We drove to Sundance this last weekend, all 750 miles of the stretch from San Diego to Salt Lake City. It used to be so close. I still haven't completely gotten used to the idea that, to go to the Sundance Film Festival, I need to either fly or take a damn long road trip. Going to film school in Salt Lake spoiled me. But it was a good road trip. Our friend Vanja came with us (and in fact offered to take her newer car), which made us three drivers strong. The 13 hours on the road just flew by. And, since I was, in fact, attending the festival with other people, I was forced to adhere to a film-watching regimen that resembled sanity. Brooke and Vanja didn't seem too keen on a schedule that required us to see a midnight show in Park City (which means bedtime in the valley at 3:30 AM at the earliest) and then to wake up at 5:30-ish to be back in Park City at 7-ish to wait in line for a 9 AM show. Can you believe that? We saw four worthy movies, though:

Journeyings and Conversations -- An almost dialogue-less observational documentary about this giant train station that takes people into Calcutta, and the hopefuls who end up living there, in a literal limbo. Fascinating stuff, and quite possibly my favorite of the four. Mon Idole -- A French feature about a young TV assistant who wants to climb the TV ladder, and ends up having to do some weird things to do so. A strange film, but I don't think it worked so well on the whole. Three Step Dancing -- An Italian feature in four parts, about life and love and culture in Sardinia, a largely rural part of Italy, and also a major resort destination. Pretty good. I might have to see it again. Nina's Tragedies -- A very good Israeli film; apparently it was a pretty big hit in Israel. It's about a boy and his unspoken love for and devotion to his aunt. Stuff happens to the aunt: love, death of loved ones, mixed feelings over other potential loves, etc. It sounds trite, but, like most things, it's all in the execution. Very good. I would imagine it will be released here in the states (at least on DVD).

All in all, a nice batch. We tried for a midnight show on Sunday, but didn't make it in. So we sat around in the mall on Main Street and shot the breeze for an impressively long time. At this point, Andrew was with us, so our previously intense-times-three conversations turned intense-times-four. Which brings me to my point. I pretend no erudition beyond normal, but, in addition to being a conversation connoisseur and junky, I have had the good fortune to be exposed throughout my lifetime to an extremely large array of media stuff. Media stuff includes lots of examples (fictional and non-fictional) of people talking to each other -- more conversations. I must confess that, despite my general love of the film-watching (and making) experience, and my love of film festivals in general and Sundance in particular, perhaps the stupidest, most ridiculous conversations I've ever overheard have been those I've overheard in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. Why is this? One would think that a film festival would attract generally intelligent people who would be aware of the basic rules and guidelines of critical thinking and would be able to avoid logical fallacies when formulating an opinion about a particular movie. But this is clearly not the case. Some people who come to Sundance are really just movie fans, looking to see things they've never seen. Some people are Hollywood types looking for a relatively cheap art-house hit. But I think the vast majority of people who stand in lines and sit in the theaters at Sundance have no real interest in film as either an art or a business, but are simply celebrating themselves and their perceived hipness by aligning themselves with an institutionalized version of hipness, the film festival. (I stole this basic idea from an article in Ron Rosenbaum's The Secret Parts of Fortune.) They have no interest in whether the film they saw is objectively good, or where it stands among the classics of the genre (unless such a comparison includes other perceivedly hip films from the past), or how well it treated the core themes within art and life. They are not interested in the festival. They are interested in how they look standing beside the festival. It's entirely possible, though, that my irritation stems from my debilitating snobbery. Not snobbery in a Park Avenue sense, but the snobbery of the mind. In which case, I don't know what else to say, but that I had a great time this year. I overheard next to zero aggravating conversations. That was because of the people I was with. In any combination of two, three or all four of us, we seemed capable of coming up with our own conversations. Interesting conversations. Conversations so good that they drowned out those of the people around us. Conversations that seemed really, objectively good. Even to a conversation snob, like me.