/director Anna Melikyan should have used these cards as a device to help her screenwriting, and then taken them out as soon as she was ready to film.

I liked seeing Russia this way, and even though the movie has a Euro-film sort of feel, it seems pretty distinct. But next time, I hope nouveau Russian cinema can think up a more coherent story.

Quid Pro Quo: If someone had told me this romance between a Nick Stahl in a wheelchair and a woman with a wheelchair fetish (the psychiatrist from The Departed) who wishes she were disabled was going to be my favorite movie at Sundance, I would have said they were insane. And I would have been right. Nevertheless, it's not too terrible. It's less gory than I thought it was going to be (nobody has any body parts cut off, even though the Sundance description eludes to that practice) and the relationship is interesting enough. There's also a decent twist near the end. Plus, seeing the woman from The Departed made me reminisce about The Departed, which is always fun.

Donkey Punch: The only reason I wanted to see Donkey Punch was because it is a horror film on a yacht, and regular readers of my blog Idea Province may know that I had an idea for a horror film in a slightly similar kind of situation (I'm not saying what exactly, since I took that idea off Idea Province and plan to write it as my next feature script).

Not too surprisingly, Donkey Punch bore little resemblance to the idea I had beyond the very superficial. Inferior as it was to my idea, I still liked it. Some British party kids gather on a yacht, thanks to alcohol, drugs, a misunderstanding, and a fatal sex position, everyone is soon killing each other. It's nothing like my next script at all.

Sunshine Cleaning: At the Q&A after Sunshine Cleaning, someone asked if the filmmakers were worried about comparisons to Little Miss Sunshine since Alan Arkin was in both films playing a free-thinking grandpa who encourages the quirky dreams and rebellious streak of his young grandkid.

The irritated-looking producer took the mic. "Uh. No." he said, and then paused to allow the question-asker to realize what a stupid question he'd just asked. "If Alan Arkin wants to be in your movie, you don't say no to Alan Arkin." What a jerk.

Admittedly, Alan Arkin was right for the role of Grandpa Joe in Sunshine Cleaning. He was nominated for an Oscar for the exact same role in Little Miss Sunshine. Except he was Grandpa Edwin that time. I was waiting for the scene where Grandpa Joe dies; it didn't happen, but there was one scene where we're supposed to think he died. I think the questioner made a good point.

But lead thesps are Amy Adams and Emily Blount, who play two sisters who start a lucrative business cleaning up bloody crime scenes. Their slogan is, "mop a killing and make a killing!" Blount plays a kind of wise-cracking Juno-lite, the aimless sister who has to be dragged into this and is more curious about the people who died than about the most efficient blood-removal techniques.

Blount tracks down the daughter of one woman whose death they clean up, and this leads to the most intriguing subplot as this woman grows attracted to Blount, and eventually Blount to her. She grows bored of her boyfriend, probably because she's just realized she's gay, and then suddenly she's not gay. And then she has to go on a road trip in the last scene to figure it out, I guess? So that was lame. The movie overall was just passable. But everyone was really excited about it because it had sunshine in the title, like Little Miss Sunshine.

George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead: It seems clear by now that George Romero's fate is to make zombie movies. This one is pretty good, but the Blair Witch/Cloverfield touch of having the entire film shot by the characters themselves makes him seem a little like an old man finally catching on to an already outdated trend.

In the Q&A, Romero claimed this movie was a satire of media and how it doesn't tell the truth, but you wouldn't know that from watching the movie. There are some scenes with the media, but they weren't exactly enlightening.

The very last scene, which has little to do with the rest of the movie and seems tacked on, is exactly like the last scene in Night of the Living Dead, in which we see humans brutalizing trapped zombies, and someone points out that humans may not be worth saving. I suppose this is a message that bears repeating: Humans torture zombies. What does that say about humanity?

THE CUT-OFF POINT. NOW WE'RE AT MOVIES I DON'T RECOMMEND.

Ballast: This was considered one of the best films of the festival, but I was really sleepy when I saw it, and it was way too slow for me in that state. I don't think I would have liked it much more if I'd been awake, though. When I was able to focus, Ballast reminded me of something David Gordon Green would have made in the "George Washington"/"All the Real Girls" stage of his career, before he sold out to Hollywood to direct stoner comedies like his adaptation of "A Confederacy of Dunces" and "Pineapple Express." And I much prefer Green's sell-out stoner comedy stage.

