Reality sets in, this last day of Sundance, as 50,000 attendees move on to greener pastures and the glistening snow-covered peaks encircling Park City once again seem a part of the natural landscape instead of a fancy festival backdrop. Down below on Main Street, festival dreams and destinies have intersected. All that remains is for this year’s festival to fade to memory.

Riffing off Barry Levinson’s Robert DeNiro-starrer about a harried Hollywood producer which premiered out-of-competition (I quite liked it), The Hollywood Reporter captured the received take on this year’s festival with its headline, “Stunned ‘dance: What Just Happened?” more

Gray skies persist and the big awards show arrives tomorrow night as Sundance 2008 draws to a close. Yet there are still surprises.

Last year I pulled out all the stops and attended thirty films in a week, my Sundance personal best. I took quiet pride in my diligence. Yet I still managed to miss Little Miss Sunshine and many other buzz-worthy films. Do the math and you’ll see why. If Sundance programs 120 films and I managed to see 30, then I’ve missed 75% of Sundance’s best programming despite my best efforts. That’s why it’s often hard to have a conversation here about what everyone’s seen in common. Often we haven’t. more

Overcast again. Blues skies aren’t forever.

A slow day. Overheard a klatch of industry veterans planning a Walmart release of the DVD of a festival film, a well-regarded but talky interview-style doc. Can’t see how it could appeal to a mass-market crowd, Walmart’s or otherwise. Maybe it’s the thin atmosphere, the high altitude of Park City that causes Sundance’s storied reality dissociation. Over the years savvy buyers have learned to take a deep breath and count to ten (or ten days) before agreeing to a hype-inflated deal at Park City. Many have been burned in the past by acquisitions vibrant with Sundance buzz that sputter months later when introduced to the public. more

Park City’s weather continues its upswing, with optimistic blue skies, blinding daylight that makes snow banks dazzle like Hollywood teeth, and thin, icy mountain air that invigorates exposed skin and reveals your every breath.

No matter how good the films—and they are good this year–after being cooped up in the gloom of flickering shadows all day, a shot of cold air to the face is as bracing as a shot of strong spirits would be. Good thing, because the latter is a delicacy in Mondo Utah, where buying a round requires temporarily joining a club, usually for the duration of the imbibing.

Sundance is the ultimate temporary club membership, ten days of pretending that the world revolves around a resort festival of small films with limited commercial appeal. Where, absurdly, festival volunteers must shout, “Please turn off your Blackberries!” as the lights dim.

Not your Treos, your Motorolas, your iPhones… tellingly Blackberries are the official mobile communication tool of Hollywood, whose flying monkeys monitor Sundance premieres while compulsively stealing glances at their email in the dark—or is it the other way around? Do they really expect to find box office champions here? more

Park City’s been overcast and gray since Day 1, but this morning a brilliant platinum light tore a hole in the endless cloud cover and ignited the overlooking Wasatch peaks, back-lighting a sparkly veil of glassy no-see-ums, tiny ice crystals too delicate to form flakes, that danced on wafts of air until they melted in my face.

Yes, I admit the night before I’d seen Academy-award nominee (Taxi to the Dark Side) Alex Gibney’s latest masterwork, Gonzo, the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, but I deny any pharmaceutical inspiration, at least this early in the morning, as I stop before the Yarrow Hotel to marvel at this floaty, twinkly, sun-lit scrim. Inside the Yarrow a press screening of Morgan Spurlock’s latest saga-in-cheek, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, is almost underway, and I race into the theater to find a seat just as the lights fall.

Both docus, I’m happy to report, are polished to high theatrical sheen with eye-catching graphics, animated illustrations (the great Ralph Steadman in Gonzo), and well-crafted high-definition cinematography (D.P. Maryse Alberti in Gonzo). Both acquaint audiences with past and present avatars of U.S. politics: the tragic George McGovern, smarmy Richard Nixon, idealistic Jimmy Carter (Gonzo); the hubristic tag team of W. and Osama (Where in the World…). Both deserve and will likely obtain limited theatrical runs (though Sundance 2008 has been notably short of acquisitions so far). more

On Saturday I paid a visit to the production wing of the Sundance Institute Online, housed on the south end of Park Ave. in a century-old former miner’s hospital.

The festival’s daily newspaper has a home on the third floor of the same building, and the podcast department is in the basement. When I visited the second floor, a team of frazzled editors were putting the last touches on the interviews they’d shot the night before for the Live@Sundance video series.

