My Sundance Experience

This page is in the process of becoming a chronological account of my trip to the Sundance Film Festival at the end of January.  The goal is to mix personal stories about the event with film reviews.

The Beginning

So the first question is, obviously, ‘Why Sundance?”  How did I get to go to this world renown festival?  Well, the answer is through my school, Elon University.  At Elon, I am a member of the School of Communications Fellows, a scholarship given to select freshman as they enter the university.  As a Fellow, I take certain classes with the other scholars in my grade, and we go on certain trips.  For example, the Freshmen Fellows go on a weekend trip to Atlanta and tour companies like CNN.  As a sophomore, we are typically brought to Los Angeles, but this year it was decided that we would go to Sundance.

So the important thing to know about all that is Elon footed the bill for travel and lodging.  So they flew 25 of us to Park City, Utah, and rented a mansion (not a house, a mansion) for a week.  It was probably the coolest thing the university has ever done for students.  I hope none of this sounds pretentions, because I’m not trying to be.  I’m really, really grateful that I was afforded this opportunity, and as you’ll see from what happens, I took full advantage of it.

This brings us to January 23.  A cold, crisp morning in Burlington, North Carolina.  25 bright-eyed (well, it was 7:30 in the morning, so perhaps bright-eyed isn’t the right word) students board a bus to the airport.  I sat next to my accomplice for the trip, Blair Foster, and off we went to the airport.  Once through security (which took about an hour all said and done.  We had fun at skycap, and then it does take a while for 25 people with mountains of camera equipment to go through security), Blair and I set out for our favorite thing in the Raleigh airport: Popeyes.  Popeyes is a bit of an obsession we have, so it was crucial that we start our trip out with some good old Louisiana fried chicken.  To our chagrin, however, it was closed.  And so it was with heavy hearts that we flew to Vegas.

Once in vegas, however, things didn’t seem so glum.  After all, it was sunny, gorgeous, warm, and there were fun little slot machines everywhere (did I mention it was warm?).  And on our way to our next gate, we spotted the best sign from God that our trip was going to be a success: we found, you guessed it, an open Popeyes.  Chicken in hand, we also spotted Mike Chang (not his actual name) from Glee.  So we were very excited.  Anyway, we get on our next plane (after I made a wonderous discovery of Pretzel Nuggets at Auntie Anne’s Pretzels), and we found ourselves in Salt Lake City.

From there, we took a fleet of tricked out SUVs up to Park City.  Now, something I haven’t mentioned yet is that this is not the first time I have been to Park City.  My family and I took a lovely trip up there for a week a couple summers ago, so that’s another reason I was really excited to go to Sundance.  I already loved the location.  Anyway, we get to Park City, and we arrive at the house.

Oh.  The house.  The house that was three stories, had 5 bedrooms (with 11 beds), 4 full baths, a gigantic kitchen (2 dishwashers), vaulted ceilings, a hot tub outside (and a Jacuzzi in the master bath), and heated tile floors.  The fridge was stocked, the beds were made, the place was beautiful.

Oh Hi Park City – The First Night

Our first night in Park City was basically a run-around-looking-doe-eyed-at-everything night.  We went up and down Main Street (our house was literally a two minute walk from downtown.  Great house, even better location), and stopped at a pizza place for dinner.  Will Anderson, who I am now titling our Behind the Scenes Documentarian took some snapshots of things, and we just generally had a good time.  After running around for a bit, Blair and I hit the hot tub with our favorite Senior and Junior on the trip, and we had some very deep (not really) conversation.

After that (by now it was around 1am), Blair and I decided to spend another two hours in the master bathroom making an extremely detailed schedule of every single movie we wanted to see at the festival.  All in all our goal was to see 20 films.  Fate forced us to only get to 15, but that’s a story for later in the week.  Anywhoo, with our schedule all planned out, we finally went to bed around 3.  With the plan to get up at 6:30 in order to go to the box office.

Ticket Shenanigans Breakdown

Okay, time for a breakdown of how you get tickets for films at Sundance.  because it is really confusing and complex.  There are about 800 ways to get tickets, but here are the main ones.

1.  Be a celebrity.  If you are famous and cool you get to go to whatever you want.

2.  Pre-order a ticket package online.  These ticket packages allowed you to purchase up to (I think) 6 tickets a couple weeks before the festival.  Basically, you sign up for a package in December, then they give you a time slot to buy your tickets.

