Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

The entire festival is over at this point, so you can view all of my photos from Sundance 2009 here. (Of course most of them are nature and environment-related because I couldn’t very well take photos of the movies, could I? Well, technically I could have, but I chose to follow the rules and refrain.) Here’s my recap with some selected photos.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

I had a beautiful morning drive up Provo Canyon to the Sundance Resort Screening Room for another 10am-2pm box office volunteer shift. The first film shown was Barking Water, which people seemed to like but made them cry. I received hands-on box office training while the film was showing, though the process was slowed due to the fact that the festival’s internet connection wasn’t working. I learned that the Sundance Resort, because it’s away from the festival hub of Park City, doesn’t receive as much support as you’d think it would.

Don’t worry, nobody’s bitter about it or anything. Until the snacks run out, that is.

The 3:00 film, It Might Get Loud, was sold out, so I stuck around and helped (wo)man the long line of people on the wait list. It turns out that I like schmoozing with people who are anxiously waiting to try to get tickets to a film they really want to see!

There were three girls in their early twenties at the front of the line who had their own band and were DYING to get in. There was a good chance that they would get in, but the late-middle aged group who were Nos. 38-41 didn’t have much of a chance. They kept trying to sweet talk me into telling them if they had a chance, and the gray-haired man complimented me on my “diplomatically dodging the question” skills. Then he told his wife to tell me about meeting Robert Redford. She turned to me with a huge smile, her twinkling eyes somehow matching the shade of her bright turquoise pea coat, and gushed about her encounter with him as he was coming off the ski slope. “He took his hat off and his hair was messy and sweaty—*pant, pant*—and he was just so nice! He gave me a hug and I could tell definitely feel his yoga body from the squeeze he gave me!”

She could have been a preteen talking about meeting one of the guys in High School Musical. I wonder if she has tear-out posters of Robert Redford from “Tiger Beat—Baby Boomer Edition” hanging on her wall at home.

The girls in the band ended up getting in to see the film, but most of the people from the wait list were turned away. I went up to the projection room to ask John the Projectionist if I could watch from there, but the film had already started and he wasn’t there. The door had been open, so I was standing at the top of the half-stairway trying to see if he was behind some equipment when he walked in behind me and about flipped his lid.

“You can’t be in here without permission!” he said in a strong whisper.

“But I came up to ask you—I mean, sorry—” I stammered. It took a minute, but we cleared things up and he said it wasn’t a problem, he just didn’t want people up there without his permission because if they touched just one thing, you know, it could stop the film and maybe he would lose his job and puppies would die and maybe the world would implode. Or something like that.

Monday, January 19, 2009

I thought I was going to have to switch my shift because of a conflict with my class schedule, but somehow the news got to Utah Valley University that it was Martin Luther King Day and I didn’t have classes. (Some of my former coworkers were only vaguely familiar with what they called “Civil Rights Day” and nobody seemed to care about its significance. If Utahns were a flavor, they would be Sheltered Vanilla.)

So, another 10-2 shift. The film at noon was Taking Chance, a documentary that follows the treatment and events surrounding the homecoming of a soldier’s body after he was killed in Iraq. I wasn’t able to watch it, but filmgoers reported that it was a powerful story whether one supports the war or not.

One of my fellow volunteers reported that a woman started sobbing at the very beginning, right after the opening scene of the soldier’s death, and ran out the emergency exit. The volunteer followed her out to make sure she was okay. She was NOT okay, though, because she had recently lost her son in Iraq. We didn’t understand why she would put herself in the traumatic situation of watching that movie in the first place.

During my volunteer hours when I was outside of the theater doing box office type thingies, I was also getting to know my fellow volunteers. Some were first-years and others had been festival volunteers at the Sundance Resort Screening Room for years. It was an interesting mix, and getting to know fellow volunteers is one of the things I enjoy most about the festival. It’s also a good way to collect some new local friends with whom I can potentially hang out with during the rest of the year.

I cashed in a volunteer voucher for the opportunity to sit in the audience for the next film, Humpday. It contained enough “beyond gay” moments to make many people uncomfortable, but it was not pr0n. And it won a special jury prize for “Spirit of Independence.”

Though I thought it was pretty good and definitely hilarious at times, it lost a little of its luster for me after the Q & A. The director (and cameo actress) Lynn Shelton revealed that she didn’t have a script—and that the movie was shot sequentially with some loose ideas surrounding the central characters, but it was all improv. Now I love improv, and I think it’s great that that’s how they made the film, but for some reason it just irritated me that she was up there hosting a Q & A when most of the answers were “it just turned out that way.”

I was starving after Humpday, so I hightailed it home for dinner and to do some homework. I pulled off the road on my way home to take a photo of the pretty sunset at the base of Provo Canyon.