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Written by Pete Timmermann Thursday, 19 January 2006 18:00

I was unable to sleep last night for more than a couple hours at a time due to a fat man I’d never seen before farting loudly in his sleep, and I haven’t eaten a single proper meal. Still, I’m having a great time.

Well, I’m here in the Park City Library, using their computer to type up this festival diary (hooray for free stuff), but the problem is that you have to wait forever to get a computer, and then there’s a 30-minute time limit once you get one. So, forgive me if this is short, nonsensical, and/or sloppy.

Since arriving in Park City roughly 27 hours ago, I have full-on stepped into a puddle of freezing cold water (like, up to my ankle) and gotten splashed relatively severely with muddy, cold water by a passing truck while walking on the sidewalk. I was unable to sleep last night for more than a couple hours at a time due to a fat man I’d never seen before farting loudly in his sleep (I’m staying in a dorm at a ski lodge), and I haven’t eaten a single proper meal. Plus, the three movies I’ve seen so far have all been not very good. Still, I’m having a great time.

The opening night film, which I saw last night, was Nicole Holofcener’s Friends With Money—which stars a typically Holofcenerian cast, including Catherine Keener, Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, and Joan Allen—and is, as you'd expect, about the interweaving lives of contemporary females. Like Holofcener’s other movies, I didn’t despise Friends With Money, but I didn’t really like it, either. She’s a very good director of actors and some plot points ring true (or much truer than most other movies, anyway), but they just never really cohere into the whole that I expect.

This morning I could have either seen the Miramax release Lucky Number Slevin, which stars Bruce Willis, Josh Hartnett, and Lucy Liu, or A Little Trip to Heaven, which doesn’t yet have a distributor and stars Forest Whitaker and Julia Stiles. I opted for Heaven, since I’m guaranteed to be able to see Slevin at some point in the future. Like Friends, Heaven, too, was just OK. Whitaker plays a mild-mannered insurance claims investigator who is investigating the death of Stiles’ husband and/or brother, and he does a very good job here (it’s nice to see a black man his size play someone extremely nice and meek in an English-language film), but it didn’t really stand out as anything special.

Just prior to coming here to the library I saw It’s Only Talk, the new movie from Japanese filmmaker Ryuichi Hiroki, who directed the great film Vibrator a few years back (which, despite it being a great film and starring Nao Omori of Ichi the Killer, never got U.S. distribution). I didn’t mind it too much at first (it’s hard to not be won over by scenes of a manic-depressive yakuza frolicking on a giant Godzilla replica made of old tires), but it really drags on, and for the duration of the last hour I found myself checking my watch every five minutes.

Later tonight I’m going to see The Peter Pan Formula, the debut from a Korean filmmaker who has worked with Kim Ki-duk, and one other movie, probably Destricted, a series of seven short erotic films by weird, modern filmmakers (Gaspar Noe, Matthew Barney, and Larry Clark among them). Also, I have to rearrange tomorrow’s schedule to include a public screening of Wordplay in the morning, as I just got an offer to interview the film’s director, Patrick Creadon, as well as its subject, The New York Times’ crossword editor, Will Shortz. Hopefully it will all work out without the interview falling through or me missing too many other screenings. Oh well, I guess it’s better to be overstimulated than understimulated.