..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Ray Pride
..Patricia Vidal

Park City is still quiet. Only a few of the troops have arrived… grabbing dinner at the restaurants they can't get into for the next ten days… cruising Albertson's before the aisles are filled with people looking for organic produce… enjoying the calm before the storm.

Sundance 2004 has all the markings of another blurry step in the blurring of the indie business. Few are expecting anything that calls for the word "great," except when talking up a starlet or star at an overcrowded party "honoring" a movie that half the room hasn't even seen. But good is a sure bet... and lots of it. The magic of this experience is finding the diamond in the meringue.

It hasn't snowed here in a week, but the air is brisk, the white remains on the fringes of the roads and walks, as though we were traipsing around a bald man's head. The parking is a little tougher. The cheaper restaurants are getting more expensive. And breathless expectation fills the air as consultants of all stripes start the build-out to a full blown house of confused repute.

One is reminded, more before things rev up than after, that the people of Park City who work for a living are good and friendly and anxious to embrace the best of those of us who come to visit them, like locusts visiting Egypt, for 10 days a year.

Here we go…

I've already seen the first two really wonderful documentaries that will get a lot of buzz and no theatrical release thanks to a tape lending system that lets us get a look off the big schedule. Dirty Work, from David Sampliner and Tim Nackashi has many of the same qualities of Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Michael Moore's Roger & Me. What is missing is the raw talent of both of those filmmakers. That said, the three-pronged doc about a mortician, a bull semen removal expert and a septic tank maven is an experience well worth having, even if only for some real perspective on the dead semen shit in all of our lives.

Sampliner and Nackishi never condescend to their subjects, embracing their well-expressed beliefs that they have found jobs that they care about every bit as much as more highly respected professionals… maybe more than most. They have their moments of joy and moments of fear. They have moments of doubt. But there they stand and there they will stand, not looking for a way out of the 9-to-5. These men are alive. And the film is too.

I don't see a theatrical future for this 58 minute movie, but it was clearly built for Cinemax or PBS. So you should have a chance to see it. Make sure not to miss it.

You probably won't have a chance to see Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, unless a magical clearance master manages to get clearance on the hundreds of movies that Andersen uses to create his travelogue/love story about Los Angeles. (Don't call it "L.A." or Thom might kick your ass.)

The only thing I have ever seen that really reminds me of this film is a short that is currently up for Oscar consideration called Fast Film, which uses 400-someodd movie clips to tell a quick story and to create emotion that does not come from the films themselves, but from the bringing together of the ideas. Los Angeles Plays Itself is like taking a tour of the city with the most knowledgeable expert on Los Angeles in the world, but through the eyes of his videotape machine.

What is real and what is false in movies? In turn, what is the truth of the most photographed city on the planet?

At moments, the film feels like a master thesis. Andersen's reading of his script is drier than the voice over of the most restrained gumshoe in any 1930s movie you could find. But the overwhelming (at times) joy of seeing movies, some of which you will know and some of which you don't, with a sense of context that is not so much about the films but about how we see them, makes this one of the most watchable - and rewatchable - and rewatchable - and rewatchable - films I have ever seen. The amount of detail in brevity and honest perspective is astounding, whether movie is Deathwish IV or Messiah of Evil or To Live and Die In L.A.

A good start… and I didn't even have to put on my boots.

- by David Poland