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Day 6 and 7

Posting on a regular basis has been a bit tough—ok, impossible—the past few days, owing to our amped-up schedule. On Tuesday alone, we did 11 back-to-back interviews with a who’s who of both established and first-time filmmakers debuting new work at Sundance, as well as members of their respective casts. Some of those conversations are making their way onto the main site (click on the Sundance Film Festival ’08 tag to see who we’ve been chatting with) thanks to the efforts of our two camera operators, Fernando Frias (a Mexico City native and filmmaker in his own right) and the talented Ari Burgess, whose late-night editing sessions have yielded mighty fine results.

Now that things are quieting down here in Park City, it’s been much easier to get into public screenings, so I’ve been taking advantage of that as often as possible. Last night, after checking out the premiere of Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor at the Eccles Theater (a well acted but disappointingly facile story about a long-grieving economics professor who befriends an illegal Syrian immigrant with a passion for Afrobeat music), it occurred to me that I’ve seen about 25 films since landing here last week. So I thought this might be a good time to relay a list of those I’ve most enjoyed seeing, and those that intrigued me but were ultimately problematic on some level.

Films I Loved and Would See Again: Ballast, Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), Under the Bombs, Trouble the Water, Baghead, Slingshot Hip Hop, Savage Grace

Films I’d Recommend, With Some Reservations: Timecrimes, The Wave, The Linguists, Mancora, Mermaid, Adventures of Power, Be Like Others, American Teen, Flow, Sleep Dealer, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Films I Had Issues With: The Broken, Just Another Love Story, Secrecy, Recycle, Perro Come Perro, Bottle Shock

Films I have Been Hearing About and Still Want to See: Sugar, Goliath, Anywhere, U.S.A., Transsiberian, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, Eat, for This Is My Body, Alone in Four Walls, Up the Yangtze, Absurdistan

Two days to go. And I still haven’t been to a single party!

Posted on 01/25/08 by: DGSmith 12:14 AM