More of Sean’s awesomeness…

http://blogs.sltrib.com/sundance/index.php?p=10097&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

(Director Tony Scott drops his hat and gestures to co-star Kristin Stewart and Melissa Leo of Welcome to the Riley in the press line at the Racquet Club Theatre at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City Utah, January 23, 2010 Live at Sundance/Calvin Knight)

I was a guest on Radio West this morning (Tuesday), discussing my impressions of Sundance. If you missed it, you can catch it again at 7 p.m. on KUER FM90, or you can download the podcast anytime from kuer.org.

I had a lot more material than we had time, so I thought I’d add a few thoughts on how the festival’s gone so far.

Celebrity sightings:

Joseph Gordon Levitt (you may remember him as the kid from the TV show “Third Rock from the Sun”) is doing a couple of projects – the film “Hesher” is getting pretty good reviews. He also did a presentation as part of the festival’s Frontier on Main on his venture called Hit Record, which is a place where people can come together and collaborate on projects and then share the profits. His website is www.hitrecord.org.

As he describes it, “In a nutshell: we create and develop art and media collaboratively here on our site; we use my position in the traditional entertainment industry to turn that creativity into money-making productions; and then we share any profits with the contributing artists.” He seemed genuinely nice and won over a lot of people at the festival this year.

Then there’s “The Runaways,” a retelling of Joan Jett’s early years in an all-girl rock band. For celebrity watchers, it was notable because it starred Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart. Some others were more impressed that Joan Jett was in town (she was executive producer of the film).

I’m still bummed about The Roots, but Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt were in town for a Sundance concert celebrating music in film, and it was nice to see them in an intimate venue. (Lyle Lovett wrote music for a movie here.) After that, I headed for the Seattle party to hear the Moondoggies, a tight band featured in $5 Cover, the project I’m writing about for the Seattle Times.

And Jimmy Smits is apparently super nice.

As for the overall vibe: It’s John Cooper’s first year as director of the festival. He’s done some new and different things – disagreeing on if it’s good. For one, he re-categorized some movies. There’s the “Next” section, focusing on low-budget films. Some people thought this would backfire and become a sort of ghetto, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Some of the most talked-about movies are in that section.

There’s a visual theme with every festival. This year, it’s kind of got an off-kilter, rough-edged, edgy, grungy feeling. I think that theme is ugly and the whole “Rebel!” thing is a little cheesy, but that’s just my opinion. Obviously, the movies are the most important thing.

A couple movies have been bought by distributors, including “Buried,” which stars Ryan Reynolds as a guy who gets buried alive and has to figure out how to escape. Obviously not a good movie for anyone with claustrophobia.

My friend Clayton Chase Fullmer took this great photo of Bill Murray for WireImage, the festival's official photographer.

I never thought celebrity-seekers would be as excited about seeing Bill Gates as they are about starlets.

He made a couple events difficult to get into when he decided to go to them. Apparently, he was partying pretty hard this weekend, dancing and flirting with young women way past midnight. I know it’s hard to imagine. I’m glad he got the Sundance experience, but it meant a lot of people didn’t get into these events because they were taken over by Gates and his entourage.

The Roots performed with John Legend at a party for “Waiting for Superman.” Because Bill Gates was there, I didn’t get in to hear it. I was deeply, bitterly disappointed. The Roots are one of my favorite bands to see live, and since they joined Jimmy Fallon as his house band, they haven’t toured much.

So I stood outside, with snow piling up on me, cursing. “Stupid Bill Gates!” I said. And I trundled off to catch a shuttle home. On the shuttle, I ran into my dear friend Sean P. Means, movie critic for the Salt Lake Tribune. Like me, he was covered with snow. Also like me, he’d been waiting to get into a party and had given up. We shared a friendly gripe about our thwarted efforts.

I soon realized that if I’d gotten into that event, I would probably not have made it home. And as I slid along at 10 miles an hour through a sideways blizzard, gripping the steering wheel and gritting my teeth as cars slid off the road all around me, I thought about what’s really important in life. Not Bill Gates. Not even The Roots (though they’re up there). It was important to me at that moment that I made it home without dying or crashing my mom’s car. It was important that I made it back to my sweetie in Seattle. And chatting with Sean was a lot more fun than party conversation would have been. Friends and family, that’s what’s important. And good music, when you can get it.

The snow was just starting when this photo was taken at the Eccles Theater. (Photo by Brandon Joseph Baker, courtesy of Sundance Film Festival)

I’m about to go interview MTV honcho David Gale and stopped for some lunch, which ended up consisting of breakfast. I just realized those fried potatoes had a lot of garlic. Apologies to David in advance.

I was supposed to interview Bill Murray and Robert Duvall today, but they cancelled this morning due to knee injury (Murray) and altitude sickness (Duvall). They’re around here somewhere, but they’re not talking to the press. Sigh.

Nonetheless, their movie, “Get Low,” is pretty good, and lifted higher by Duvall’s performance. The guy doesn’t miss a step.

People keep asking me if I’ve seen any good movies. Usually by this time I haven’t seen many – too busy working! The one getting the best response so far is the one I mentioned yesterday, “Waiting for Superman.”