The previous night, a team of Sundance videographers had shot three sequences between 10pm and midnight — it was the big U2 3D premiere. more

“Four score and seven years ago, to thine own self be true. I believe in rock n’ roll. I believe in getting high.”
- Cowman Kennedy’s infamous Gettysburg address

The Kansas City, Mo., art collective known as MK12 has been on quite a roll lately. The ingenious graphics that highlighted Will Ferrell’s routine life in Stranger Than Fiction were theirs, and Director Marc Forster utilized their animation talents again for the opening credits of his newest film, The Kite Runner. This year, Sundance spotlights their subversively fun short The History of America, which was one of 16 works chosen by New York magazine as the best online content of 2007.

A visually dynamic mix of rotoscoped live action shot against a greenscreen and the latest computer animation techniques, The History of America is not the typical sly condemnation of U.S. culture that its title might suggest, but more a hilarious celebration of distinctly American iconography. Were it not for the epic war between the cowboys (who reside in Las Vegas and work from the Cowboy Headquarters and Casino) the astronauts (who live in a space station on the moon), the U.S. may not be the great country that it is today.

This ambitious project has been about four years in the making. Before any animation processing was done, MK12 storyboarded. Then, they finished a live-action rough cut, complete with actors and set design, to see what they had. Even when the computer processing had begun, every part of the film was still hand-tweaked in some fashion. A startlingly orginal creation, it combines cutting edge slick graphic design with a worn-out third-generation print look. Read On and watch the entire film at Scene-Stealers.com

The word “cherries” may be an American Army slang term that refers to unused or untried military equipment and weaponry, but it is also the title of a digitally-shot short film from our neighbors across the pond. Funded by Film London and the U.K. Film Council, Cherries tackles a controversial statistic in Great Britain.

The country has the lowest deployment and recruitment age for soldiers in Europe and has been condemned by Amnesty International as the only European country that has routinely sent under-18s into armed conflict. And, according to the film’s press release, for the first time in its history, the Territorial Army has seen members compulsorily drafted into regular army units in combat zones.

Director Tom Harper and first-time Screenwriter Fiona Kissane set Cherries, shot in HDCAM SR, in the near future. A group of teenaged schoolboys mess around in the schoolyard, checking egos and measuring each other up. Their teacher has an unexpected announcement waiting for them inside that will change their lives forever. The story takes aim not just at the government for allowing this kind of thing to happen, but also at he youngsters, who carry on with their lives oblivious to the fact that the world they ignore may directly affect them someday. Read On at Scene-Stealers.com

We’ve seen shorts from the U.S., Canada, Iceland, and Australia so far at the Sundance Film Festival. The entries this year are truly an international affair. In that spirit, it is time to move on to an entirely different continent.

Writer/Director Xuan Jiang grew up in a Beijing that is in a constant state of influx. From an ever-growing economy to the modern barrage of global influences, China is a very different place than it once was. After doing television production work at the News Corporation China, Jiang enrolled in the Film Directing program at the California Institute of the Arts. August 15th, her thesis film, grew out of a desire to tell stories about the waves of cultural change that are rippling through her home country.

This 20-minute short is a powerful drama that was inspired by a true story. A bus travels through the Chinese mountains during East Asia’s Mid-Autumn Festival, a yearly celebration of togetherness and abundance. A young woman and her boyfriend are on their way to spend some time with his family. Set against this idyllic time of year, the bus is hijacked, and each passenger must decide how far they are willing to go to preserve their own safety versus the safety of others.

Shot on super 16mm film by Cinematographer Haifeng Duan, August 15th has a very naturalistic tone. There are no distracting or overriding stylistic touches, and Jiang is patient enough to give the story the time it deserves, building the mounting tension slowly. She takes essential moments to scan the faces of the all the passengers on the bus, surveying their different reactions in a time of crisis. As the pressure becomes worse, the faces become shrouded in shadow. August 15th asks some serious questions about moral responsibility and choices that can change lives irreparably. Read On at Scene-Stealers.com

With the recent popularity of free, user-generated content on websites like YouTube, where video is most often viewed in short bursts, original short films have been able to find a new and eager audience. No longer confined to being seen one theater and one festival at a time, shorts can be uploaded by the filmmakers and watched by anyone in the world who has a fast enough internet connection.

This trend seems to favor comedic shorts more than anything else, and Dan Beers’ short film FCU: Fact Checkers Unit definitely falls into that category. To show at Sundance 2008 is prestigious for sure, but at this point, it seems like almost an afterthought. This short is something of an internet sensation, having appeared on Will Ferrell’s FunnyorDie.com site, and now on YouTube and virtually everywhere else with embeddable video. It doesn’t hurt, of course, to have Bill Murray in your movie.

In addition to directing, Beers also co-wrote the short with its two stars, Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca. The set-up is simple. Two guys who work as fact checkers and take their job very seriously (way more seriously than their half-awake, banana-chomping editor) are assigned to check whether or not Bill Murray has a glass of milk right before he goes to bed at night. Read On and watch the entire short at Scene-Stealers.com