Ballast, directed by Lance Hammer, takes place in a mostly African-American small town. Two twin brothers run a general store, but then one of the brothers kills himself. This dead twin had a family, a wife and kid, whereas his surviving twin has no one.

The wife can no longer support her fatherless kid, who takes to robbing the surviving twin at gunpoint for drugs. But even though she was married to an exact duplicate of this surviving guy, there's bad blood between her and the duplicate, so his attempts to father the out-of-control son aren't welcome.

After sleepily mulling over the last scene for a few minutes, I was able to see what it was getting at. "Oh, the little kid redeemed himself and his Uncle," I realized. So I was proud of myself for arriving at some kind of coherent thought in my fog. But Ballast should have been a short film.

Assassination of a High School President: When I was sixteen, I took a screenwriting class at Richland Community College from Harry Preston, an old man with an old fashioned sensibility (he didn't think a good movie had been made since the 1960s). After getting to know my early writing attempts, he suggested I write something about a high school student investigating a crime at his school, a sort of high school Nancy Drew. If I'd written Assassination of a High School President, he would have been very, very happy.

This is the second movie I've seen with that stuttering kid from Rocket Science. I didn't like Rocket Science, except for the stand-out performance by Nicholas D'Agosto, mainly because that stuttering kid was such a weak protagonist. But in Assassination of a High School President, he plays a non-stuttering hard-boiled high school newspaper reporter, and I liked him a lot. The plot about stolen test scores and a cover-up is a little silly, but impressively intricate. Harry Preston would have wept.

PS: I demoted this movie from recommended to not recommended after seeing it again at the SxSW film festival. Though the movie doesn't hold up as well upon a second viewing, the main reason is that the first time I saw it was in a press screening with no Q&A, and this time there was a Q&A, and I really didn't like the director. I wasn't so into the writers either, but they didn't come across as awful people like the director did. The director quickly struck me as a little off in his insistence of calling this "my movie", even though he didn't even write it. Even if he did write it, he would still be obnoxious for leaving out the cast and crew. He corrected himself once when he accidentally made a reference to the screenwriters having some kind of creative influence, and clarified that it was him and only him. He constantly belittled his star, Reece Daniel Thompson ("I guess you could call him an actor.") and for some reason allowed Misha Barton's name to appear at the top of the credits, even though she's just a supporting character, and isn't even the biggest star in the movie (Bruce Willis is). There's a song in the movie that's different from how the writers originally wrote it, and he had to get his friend to re-write it. So he kept referring to "The writers' shitty song," which the writers laughed about at first, but eventually got more annoyed about as he kept saying it. The writers, for their part, were lame and not very charismatic or compelling. Plus, they didn't stand up for themselves against the director in the Q&A. The only one who came out okay was Reece Thompson. So go see his next movie. Or see Rocket Science, which at least has Nicholas D'Agosto in it.

Perro Come Perro (Dog Eat Dog): I went to this South American crime movie hoping for a sort of City of Dog, but it was just a pointless unconvincing crime movie with a hero you can't root for and a villain that's more annoying than anything. My dog ate my homework? More like my dog ate my movie!

The Last Word: Wes Bentley from American Beauty plays a grown-up version of that character here, a more cynical character who is less interested in beauty, but just as interested in death. He's a professional suicide note writer who tries to maintain his distance from his oft-dying clients, but things get personal when he falls in love with Winona Ryder, the sister of one of his success stories.

But she doesn't know how he knows her dead brother, and instead of coming out with it, he lies the whole movie. Which means the entire movie is him lying and then coming up with new lies when the previous lie fails. Eventually she discovers he's lying and she's upset. End of movie. Ricky Fitz wouldn't have lied.

The Escapist: This film would be a lot better if it were inspired by the comic book with the same name in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. Instead, it's just a dumb prisoner escape movie that gives us no reason to root for the prisoners because we don't know anything about them, and so can only assume they're mass murders who deserve to be in prison. The flashback structure doesn't help either, though it is necessary for the Jacob's Ladder like twist at the end.

