You haven't *really* experienced Sundance until you've trudged through eight blocks of human gridlock on Main Street, stuck behind three heavily Ugg-ed out 19-year-old girls intent on topping one another with tales of encounters with actors 4-6 times their age. (Examples: "I can't BELIEVE I saw Anthony Hopkins!"; "Remember that time I took a picture with Colin Firth? Ohmigodialmostdied!!!") Wait, scratch that: you haven't *really* experienced Sundance until you're distracted from all of the above by the sight of a respectable journalist exiting the Lean Pockets Hospitality Lodge* weighed down with three or four canvas bags full of swag. This is what Main Street is all about, and I'm pretty sure its why Robert Redford and Geoff Gilmore need to remind us to "Focus on Film" at the biggest film festival in the States. I've never been to Park City during the off-season, but it seems a lot like any other slightly-sleepy resort town, where mom-and-pop pizza shops share blocks with ridiculous tchochke emporiums. But the during second two weeks of January, nearly every other storefront is commandeered by a corporation.

ESPN takes over a sports bar; T-Mobile and MySpace team up to conquer an Asian-Fusion restaurant; Delta clears out a local pub and pays for WireImage to use it as a portrait studio. Some companies make their omnipresence felt via random advertising slogans, plastered on buildings but pointing to no visible product (see above). The Festival itself arranges for their official sponsors to take turns taking over the same Main Street club, where mobs line up to collect swag from Motorola, Turning Leaf and Krups. Some brands put up a discrete sign in a second-story window and hire a goon to keep the rabble out; this afternoon, I was denied access to both the PREMIERE Magazine Lounge, and the Luxury Lounge Hosted by PEOPLE. Meanwhile, the folks at the New York Lounge (hosted by the Bloomberg-established agency to lure film and TV productions to the state) welcomed me with open arms, offering me bagels with apple butter and tons of tax incentive literature.

Karina Longworth, the Editor Emeritus of Cinematical, is taking advantage of her mostly-meaningless title to post a diary of her experiences at Sundance. Your new editor wants her to do this every day, but in case she, uh, doesn't, it's because her real job got in the way.

Reading Eugene Hernandez' blog whilst waiting the for the cab to arrive to take me to La Gaurdia this morning, I learned that David Poland and Jeffrey Wells have declared that Sundance 2007, which officially begins tonight, is, in fact, already over. You see, they arrived in Park City a good 48 hours ahead of me, took turns inserting their thermometers in the rectum of the festival, and rushed to their computers to report the reading: cold. In fact, according to Wells, EVERYONE is saying that this year's line-up looks "flat, so-so, nothing to write home about material...a couple of almost-but-not-quite- as-good-as-Half Nelson flicks, and apparently nothing even close to a Little Miss Sunshine-type breakout waiting to happen."

Though tempted to reach for my phone to cancel the car -- a Sundance without a Sunshine is no Sundance for me! -- my more rational self prevailed. Instead, actually invigorated by the prospect of attending a film festival in which an over-hyped (and over-priced) Vacation retread steals headlines (and potential aquisition dollars) from ten or twelve films more deserving of market share, I zipped up my laptop and went downstairs. I went to the airport, got on the plane, and landed a little while ago. I even had my first Chik-fil-a in the Cincinatti airport during my layover. It was good. I ate too many waffle fries, though.

Whereas most major movies these days rely on carefully calibrated publicity campaigns to build and sustain Oscar buzz, the press has spontaneously touted Dreamgirls as an Oscar "lock" since before casting was complete. But 13 months later, most major critics have seen the film, and their returned verdicts are decidedly mixed. Whilst the musical certainly has its fans (such as our own James Rocchi), critics from major publications such as The New York Times, Premiere, Salon and New York Magazine have dared to come out against the film.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating by using the word "dared," take a look at the disclaimers some of the guys and gals have tacked before their reviews. "I know I'm going to bring down the room by saying I think it's just okay," writes David Edelstein at NY Mag. "Well, Jennifer Hudson is more than okay..." Aaron Hillis, a Premiere writer moonlighting at The Reeler, also anticipates that reviewing the film negatively will somehow brand him as an outcast: "I'm bound to take some abuse for being a real holiday Scrooge [by] saying I don't think Dreamgirls is particularly good." I find these reviews fascinating, not because they're negative, but because they contain such a palpable sense of anxiety on the part of the critic. Dreamgirls seemed like such a prohibitive frontrunner at the time it was screened for the press that anyone who didn't like it must have wondered if they were missing something. It certainly seemed unlikely that The New York Times' A.O. Scott, who is not generally known for staking out unpopular opinions, would dismiss Bill Condon's musical as "disappointing."

As any veteran of the annual five-day geek bacchanal that is Comic-Con International can attest, the Wednesday night "preview" is all about waiting in line just long enough to approach the brink of insanity, until the Convention Floor doors are finally thrown open, the security guards step aside, and you and a few thousand of your closest (and sweatiest) internet friends are given free reign to bum rush the booths. Knowing this – and, more importantly, knowing they wouldn't even have a critic-proof summer tentpole if it weren't for internet film nerds like you and me – the folks at New Line decided throw bloggers a bone, by inviting us to preview their Snakes on a Plane booth about 30 minutes before the official preview. This was undoubtedly another very cool move for a studio whose Interactive Marketing department has been working over time the past few months to blaze a trail in treating internet tastemakers the way their influence on the audience really entitles them to be treated. And later in the weekend, when the convention floor is packed and the Snakes on a graffiti wall starts to fill up and the Snakes on a DJ is blasting the Snakes on a party mix, Snakes on a Booth will almost definitely be the hottest booth on the floor. But in its pre-preview state, there was little to write home about. That's why I'm sending back pics. Many, many more after the jump.

