Here I lie on the muddy brick floor of Sundance�s Gateway Center, the gathering place of those rare fanatical fest-goers who aren�t extravagantly rich, who don�t have a press or public pass, and are willing to pay for their deficiencies in the form of a wildly erratic sleeping schedule hampered by bass-heavy private parties and vomit-lathered bathroom floors. The addition of an erstwhile day-time No-Doze pill further precludes the hope of knowing when sleep will come or go. To subsist is to fill the day without regret. With the setting set, here are some pre-fest thoughts:

I did �catch� a couple �films� from this year�s Sundance at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, one during which I fell asleep (Andrucha Waddington�s The House of Sand) and one out of which I stormed the mighty motherfuck (Philip Groening�s Into Great Silence). The former is stunningly shot � Anthony Mann filtered through Bela Tarr, a very drowsy me scribbled down � but this was one of those cases where you�re watching a film and gradually, just very gradually you fall, umm, Into Great Silence (*rimshot*, synth-y transition music, cross-fade). Now this is a near-3-hour study of quotidian monk life, filmed in a manner as reverent and monastic as its subject. If that sounds awesome to you, I sincerely empathize. But I couldn�t for the life of me find a purpose in Groening�s vacillation between grainy and grainier film stock, hand-held and static shooting styles, interior rituals and exterior labor. It�s sheer self-sacrificing rigor, studied with sheer structural carelessness.

Now for the Holy Grail of Park City, my now two-day history of Adventures in Cinema. Saying I �didn�t make it,� to Nicole Holofcener�s latest, the opening-night premiere Friends With Money, seems inappropriate, given that I contributed a good five hours of fruitless wait-list tedium to Ms. Holofcener�s personal karma bank. Did I mention I come to Sundance sans tickets or passes, and avec much quixotic persistence? Or how about that the latter, post-Friends With Money, has served me quite well?

Welcome to my first screening, rather appropriately of a film I was shut out of at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, Battle in Heaven, the second feature by a strange pervert named Carlos Reygadas. His first feature, Japon, sampled filmmakers as diverse as Fellini and Tarkovsky, and it took two viewings for me to glean its precious offerings of transcendental craziness dispersed across miles of solemn drudgery. Reygadas� signature trope is making fug sex explicit, irrational, and spiritually charged. I can think of no other filmmaker living who so deliberately subjects his audience to images only the teeniest subset of granny-chasing fetishists would even find agreeable, let alone beautiful. Taking my Toronto shut-out into consideration, here�s a brief sampling of what I *did* make it into up north: A History of Violence, Manderlay, Corpse Bride. So despite being willfully esoteric, Reygadas is veritably holding his own among some of the more prominent auteurs of the past two decades. I�m not sure I �get� Battle in Heaven, but in this decade�s International Cinema Contest of Implosive Opacity (also attended by Bruno Dumont and Vincent Gallo), I�d give it a generous smiley, if not a gold star. I read it as a savage attack on the Mexico�s diverging institutional values, i.e. church and state, with the former represented in allegory by Devoted Obese Wife and the latter by Sexy Rich Psychologically Nonsensical Chick. Reygadas isn�t quite a humorist, but his conceptual gags, e.g. the poker-faced protag glimpsing a painting of Christ mid-coitus with the DOW, ultimately compensate for his sludgy portent. Sandro Matosevic offered a fuller review here.

I saw James Ponsoldt�s Off the Black because, of course, Nick Nolte is in it, playing a goofy, washed-up umpire, and Tim Orr shot it, and on that basis alone I could reasonably expect a melancholy, shambling mammoth shot in sun-dappled grit. In that arena, it didn�t disappoint. It�s a convoluted but enjoyable father-figure-son-figure bonding movie, its brightest bits hidden in isolation. Ponsoldt�s promising, quasi-Fordian generosity shines through in unadorned sequences like Nolte�s chance meeting with the father of a past team member, or his prot�g�e�s (Trevor Morgan) excursion into the fields with his sister, who sings in disarming struggle to open her heart. And a note: I�d usually consider myself a guy who cringes at the thought of a title explained mid-dialogue. But Off the Black contains one such so perfectly calibrated and affecting that I�m nearly prepared to renounce that pet peeve.

Brian Jun�s Steel City is yet another non-gay man-on-man bonding flick, which from now on I will confusingly refer to as MOMs. It�s also a dramatic competition film, my first of the fest. I usually try not to get my hopes up, but last year�s first comp film was so much richer, more assured, and most importantly unexpected than anything else the fest had to offer, that it would seem presumptuous not to shed any expectations I have with regards to competition entries. That film, by the way, was Rian Johnson�s Brick, soon to blaze across screens in what I�ve been assured is an even more dazzling new cut. Sure enough, Steel City gets off to a wobbly start, protag PJ (Tom Guiry, aiming for Brando and getting maybe halfway to Penn) perpetually wounded and summoning tics to the high heavens. But in fact the film�s Method pretensions pleasingly dilute its schematic screenplay, and a font of unexpectedly complex stuff ensues: Jun is a legit realist, with a thorough humanist gameplan. A fine slab of down-home path-to-redemption rue, the film also works overtime as a smart man�s Crash, where social discord is illustrated not through clunky designations of Good and Bad behavior but through lived-in, affectionate banter between folks who frankly have more important things to do than Learn About Prejudice. Jun has evidently studied the work of the Dardenne brothers, best on display in an awesomely referential from-behind tracking shot of PJ�s working-class hero straight from their The Son. Like the Dardennes� protagonists, PJ earns our sympathy by being unabashedly flawed, a good guy who on occasion indulges his worst impulses. Jun’s subtly aberrant sensibility, per one tangent, views a casually offensive joke about truck-packing Mexicans as sincerely felt flirtation from Caucasian coquet to apprehensive Latina. The giddy warmth of nascent love is suffused with the legacy of hate, and no one is punished for sinning in the process, unless the burden of navigating through thorny anxiety can be called cruel and unusual.

Just an N.B. before discussing Cam Archer�s Wild Tigers I Have Known: I know and have worked with one of its makers, on a short somewhat composed of the same crew, so this review perhaps presents a scandalous collusion between my semi-professional and secondary-semi-professional lives. To further soil my tainted credibility, I�ll go ahead and hail Wild Tigers as the fest�s first unqualified triumph. Another MOM, it�s also hugely queer, resurrecting the homo-sensuality of Kenneth Anger for the Tarnation generation of the self-castigating, confessional diva. Archer solipsizes closeted pre-teen Logan (Malcolm Stumpf) into a realm where he can talk without speaking, dream without waking, and meander without turning back. We�re immersed in Logan�s shifting conscious, extending to his suppression of sadness � we indirectly learn he�s crying, while the back of his hooded sweater conceals all. But the details of Logan�s journey stand as unmapped, authentic territory, from the lingering eroticism of a schoolyard brawl to Fairuza Balk�s discomfiting sexpot mom. Archer captures the moment when the belief in human goodness and the admission to incompatible perceptions emerge, hug, and explode. As the director singles out a �totem of tolerance� as facile, the only transcendence he conclusively propagates is psychological. Changing the world is laughable, if only because Logan expends so much energy comprehending one or two junior high studs. Free of hetero-friendly convention, the film is personal, not universal, and it�s hemmed from an impervious social survivalism some might call insane. Call it All the Real Boys.