Hell Ride: I didn't know anything about this when I went to see it, except that Quentin Tarantino produced it. So when it opened in grainy 70s exploitation movie style with a sunglass wearing hitchhiker getting a ride from a transvestite with mummies in the back of his car who has a device that records dreams to VHS, I figured Hell Ride was attempting to duplicate the inestimable worldwide success of Tarantino's Grindhouse. Even though Grindhouse wasn't so great, Hell Ride seemed like it would be pretty cool.

The transvestite insists on bringing the hitchhiker to his home for the night, where he meets his daughter. She's beautiful but, "Very sick. Oh, she's very, very sick." She seduces him to her bed anyway, where she proceeds to puke on him until he's covered in green and red and she's dead. He casually leaves her room and takes off his sunglasses. We see his eyes for the first time, the one place not covered in throw-up.

He goes to the shed to find the transvestite has melted his brain while attempting to record one of his dreams, which involves a squirrel and a woman's breasts popping. All of this is sheer brilliance, and then the hitch-hiker goes to the road, still soaked with a melange of colors, unhappy to find it's harder to find someone to pick him up now. Then the credits roll and we find out this was "The Rambler", the short that proceeds Hell Ride.

Hell Ride itself is a stupid, not horrible, but basically worthless movie about bikers. Rent The Rambler instead.

Choke: I wasn't a huge fan of Fight Club, though I recently watched it for the third time, and it started to grow on me. I still thought I should see this movie, based on another Chuck Palahniuk novel, because my friend was in it. Everyone is miscast, except for my friend, the script is bad, the whole look of the film is kind of phony, and Angelica Houston pulls an Alan Arkin, playing the same unrealistically irresponsible mother she played in Darjeeling Limited.

The only good thing was I got to meet Crispin Glover afterward. Hellooo! McFly!

Goliath: I walked out of this movie early so I could check my email. I didn't have any email, but I didn't regret my decision. Goliath is about a lonely man who loses his cat, whom he had named Goliath in better times, "because I thought it sounded cool." And yes, that's the best line of the film. Except maybe every line in the movie after I left. I can't honestly say.

This sounded like it could be the American "Chacun Cherche Son Chat," with a lonely man finally having to get out of his house to chase his cat around the neighborhood, and in doing so makes friends and falls in love. But instead, from what I hear, it ends with him macing a man in the hole in his neck he got from smoking. Actually, maybe that does make it the American "Chacun Cherche Son Chat."

J'ai toujours reve d'etre un gangster (I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster): This is a movie that starts off dumb and barely tolerable and gets slightly better as it goes on. I felt like a frog in one of those pots that comes to a boil so slowly, it doesn't realize it's being cooked. If the movie had got worse than it was in the beginning, I would have left without a hesitation. But by slightly improving, very slowly, you can't quite justify leaving, so you sit through the whole thing, mad at yourself that you didn't leave after the first minute.

This is yet another movie about ineffectual small-time crooks. Like a lot of these movies, it's divided into multiple stories that all interconnect superficially. The main location in the movie is a bar where all the signs are in English, and most of the beers are American.

This was the one compelling thing about the film. I thought maybe it was a faux French film shot in America. They apparently wrote a script in English, had it translated into French, found a few French people in their town, or Americans who could speak French, and suddenly they had a fancy foreign film on their hands, guaranteed a short run at all the art houses. But then later we find out they actually are in France, it's just that bar has a lot of American beer for some reason. Merde.

Pretty Bird: This is a well-made film, but with no apparent purpose. It's a pointless story about a huckster who convinces his friend to fund the development and marketing of a rocket belt, and hires a scientist to make it. Why a rocket belt? Not sure. The movie doesn't seem to know what it's about.

Billy Crudup is perfect as the huckster, but there's no reason to care about him, or hate him, or wonder what happens. I walked out, but I heard from a friend who saw the whole thing that the ending turns strangely violent, kind of like what happened in Goliath. A suddenly violent ending: a realistic depiction of the randomness of life or the last resort of a desperate filmmaker?

This movie didn't get picked up for distribution, obviously, which allegedly led helmer Paul Schneider to fly into anti-Sundance rants on occasion during his stay in Park City. Rumor was he even spit on a volunteer during one of them. I can only guess that the volunteer was attempting to explain to him that the movie's lack of a reason for existing was more to blame for its failure to find distribution than Sundance was.

