Wecome to our 2011 Sundance Blog! Kristine and I flew in on Thursday afternoon and met up at the Salt Lake City airport. It was a beautiful day in Utah, cold and crisp but not uncomfortably so. We arrived at the Hampton Inn in Park City to find a member of Snoop Dogg's posse, Tha Dogg Pound, at the front desk checking in. His name was MacShawn100 and he was wearing some impressive bling. We chatted with Mr. Shawn and tried to score tickets to the sold out Snoop Dogg and Lil' Jon show at Harry O's. He said he would ask his manager Pam for some tickets for us, but we had to leave for a movie before Pam arrived back at the Hampton. You can see MacShawn100 here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaVIBRteG9M
Turns out that Snoop Dogg himself, Lil' Jon, and their respective posses roll Hampton Inn-style, yo.
We arrived in our room to find another fabulous gift basket from the Ryneska family.
As usual, we were starving and tore i
nto it with glee. We then left to go to the Eccles Theatre to check out the opening night premiere of Pariah by director Dee Rees. We saw the short film version of Pariah at Sundance a couple of years ago, so it was good to see how it evolved into a feature. Dee Rees is a Spike Lee protege and very impressive young woman. Pariah is a semi-autobiographical film about a teenager named Alike living in New York City with her family and trying to figure out her identity. She is gay but doesn't fit into the lesbian community or the straight community around her. Ultimately, she finds freedom through her writing and figures out that she can just be herself. Dee Rees said during Q&A that she dealt with many of the same issues growing up and that her parents stopped having anything to do with her after she came out as gay. She said that recently she has been back in contact with her mother, but her father still refuses to acknowledge her or the film. We'll post some video of the Pariah Q&A here soon.
After the film, we headed down to Main Street for a post-midnight dinner at Main Street Pizza and Noodles. Apparently, a lot of people had the same idea because we saw Ben Lyons from E! Entertainment News (son of movie critic Jeffrey Lyons), Lake Bell from the Meryl Streep film It's Complicated (she has a short at the festival this year), Cisco Adler, and Michael Rapaport. I have had a special dislike for Michael Rapaport ever since I read a really mean article he wrote about Natasha Lyonne in the May, 2005 issue of Jane Magazine. You can check out a copy of "Evicting Natasha" online if you want to see what a jerk he is. He also apparently stalked and harrassed the fabulous Lili Taylor a few years ago when she broke up with him. I had told Matt that I might have to hit him if I ran into him at Sundance, but I was able to restrain myself. He directed a doc about A Tribe Called Quest that is at the festival this year. He and his lady friend walked out at the same time we did, so we eavesdropped on their conversation as they walked down the street behind us. He sounded pretty friendly and was talking about how he didn't need to go shopping while he was in Park City because he had enough winter clothes. Hopefully he has reformed his jerky ways, but I still don't trust the guy.
We arrived back at the Hampton Inn to the overwhelming pungent smell of smoke, thanks to the Snoop Dogg and Lil' Jon posses. Kristine realized that when she had complained to the front desk about the odd herbal smell in our hallway earlier in the evening ("it smells like a fragrant cleaning agent or something"), MacShawn100 was sitting at the lobby computer right behind her and must have gotten pretty nervous. Kristine pressed the front desk hard enough to get a bottle of Febreze, but it occurred to us later that if she had pressed any harder she could have single-handedly brought down the whole Dogg Pound par-tay. Holla!
