(Note: Eric D. Snider has been posting daily Sundance diaries on his own blog, but for the next few days we're stealing them and posting them here. If you want to catch up, here are the previous entries: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6.

Sundance Diary, Day 7 (Wednesday, January 23):

You'll be glad to know that the chest pains I was having a couple days ago have subsided. Now if I exert myself slightly I just get a little light-headed, like maybe I'm going to pass out, except I don't pass out. This is definitely an improvement, as chest pains are painful (duh) while light-headedness is kind of fun. It's how Paris Hilton feels all the time, only without the lesions.

I got up at 8:45 this morning (DAY SEVEN OF EARLY ARISING!) and headed straight for the Yarrow lobby, where I made with the clickety-clack on the laptop for a while. This was necessary because apparently my various employers actually want me to write things for them.

My first screening was at 11:30 a.m., the premiere of the new version of Funny Games. The 1997 original is a love-it-or-hate-it German terror flick about a home invasion. The new one is almost a shot-for-shot remake, made by the same writer/director, Michael Haneke. The only conceivable reason for it is simply to have it in English, which is more marketable than German.

Not that it's very marketable anyway. This is an intense, uncomfortable film with some disturbing violence (though most of it happens off-camera). Personally, I love it. Haneke's a very, very talented filmmaker. The discomfort, for me, is the fun kind. Maybe it's because the movie has a slightly playful tone to it -- creepily playful, but playful nonetheless.

It was about 1:20 when we got out, and I needed to get to the Racquet Club for a 2:30 public screening of The Wackness. You'll recall that this film has been the source of much discussion this week due to the fact that many people love it and a few vocal others dislike it immensely. Thus far the world had been deprived of MY opinion, and it was time I remedied that. Untold millions were wandering in darkness!!

This was to be my first public screening of the festival. They prefer to keep members of the press quarantined in press screenings, but it is possible to get public tickets on a case-by-case basis. I like to do a few public screenings here and there, just to be out among regular people and eavesdrop on their phone conversations. I was not disappointed. While in line waiting to get in, the woman next to me was on the phone describing a movie playing at the fest called Donkey Punch, and she found it necessary to explain what a "donkey punch" is. It's a mythical sex act, and if you aren't already acquainted with the term, I urge you not to Google it.

For some reason they're persnickety about food and beverage in the Racquet Club screening venue. They'll sell it at a booth in the waiting area, at prices that have literally made me laugh out loud in the past, but when you actually get into the building there are volunteers telling you that you can't bring it in. Savvy Sundance veterans such as myself have thus learned to smuggle food and beverage in our backpacks and eat it surreptitiously when the volunteers aren't looking. And that is how I was able to eat a Whopper while waiting for The Wackness to start.

(Side anecdote: At public screenings they give you little ballots so you can score the movie afterward, and that's how the audience awards are determined. So right before the movie starts, there's a card on the screen that says, "Don't forget to vote!" When it appeared, someone yelled, "Obama!" and there was much laughter and applause. If he had yelled "Huckabee!" I suspect there would also have been laughter, but a different kind.)

So. The Wackness. It's about a young man who has just graduated and doesn't know what to do with his life. I know! The innovation is astounding. The element that makes the film ever-so-slightly different from the 13,827,356 other indie films with that premise is that it's set in New York in 1994, and the main character is a white, rap-loving marijuana dealer who trades weed for therapy sessions with a psychiatrist played by Ben Kingsley. The kid himself is played by Josh Peck, of Nickelodeon's "Drake & Josh" show, doing his part to break into more "adult" roles, i.e., roles that involve doing drugs and showing his butt.

It's a C or C+ movie. I don't understand loving it and I don't understand hating it. A few laughs, a memorable character or two, and a lot of padding. The book says 110 minutes; it's really more like 100; even that is too long. My feeling is that if your movie doesn't really have a point, you should get to it as quickly as possible.

I managed to catch a shuttle just seconds after exiting the venue and headed back to Holiday Village for a press screening of a comedy called Adventures of Power. Much of the usual gang was there: Childress, Weinberg, friends from Film Threat and Slash Film, and others. We chatted and laughed and had a good time, up until the movie started. Then the laughter died.

I endured about 20 minutes before I decided there was no point in continuing and I left. It's a transparent Napoleon Dynamite wannabe, complete with nerdy main character who doesn't realize he's a joke, who wears a headband and a fanny pack to convey to us how hilariously out-of-touch he is. The guy's claim to fame is that he's great at playing air drums along with cheesy '80s rock songs. That is the movie's joke. Its one joke. Childress and Weinberg walked out on it later than I did, reporting that it never got any better. A pox on it.

'Twas dinnertime next. Weinberg, Kim, and I headed across the parking lot to Used To Be A Burrito Place, where chicken parmesan and chicken marsala (which smelled a lot like dog butt, no joke, but Kim said it was delicious) were consumed. And then Weinberg and I had to go watch a movie about biker gangs.

Hell Ride was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino. He didn't write or direct it, but it's clear that Larry Bishop, who did, has memorized everything Tarantino has ever done. It fits with the grindhouse cinema du crap experience that Tarantino and his pals are so fond of, being about two rival biker gangs who, like, track each other down and shoot each other a lot. Its dialogue is hyper-aware and over-written. It's either a commentary on bad biker movies or possibly just a bad biker movie. Weinberg wrote me this note during it: "Bad on purpose is still bad." He hated hated HATED the movie; I found elements of it kind of fun, particularly its visual style. But yeah, not a very enjoyable movie.

It was preceded by a short. Shorts are Sundance's way of saying, "Here's your last chance to go to the bathroom before the movie starts." This one, The Rambler, looked like a '70s low-budget hitchhiker flick. I missed a few minutes of it while I was in the bathroom, but I got back in time to see the hitchhiker in the basement of someone's house, having sex with a woman who then proceeded to vomit all over him. It was colorful vomit, not realistic at all, and it just kept coming. Buckets of it, over and over again. It was supposed to be funny, and it was, and on a whole the short was one of the strangest things I've ever seen in my life. And as a nine-year Sundance veteran, that's saying a lot.

The night ended with me and the Cinematical crew and Childress all hanging out in Kim's hotel room, eating and talking and yelling about movies. It was fun, a simple pleasure that people like me look forward to at film festivals. Festivals are like a support group for movie addicts, except that we enable each other instead of trying to quit. This group meeting last until 3 a.m., and ended then only because someone looked at the clock and emitted an expression of great shock and horror, which is probably how a lot of support groups end.

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