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?: The problem with Morgan Spurlock is he's so easily amused by his own corny sense of humor, he thinks audiences will be too. He also has an annoyingly dull wife, who fatally plays an even bigger part in WITWIOBL than she did in Super Size Me.

For this, Spurlock's follow-up film, he picked a premise that he only pretends to care about, but correctly gambled would seem intriguing to a lot of people. Terrorism just doesn't belong in a world with women and children, he sarcastically explains in a monologue resembling the opening treatise to Super Size Me. So he goes on a quest for the creme de la creme of terrorists, the man responsible for them all, Osama.

But there are no scenes of Spurlock studying up on international terrorism, researching failed attempts to find Osama and figuring out where they went wrong. Instead he takes a few self-defense classes and he's off to the Middle East.

He travels to a few major Middle-Eastern countries, interviewing locals in grocery stores and on the street about where they think Osama is. It's not really a search for Osama so much as a travelogue, with Spurlock finding out in each country that Arabs hate the United States government but not The United States people. The other thing he learns from everyone he interviews is that capturing Osama isn't going to change anything, but Spurlock keeps pretending to care so he can have a movie.

Besides Spurlock's lame jokes, the most annoying them about him in this context is his embarrassing ignorance. He visits Gaza, which as we know from Slingshot Hip-Hop is a miserable hovel, and he asks someone there why Osama Bin Laden's main issue is freeing Palestine. Where in the world did he get that? al-Qaeda has barely done anything about the West Bank and Gaza, besides pay them some lip-service and diss Israel's right to exist.

Hamas and Hezbollah are the ones blasting Israel, not al-Qaeda. Reading even a single headline in the international section of USA Today would have told him that much. Based on this gross misunderstanding, Spurlock goes to Israel to see what Osama is so upset about there, and in a totally non-sequitur of a sequence, enters an extremely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.

He's not welcome there, but he hangs around until the angry Hasidim force him out. What is the point of this? That religion is irrational and divisive and can lead to anger and violence? Maybe in a smarter movie we'd get that point, but here's it's just gratuitous action footage.

So we have this ignorant unfunny guy taking us on a tour of a place he knows nothing about, with nothing insightful to offer. Sometimes, when Spurlock gets out of the way, the material manages to be somewhat interesting. In Saudia Arabia, he interviews some young students about their feelings on terrorism and The United States.

The kids, nervous of punishment, glance at the severe Saudi Arabians observing the interview and offer the most inane answers they can muster, until the observers call the interview off. Obviously, free expression isn't valued much in Saudia Arabia. But it's also not valued much in schools generally. You could get an interview scene resembling that one with an elementary school in The United States, if you had a mean principal hovering over the students the whole time.

Which could be Spurlock's point. Just kidding, he doesn't have a point.

I don't know if he finds Osama Bin Laden at the end. Judging from Spurlock's lack of preparation and the very minor effort he puts into his search, I have to guess that he doesn't. I guess I'll never know because I walked out with 10 minutes left to go, right as he gets to Pakistan, where most people think Osama is hiding. The look on people's faces as I left - "What? You're not staying to see if he catches him??" - was funnier than anything in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?

My friend Joe Weisenthal had a good idea for a movie he wants to make, called Super Size Me. It would be a documentary about him eating nothing but McDonalds for 30 days. He would consult his doctor about it, get his health checked throughout the ordeal, puke up hamburgers, describe his mission to McDonalds cashiers, be lectured by his vegetarian wife, have a bunch of french fries shoved in his mouth in the poster, etc.

You know, it would be just like Spurlock's Super Size Me, except it would be Joe doing it many years too late. Hilarious, the sort of humor that's way over Spurlock's head. Don't waste your time on Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? Wait for Super Size Me instead.

Adventures of Power: A pretty terrible Napoleon Dynamite rip-off with a relatively decent ending. The protagonist, Power, is an air drummer in New Mexico. But nobody believes in him aside from a little Hispanic kid, so he enters the national air drumming competition to prove himself. He goes to Newark to train for the battle, but most of these scenes seem to have been shot in Brooklyn. I'm guessing because the filmmakers were too chicken to film in a dangerous city like Newark.

