ParkCity Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Ahh, Sundance. After 12 days in Park City, where the average temp was something like 12 degrees and anyone who made it to less than 3 screenings a day was kicked off the island, I gave the kids a day off to recuperate. Now we're back (baby), and we have enough backed-up content to choke a horse. Stay tuned, because over the next two weeks, we'll have more reviews, video interviews, deal news and, coming today and tomorrow, a few extra-special festival roundups. Have any lingering questions about the fest? Comment here and we'll try to get it all sorted.

Someone has made a terrible mistake  – they've leaked a partial list of this year's Sundance parties to us nerds. Since most of us on the Cinematical/Blogging Sundance team like to check into our hyperbolic chambers by 11 at the latest, we thought we'd pass this highly classified information on to you. We'll update this list daily until the Festival ends or the Party Gods strike us down (whichever comes first). Feel free to post your own party deets and gossip in the comments.

Friday Night, Jan. 20

6:00PM
Opening Gala Salt Lake City
Jeanne Wagner Theatre, 138 West Broadway
Salt Lake City, Utah

7:00PM
Starbucks Salon (curated by Gen Art)
449 Main Street

9:00pm
Slamdance Opening Party
Star Bar, The Night Club 268 Main St.

9:00 PM Blender Sessions at Tao (formerly Harry O's)
427 Main Street

9:30 PM – 1:00 AM
ICM Party
Premiere Lounge 573 Main St.

11:30 PM
Weinstein Co.
Lucky Number Slevin Party, Village at the Lift
825 Main St.

I couldn't get a steady wifi connection at this afternoon's Sundance Opening Press Conference at the Kimball Art Center, so here's my "live blog" ... an hour after the fact:

Geoffrey Gilmore (fesitval co-director and programmer), Nicole Hofcener (director of opening night film, Friends with Money) and Robert Redford (duh) take the stage. Geoff starts, and right away the agenda seems to be about proving that Sundance still has cred:

"It's a pleasure to have an opening night press conference, we haven't in the past. Fest in the 20th year, Institute in its 25th. People don't understand the merging of the institute and the festival. Truth is, it's really hard to talk abou the festival when you haven't seen the films yet...I can tell you that I think the fest is as independent as a festival we've done in years, but you'll be the judge of that."

He lists the numbers on this year's program:

120 features
84 world premires
48 first time featuremakers
102 films to be presented on digital projection (!)
(Only 41 shot on digital formats)
46 docs
35 features by women - speaks to our diverstiy, speaks to what this festival is about

if the number of films being made in this country is any indication of the level of interest in independent cinema ... look at the diversity of the range of films that are at this festival.

Geoff wants to ask two things of the press: that we try not to talk about the films by reducing them to summary points, and that we hold your judgements about what the festival is, until we get through the festival, and that we try to see work we wouldnt ordinarily get a chance to see (obviously, that's three. Wonder which one he made up on the spot?)

In a recent interview at the Television Critics Association press tour (where he stopped by to promote the Sundance Channel) Robert Redford shot back at  complaints that the Sundance Film Festival has gone Hollywood. "I don't think that's happened," he said. "I think Hollywood is just taking films from the festival because they realize they have worth." Though the silver fox acknowledges that crowds have grown over the years – "Once it started to roll and you had the success of films like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and other films, then suddenly more people began to come ... Then the paparazzi came, and then the fashion came. And it's like a pebble being dropped in a pond, but these ripples come out" – he maintains that at its core, the festival has followed the same programming philosophy for the past twenty years. He seems to lament the fact that the festival – his baby – gets such a bad rap from media focused on bling and bloat. "When a media person comes in and looks at the festival, but from an outer tier, they're going to see a completely different picture than the one we're programming," he said. "They'll think it's about Paris Hilton, which is not about anything." I'm heading to Park City for the first time ever on Wednesday – let's hope I'm given an opportunity to prove Bob right.

In about three weeks, I'm going to pack a couple of bloggers in my suitcase and head on out to Utah to infiltrate the Sundance Film Festival. We're working on putting together a nightly roundtable – to be hosted by Weblogs, Inc CEO Jason Calacanis and featuring a host of special film-world guests – which we'll videotape and throw up on the web in easily digestible (and downloadable) episodes. We've got a video producer, and we've got the talent – we just need a location.

Do you have a space we could use? An office? A storefront? A classroom? A really big truck? In exchange for a couple of hours use per afternoon, we could offer you mad promotion on the vblog itself, which will available for download here on Cinematical, on iTunes and at AOL Movies. Let's say you work for a company called ... Company X. Company X presents The Cinematical Sundance Vidcast. That's got a nice ring to it, now doesn't it?

As far as location goes, we're not exactly picky - we need to have power, and we need room for about 5 speakers (as in, humans, speaking), a couple of cameras and a 2-person crew. If you've got a stage or room for an audience, all the better, but neither is essential.

C'mon - help a blogger out. Contact us here, and we'll go from there.

And thanks!