3.  Advanced ticket sales – once the ticket package time slots are up, the rest of the tickets that are available go on sale and can be bought online.  Or, at least, the rest of the tickets they are selling at that point.

4.  Day-of tickets – What this means is that the Sundance Institute doesn’t actually sell all of their movie tickets beforehand.  So if a movie is sold out online, that does not mean that it doesn’t have any available tickets.  So each morning, at 8am, the box office opens its doors and you can purchase the leftover tickets.

5.  If all of the above fails, you can go to the theatre where the movie you want to see is showing.  Get there two (but honestly three) hours before the showtime and you get put in the Wait List line.  And the way the wait list works is that you line up two hours before the film to get a number (note, if you’re going to sundance, the line actually starts forming around three hours before.  The two hour mark is when they hand out the numbers).  Then you come back a half hour before the film starts, and if they have empty seats, they sell them in numerical order to the line.

Day One – The Start of Something New

So 6:30am rolls around on Monday, the 24th.  Blair and I hop out of bed and head over to the box office, which is conveniently located about a two minute walk from the house.  When we get there, we are greeted by The Line.  The Line is the magical thing that forms overnight because people are really obsessive about getting tickets.  So that morning was a bust as far as purchasing anything for that day.  Blair and I were discouraged, but we became fiercely determined to see films anyway.  And we did have some pre-ordered tickets for later in the week, so all was not lost.  But don’t think that we simply gave up on seeing movies that day.  Oh no.  We left the box office and headed straight to our very first wait list, for the film Another Earth.

I think, at this point, you guys are ready for a movie review.  So I’ll talk about the different venues and the wait list experience later.  Anyway, here it is:

Another Earth

I figure the best way to start these reviews is with a synopsis of the film.  I’m just going to use the ones that they produce, because if I write my own it will have too many spoilers.

Synopsis: Rhoda Williams, a bright young woman recently accepted into MIT’s astrophysics program, aspires to explore the cosmos. John Burroughs, a brilliant composer, has just reached the pinnacle of his profession, and is about to have a second child with his loving wife. On the eve of the discovery of a duplicate Earth, tragedy strikes, and the lives of these strangers become irrevocably intertwined. Estranged from the world and the selves they once knew, the two outsiders begin an unlikely love affair, which reawakens them to life. But when one of them is presented with the opportunity to travel to the other Earth and embrace an alternative reality, which new life will they choose?

The film itself was excellent.  A really well made indie sci-fi that is honestly more of a character drama than a science fiction film.  The discovery of Earth 2 is a catalyst, but the planet itself takes a backseat during a majority of the film.  It serves as a presence, as a reminder, but don’t go into this expecting some wild space adventure.  We never journey outside our own atmosphere.  The overarching theme of the film is about taking responsibility for your actions, and setting things right.  It is a piece about second chances, and whether or not we deserve them.

So as you can see from the still (which highlights how gorgeous the movie looks), Earth 2 serves as more of a presence in the film than anything.  But back to my opinion.

I was with this movie the whole way.  The pacing was really spot on, and the plot was focused and driven.  I really fell in love with the characters and how broken they were, and I was completely invested in the film from start to finish.  I felt that the piece deserved the payoff it was given in the end, and I left the movie feeling satisfied with the piece as a whole.

As far as the other elements go, the acting was stellar, with newcomer Brit Marling taking on the role of Rhoda and really nailing it.  I thought she was absolutely beautiful, and the transformation her character undergoes was really wonderful to witness.  WIlliam Mapother (Ethan from LOST) also did a fantastic job, and I really felt his struggle and hoped for his success.

So that’s all I’m doing for right now.  I’ve been typing for a really long time and my fingers want to die.

I was really impressed by the direction, as the film is Mike Cahill’s first feature.  The style of the piece was consistent and everything felt natural as far as the flow of the piece and the characters without.  He also wrote the piece, and the writing is really stellar.  Some of the sci-fi might not be water-tight, but again, I didn’t see the film for the science fiction, so I didn’t mind all that much at all.  The interaction between Marling and Mapother was really what drove the film, and they worked off of each other fantastically.

Something else I really loved was that the special effects were really solid.  There is one shot involving a car crash that is absolutely fantastic, and the integration of Earth 2 in the background was extremely believable and really reminded me of the work done on films like District 9 (the ship as a presence in the background).