There's also a subplot with a deaf girl love interest and a strike at a factory. And Adrian Grenier is amusing as Power's rival, a rich and famous country singer whose childhood ambition was air drumming, until his image-obsessed dad forced him to suppress it for fear of the family name being tarnished.

This is the funniest aspect of the movie, though it never quite makes sense; we never figure out if we're supposed to feel for Grenier's thwarted rich kid character or not. The movie actually ties all these silly and idiotic plot threads together quite nicely, making the movie almost tolerable in retrospect. But still the third worst movie I saw at Sundance.

I saw this at a volunteer screening before the festival really started, and one of the most notable things about the Q&A was that the director's twin brother, who was there because he wrote the music, had his fly open the whole time. Now that's comedy.

The Guitar: As I was watching The Guitar, I kept wondering, "how did this get into Sundance?" Because it's not like bad movies don't get into Sundance, but this kind of sentimental and stupid bad movie doesn't particularly seem like the Sundance type. Then the movie finished and I saw "Amy Redford" was the director. That explained it.

The movie is about a woman who finds a new lease on life when she learns from her doctor, a very stilted Janeane Garofalo, that she has a fatal disease and only has a month left to live. Coincidentally, her boyfriend breaks up with her and her boss fires her the very next day. Totally liberated now, she orders a fancy Manhattan loft for a month and buys tons and tons of stuff. She also sleeps with the married delivery man who brings all the junk, and the pizza girl; first separately, and then together.

Then she learns she's going to live after all because her happiness over this month cured her disease. Oops, but she bought all this stuff!

It was one of the more negative Q&As I'd seen. One woman asked if someone buying a bunch of stuff because she was about to die was a superficial reaction to facing mortality. Ms. Redford and the actress who played this woman agreed that it was, but, well, you know, movies can't always be perfect.

The only reason I'm ranking this movie as highly as I am is because my friend was in it (the same who was in Choke), as the gay pizza girl. That, incidentally, was the only reason I went to see this in the first place. So it was kind of annoying when she wasn't even at the screening and didn't show up for the Q & A. But if I were in this movie, I would have been too embarrassed to show up too.

Reversion: My heart sunk a few minutes into this film when I realized I was trapped in the middle of the row and I might have to sit through the whole thing. Luckily, it was objectively horrible and everyone to my left walked out. I was right on their tails.

Reversion is about people who have a genetic mutation that impedes their understanding concept of time. They live only in the present, with no appreciation for the future consequences of their actions. As a result, they do what suits them in the moment, usually theft. At grocery stores, these mutants wander the aisles, eating food without worries. To get around, they steal cars, and if another mutant steals their stolen car from them, they steal a different car.

Because these mutants have no understanding of time, they jump between different moments in their life, reliving old experiences and getting sneak peeks into future ones that haven't happened yet. "You know you don't kill me yet," one character says to his ex-girlfriend, who has her gun pointed at him. "Oops, my bad." And she puts her gun down. This explains superheroes who can fly. They've never heard of gravity.

The movie explains all this with lots of flickery type effects and jump cuts, and repeat shots, and even entire scenes that repeat in their entirety. That's not enough, though, so they have a sort of Greek chorus in the form of two pot smokers who have nothing to do with the story who are talking about these mutants in an awkward conversation that only serves to explain the the premise to the audience.

"Dude, have you heard of these mutants that don't understand time?" "Whoa, what? Yeah right!" "Duuuuude, I'm not lying, they don't understand the consequences of their actions and they live among us! You may recognize them by the way they steal cars and don't care about the past or the future. It's a gene that some people have, and more and more people have this gene these days!"

Reversion is horrible.

Sorry to end on a bad note, but that's what happens when you go from best to worst.

Actually, though, I just saw In Bruges today, the opening night movie at Sundance. I skipped it at Sundance because volunteer screenings were going on at the same time and I could see more movies that way. Plus I knew it was getting distribution. I'm glad I eventually did see it, because it's a terrific film and would have been at the top of my list if I'd seen it at Sundance. Bruges is beautiful and the writing/directing is first class, which surprised me because I stopped by a press conference about In Bruges and writer/director Martin McDonagh didn't look like he'd know what he was doing. But he did. So see In Bruges.