I love SXSW. It's by far the most favorite film festival to attend, in no small part because it's seemingly the last major film festival that cares about whether or not its audience is having fun. So when the people behind the acronym called and asked me to sit on the jury of their offshoot, SXSWclick, I jumped at the chance. SXSWclick, to quote the official website, "is a year-round initiative created to showcase short-form storytelling via mobile devices and the web." In other words, it's a festival specifically for shorts designed for digital, if not device-specific, distribution. There are five categories to submit work in, ranging from music videos to documentary, to "What the F*$!?" - or, the "Not sure we 'get it' -- but it's pretty cool" category. All work has to be under ten minutes, and it needs to arrive at the SXSW offices via VHS or DVD by June 12. Winners receive a passel of prizes, as well as a chance to screen their film for the ever-expanding crowds at the 2007 SXSW Film Festival, and all entrants will be seen by a panel of filmmakers and industry professionals, including Jason Reitman, Bob Sabiston, Kirby Dick, and, well, me. Wanna enter? Here's the link.

There's nothing tackier than a Memorial Day sunburn. Come point and laugh at mine, tonight in New York City. Our friend The Reeler is hosting a screening of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane tonight at the Pioneer Theater on the Lower East Side, and after the movie I'll be sitting in on a discussion with Kerrigan, Lawrence Levi, and The Reeler himself, S.T. VanAirsdale.

You probably blinked and missed Keane when it was released late last summer, but the film (which was nominated for Independent Spirit and Gotham Awards alongside films like Brokeback Mountain and Capote) produced some of my favorite pullquotes of 2005. Manohla Dargis' review opened like this: "Lodge Kerrigan keeps such a tight watch on the title character in Keane that at times you think the camera is going to crawl in the man's ear to take a look inside." In The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern wrote, "This isn't entertainment in any conventional sense, but it's a mesmerizing film all the same." And, in positing Keane as the indie flipside to the Jodie Foster hit Flightplan, Roger Ebert took an opportunity to philosophize on the nature of filmgoing: "The complete filmgoer is open to the movie on the screen, and asks it to work in its own ways for its own purposes."

Tonight's event starts at 6:30. If none of the above seems like reason enough to head downtown, know that there will be free beer and pizza after the discussion, courtesy of Two Boots and Magic Hat -- for ticketholders only. You can buy tickets here; for more info, click here.

Who wants to spend a beautiful summer evening inside an overly-air conditioned concert hall listening to a washed up politico, some gadget nerds, a NASA guy and a couple of Hollywood producers talk about the environment? Apparently, everybody. WIRED Magazine threw just such an event in New York City last night, occasioned by this week's release of Al Gore's global warming doc, An Inconvenient Truth, and judging by the clamoring crowds that spilled out of Town Hall onto 43rd street as far down as 6th Ave fifteen minutes before showtime, it was the hottest ticket in town. Boldfaced names in attendance reportedly included director Darren Aronofsky and his Oscar-winning baby mama Rachel Weisz, and Chelsea Clinton, who Gore took pains to point to from the stage as "a friend of the family".

But if we're talking about "hot" -- and, considering the bounty of temperature-related puns the topic at hand brings to the table, we most definitely are -- could anyone hotter have been in attendance than the guest of honor himself? Though it's way too early for it to mean anything (or, at least, for it to mean anything good), the liberal media is currently under the spell of a debilitating case of Gore Fever, They've got it bad, got it bad, got it bad - they're hot for an aging also-ran who won't even admit to thinking about running for President in 2008. Or maybe they're just, understandably, hot for the idea that liberal passion could actually mean something again. Or maybe -- and this is the one I'd like to believe -- we're talking about social movement that ostensibly thrives on dissent; Gore not only stands for the opposite of everything the current administration has come to represent, he's also the Anti-Hillary. You don't have to know much about global warming to warm to the appeal of the presumptive Democratic nominee's polar opposite.

The evening certainly wasn't billed as Al Gore's Coming Out Party -- in his opening remarks, WIRED editor Chris Anderson labeled the event as a celebration of  "a new kind of environmentalist" he called the Neo-Green, a gadget-savvy do-over of the spacey hippie drip of olde, one "that realizes that technology doesn't only create problems - it solves them." But from the standing ovation that met the Vice President's entrance, to the thunderous applause with which the audience punctuated his every minor point, it was clear that the mass assembled were there to hear a statement of intent.

They didn't quite get that, but most in attendance seemed happy enough with what they did get. At the very least, the event showcased an Al Gore to which jokes involving the words "bore" or "snore" did not apply. At most, it was a chance to contemplate a rabblerouser in the body of an elder statesman, and that in itself was a spectacle rare enough to rouse my interest.