Me and My Precious Feelings While Attending the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Me, Me, Me. [Part 3]

There is this young long-haired surfer dude I keep seeing at every film I attend, which means he has the same festival pass as me, and we always end up sitting on the same aisle (it's the one with the most leg room).  Without fail, if I hate a film, I hear/see him enraptured over it.  If I find a film engrossing, I observe him fidgeting with his cell phone.  I've come to the conclusion he is me in Opposite Land.  I must talk to him and find out if he enjoys Circus Peanuts and pretzels the same way I loathe them.

I've thought of a pretty good tagline for the film Keep the Lights On:  Love Means Never Having to Hold Your Lover's Hand While He is in a Meth-Addicted Fog While Being Sodomized by a Hustler. (Seriously, though, it's a great film with an excellent soundtrack by Arther Russell--check it out when it hits theaters.)

I saw Cheyenne Jackson in the lobby of the Festival Headquarters, and good god is that man tall.  He was with another gent I assumed to be his husband who was just as epic in size, and my hope is that medical science will find a way for them to birth a baby together, thereby breeding a race of super-tall toddlers which will one day rule the world.

While seated waiting for a film to begin, a woman stands near me chatting with her friends seated next to me: "Oh! I never knew this theater had a balcony!", she exclaims while looking up.  "I've never done balcony.  Have you ever done balcony?"  Not "done the balcony"--but "done balcony", as if it were a drug.

I've only walked out of two shit films, which is a new low record for me at Sundance.  I must be getting better at sniffing out the duds before entering.

I thought of a pretty good tagline for the film For Ellen:  It's Kramer vs. Kramer for the MTV Generation! (Seriously, though, it's another great film by So Yong Kim--check it out when it hits theaters.)

Whenever I'm in line for a screening, there is a moment in line where someone standing next to me asks where I'm from, and for a split second I debate whether or not to lie rather than admit I'm from Arizona, the Land of Fucktards.

The Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic Film went to Beasts of the Southern Wild and it was wholly deserving of all the accolades.  It's a grand work, thematically ambitious and addressing a fully-formed range of ideas, and yet the filmmaker is only 29 (after suffering through the reprehensibly boring Save the Date and its sitcom-level concerns, I had wrongly assumed all 20-something filmmakers cared about was telling stories of other 20-somethings trying to figure out this thing called love).  I'm reading a great deal of reviewers referencing Terrence Malick as an obvious influence, and although the narration of wise-beyond-her-years lead character Hush Puppy does put it in the same category as Days of Heaven, there seems to be more going on than that initial comparison.  I'd go one further and cite Malick devotee David Gordon Green's George Washington, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and perhaps even Pedro Costa's Fontainhas trilogy (specifcally In Vanda's Room) in its deeply humanistic documentation and celebration of outcasts struggling to survive while being wiped away by outside forces.  So moved was I by this film that I've decided to skip all the screenings for the rest of the festival.  Beasts is such a perfect film, mixing moments of visceral tenderness, textured imagery and mythical grandeur in equal measure, I want to make sure this is my last memory of the festival.

A-R-I-Z-O-N-A Is My State, Arizona Let Me Say I Think You're Great!

Now that Arizona has successfully banned Hispanics from rudely assuming they, too, can breathe the White Man's oxygen, I--a proud native Arizonan--now feel safer to enjoy patronizing our abundance of Mexican food restaurants without having to actually be around all those Mexicans. And on that same topic, a stern word of caution to underground lofi-funksters Javelin should they ignore the worldwide band boycott and choose to perform in The Grand Canyon State: I recommend only playing songs from your David Byrne-approved new album instead of certain tracks off your underground demos (since they contain what is almost certainly traces of what we Gringos call Spanish). As for the rest of you, stop stating our State government is at least as dumb as Georgia's. When it comes to The Championship of Passing Senseless Bills, everyone knows Arizona has them beat at this particular parlor game.

Copper, Cattle, Citrus, Commerce, Climate

Since it will probably be another year until we see a follow-up to Illinois, and probably two more years until he tackles the next American state, bloggers seem to be placating themselves with live recordings to wait out the delay for the next sprawling set from Sufjan Stevens. It is unto this fray in which I heartily jump: here is Mr. Stevens and his squad running their paces at Lee's Palace in Toronto, on November 16th, 2004. You can download it here as a 71.2MB jesus-fucking-christ-this-is-going-to-take-forever! mp3 download, or you can click here for an .sitx file (which, presumably, will download faster). If Sufjan happens to be reading this musical offering and intends to sue my ass to Kingdom Come, I'd like to strike a little bargain: you cancel the lawsuit and I'll teach you the little A-R-I-Z-O-N-A Is My State diddy drilled into my preschool-era brain by the Phoenix Union School District way back when. Feel free to use it on the eventual Arizona album in the year 2037. Sadly, the lyrics do not mention any of what we used to call The Five C's.