Sundance: First Day
Just arrived today for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. When I asked the driver about the buzz he said that Paris Hilton was lunching right this minute at the GrubSteak restaurant. Later I learned that Bruce Willis was so happy at the bar at Zoom restaurant the night before that he fixed a toilet.
What about movies? For perspective I sat down with Mr. Sundance himself, Robert Redford, who said that “having Paris Hilton at Sundance was the reason I invented the place.” He was joking of course. In an interview with Redford I did for ABCNow, he talked seriously about the need to separate the movies from the hype around them. Good luck with that.
Big news: The first movie I see, Hamlet 2, is a special kind of fun. Steve Coogan is hilarious as a TV commercial actor reduced to teaching drama at a high school in New Mexico while his wife (Catherine Keener) hustles him off to the sperm clinic so she can get pregnant. More on this later, but let the biddng wars begin. It could be the next Napoleon Dynamite.