Waiting in line at Prospector theater at 8:00 am, I am surrounded by coffee cups, hand-held touch screen devices and a rainbow of fur. There are some people mixed in too. It becomes apparent that while waiting in line at Sundance that the native language is schmooze. Locals refused to partake; I try.

Even at this absurd time of day that no man should ever be awake to experience, I am jittery, eagerly anticipating another film at Sundance. I take a sip of my coffee.

‘You in the business?” I turn around to face a tuft of chest hair poking through a dark orange North Face jacket. I look up to find a scruffy face shielded by top-dollar sunglasses and topped off with a taupe.

“Blogging. I blog,” I nod. “How about you?”

“Mark Higgins, Google,” he slipped me a business card. “This is my wife Leanne.” Red lipstick covered implants smiled at me as she offered her hand in my direction. “So you doing reviews or what’s your beat?” Mark inquired.

“Yeah, mostly reviews, other shit, color on the events, uh you know?”

“Oh yeah, the events,” Mark raised his eyebrows and let out an exhausted sigh. “I was at this party last night for that french flick, fucking breathtaking by the way, but Paris was there.”

“No way?”

“Yeah man, and some Absinthe brand was sponsoring it, because you know it just got legalized in the States?” I nodded. “Anyway, they were giving away little nips of the Absinthe; there was a whole basket of them. So Paris is drunk as hell, as usual, and goes up to the basket and starts shoveling the goddamn things in her purse!”

“Ha, no way.” I responded.

“Yeah, and later that night she got arrested for smoking a joint on fucking main street.” We laughed. “So what events you been covering?” I knew the question was coming.

“Well, um, the Sidecar had great drink specials on Thursday. And I was at this house party for Matisyaho. He didn’t show up, but it was cool.”

“Ha!” Mark squeezed out a fabricated chuckle. “You gotta get out, man. Put that press pass to use, brother.” My pass was grey, not red. I guess it was backwards. “What films have stood out so far?”

“Well, Big River Man was incredible. Its about–”

“Yeah, I know the drunk guy who swims. It was just so exploitative.”

I was shocked and crossed my brow to let him know. “How so?”

“It’s just like Super Size Me.” I saw no correlation. “He’s swimming to save the rain forest right? But the film does nothing to help things anyway.”

“I think it touches on the environmental issues very nicely, but how is it exploitative?” I argued.

“Its exploitative of the viewer.”

“How?” I threw my arms up.

“Because they think that by seeing it the film, somebody had some care and emotional attatchment to the issue were covering by making a differenc.!”

“You didn’t,” I responded. “And maybe it’s just telling an amazing story and that’s it. Who cares? It was done well.”

“What blog did you say you wrote for?” I knew this one was coming too.

“You can find it at eckerd.edu/sundance,” I said waiting for a reaction.

“I knew it! You’re Hamburger, that amateur critic asshole who wrote all that bogus shit about Kenneth Anger! He was a fucking visionary!”

“Yeah, I said that in the blog, but I just did not really like some of his material.”

“And the shit you tried to pull about A Woman Under The Influence! You missed the entire fucking point of the film. Are you retarded?” Mark glared at me. “No seriously, kid, are you fucking retarded? This must be like your first film festival? Had you even heard of Sundance?”

The line started to move. I was fed up. “You know what, I’m going to use the bathroom before the film.”

“Yeah, don’t piss on your credentials, kid.” I brushed past the fur and the frustrated moviegoers and tossed my credentials around to my back.

Tags: Ben Hamburger, google, john cassavettes, Kenneth Anger, sundance film festival

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.