Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
Emanuel Levy
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride

Beautiful, warm weather from the start of the festival has meant the only powder anyone's seen at my lodgings has been Emergen-C and TheraFlu.

"So have you seen anything great?" is the hopeful refrain on days one-two-three-four. There are shrugs, a few arguments, Slate Movie Club-like side chats about Sideways and its ostensible "backlash." And then sort of great sigh seems to rise up with the first multimillion dollar sale, the convoluted cross-collateralization of John Singleton's production of Hustle and Flow. I've got one last chance before its Viacom-Paramount-MTV-BET release in a few months to catch the movie the New York Times' Manohla Dargis has already smacked down "rubbish… precisely the kind of rubbish movie executives seek at Sundance, hoping that the film's beats, pimp hero and putative exoticism will attract young audiences."

Putative, indeed. Walking Main Street late on Tuesday night, I got a better dose of optimism running into the producer of Kirby Dick's solid Twist of Faith, Eddie Schmidt, who was still reeling from a late night screening the night before and an Oscar nomination at dawn. How do you say "Congratulations" about a movie with such painful subject matter?

Everyone's doing their impersonation of the always amusing and stimulating Werner Herzog, recounting interviews, panel discussions and Q&As after his newest rebuke to nature, the documentary Grizzly Man, essentially a contentious conversation with a dead man who was eaten by the bears he loved so much.

Fewer people are talking about Forty Shades of Blue, but Ira Sachs' second feature, captures levels of passive-aggressiveness among families and lovers in a way that few filmmakers dare. Sachs cites the late French director Maurice Pialat as a major influence, and the movie's willingness to allow its Russian-born female lead to be alternately opaque and manipulative is brave, as is its quiet depiction of contempt in an unhappy household. Rip Torn's magnetic, if familiar, as a blustering Southern musician who does not have the will or time to change, and Dickon Hinchliffe's refrains add emotion, as close to Michael Nyman's broody compositions for Michael Winterbottom as Hinchliffe's work for Claire Denis or with the band Tindersticks.

Meeting places and lobbies and stairwells are provisional Mac villages, often a sea of small, pearl-colored Barbie-toy iBooks. Wireless is free at festival sites; dispatches and seat-of-the-pants insights are flying left and right. For several days, the most common response is a shrug and a smile: there's a good mood in Park City, but maybe I haven't seen enough screenings where movies aren't going well and smiled past a few pessimistic monologues. Of movies I'm catching in the next couple days, a lot of love's being directed toward The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig's epic documentary on the life of the troubled and talented musician's musician, and I'll have some more to say about Hal Hartley's dour sci-fi miniature, The Girl From Monday, and the snazzy Argentine post-Tarantino thriller Palermo Hollywood, after interviews with the filmmakers.

Slamdance has notable films, too; audiences have gone wild for Marilyn Agrelo's Mad Hot Ballroom and Taggart Siegel's The Real Dirt on Farmer John, about an eccentric farmer, the last of a line of rural entrepreneurs who battles the odds. There's a lot to like about Four-Eyed Monsters, a prodigious eyeful of deadpan visual and comic flair by the young writing-directing-acting team of Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, which I'll write about later, along with Jonathan Berman's Commune, conveying the goofy optimism of the survivors of a 1970s commune.

By contrast, Sundance entry Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 ½ by Willliam Greave is an unintentional comedy of the naiveté of several eras. Mingling an unreleased 1968 film, based on an unbearable acting exercise, it encapsulates cruel clichés about actors and directors, in an even more frightful way than Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's wan "unscripted." "That's the whole fallacy of the movies," is the sort of head-scratcher its actors blurt through endless chat sessions about authority. It could be one of the snarkiest satires of late 1960s-early 1970s cinematic pretension. "This conspiracy of images, watching how it occurred" is hilarious when it's not numbing, the Spinal Tap of satires on experimental film. "Film's the thing, talk's nothing," as one performer says in this very, very talky object.

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