By the way, everyone seems to want to know whether Bill Gates is traveling with security guards. What do you think? I saw a couple, with Secret-Service-style, with clear headphone cords coming out their ears. My sources tell me he came to Sundance with a contingent of 14 security people. I’m guessing they go with him everywhere. You would have security, too, if you were Bill Gates. They also tell me the one movie he was interested in seeing at Sundance was “the one with the girl from Twilight” (that would be “The Runaways,” BTW). Maybe he’s not such a nerd after all.

Celebrity sightings: I saw Elisabeth Shue the other night. Not sure if she’s in a movie or just having fun. I also saw Ty Burrell from “Modern Family,” whose hometown is Grants Pass, Oregon (he also attended the U of O) and who now lives in Utah.

My first crappy photo of Bill Gates (on the right, with producer Lesley Chilcott and legendary school reformer Geoffrey Canada)

Ever since we moved to Seattle, people have been asking Bill, my fiance, “Have you met Bill Gates yet?”

I suppose people think that since (my) Bill works in technology in Seattle, he might someday run into (the richest man in the world) Bill. And it will probably happen eventually. But I ended up meeting the software star first. Today, at Sundance.

Gates was here to support “Waiting for Superman,” a documentary about just how bad America’s public education is, and why. The Gates Foundation is a big supporter of efforts to reform failing schools, and Gates is also interviewed in the film, bemoaning the lack of educated American workers who could be filling the high-paying jobs he now has to recruit for worldwide.

In person, Gates was, well, pretty nerdy. During the post-screening Q&A, the filmmakers turned to him whenever someone asked a question involving numbers or obscure facts, and he happily rattled off percentages and program names.

I met him at a reception after the screening. I’m sorry to say I have no photographic evidence (he posed with fans and I did have a camera, but I just can’t bring myself to do something as cheesy as ask to have a photo taken with someone). I shook his hand and introduced myself and mentioned that my fiance works for a couple of his old buddies (which is true), and he replied with, “I love those guys!” and that was about it. He’s clearly enjoying his job as philanthropist, which he approaches the way he approaches everything: with an eye toward value and return on investment.

I did have nice conversations with a couple Gates Foundation folks, which I hope to print sometime soon.

The movie, directed by Davis Guggenheim of “An Inconvenient Truth” fame, is a touching and saddening look at families’ efforts to get their kids into better public schools, even as the odds are stacked against them. It looks at the ways some schools (often public charter schools) are blowing the notion that kids fail in school because they come from poor families or otherwise tough backgrounds. And it gives some reasons why it’s so difficult to make schools better (national teachers’ unions are big villains here).

Bill Gates was a surprise guest, as was Geoffrey Canada, a prominent school reformer. Musician John Legend, who composed a song for the film, will be in town tomorrow.

In related news, Microsoft is everywhere at this year’s festival – not that you’d know it, necessarily. The company’s search engine, Bing, is an official festival sponsor and hosts the Bing Bar hangout on Main Street and quite a few parties. Obviously, the company’s trying to distance itself from Microsoft’s staid reputation.

It’s probably safe to say that Bill Gates didn’t have much to do with “Waiting for Superman” getting into Sundance – I mean, Guggenheim has an Oscar, and all. And the movie itself is good. Paramount will be releasing it nationally, so make a point of seeing it. Just maybe not with an ardent teachers’ union rep.

...and, my second crappy photo of Bill Gates, this time at the reception.

Heading to Sundance for a screening this morning got me thinking about what I love about Sundance. For the most part, it’s not celebrities (they’re usually boring and cause traffic jams) or the parties (they can be fun, but just as often they’re not).

My list of favorites for now, in no particular order:

1. Publicists: They’re the ones who connect the events and movies with us press people, and they make the world go ’round. No one works harder, or for longer hours. They’re sending off press releases, making phone calls, arranging interviews, manning guest lists, and just generally doing a lot to make my life easier.

2. Sundance audiences: They watch the movie! They turn off their cell phones! They don’t talk during the film! They laugh and even cry at the right times! They’re actually here to watch the movies, not chatter at their friends or babysit their kids.

3. Shuttle bus drivers: They’re heroes. They drive in all kinds of weather, on slick roads, all the while directing frantic patrons and calmly answering questions. And they’re damned nice while they’re at it.

More soon…

It's Time!

I’m launching this blog just in time for the Outdoor Retailer convention and the Sundance Film Festival. For a long time now, the last week in January has been my busiest of the year, and this is gearing up to be a big one.

I’ll be writing stories about Sundance for the Seattle Times, but I’ll be adding a lot here that you won’t see there (including, I hope, some juicy gossip and celebrity encounters). Outdoor Retailer is a trade show for the outdoor recreation industry, which means people like me go there to find out about the latest and greatest in outdoor gear. I’ll pass along what I find out about that, too.

I was at the Salt Lake airport yesterday watching the hordes descend. It struck me that it’s pretty easy to tell which were in town for which event:

Sundance clothing: tight designer jeans, funky hats, ridiculously inappropriate outerwear, orange Puma sneakers or high-heeled boots
OR clothing: nondescript relaxed-fit jeans, baseball caps or wool hats, ridiculously overbuilt outerwear, comfy leather shoes
Sundance luggage: pricey
OR luggage: got free at a previous show
Sundance rude behavior: refusal to get off phone even when talking to customer service person
OR rude behavior: talking loudly and obsessively about snow quality and their last outings
Sundance build: slender bordering on sickly
OR build: athletic
Sundance male/female ratio: about 50/50
OR male/female ratio: about 70/30

Of the two, you would think Sundance would be more fun. It’s busier, with more going on in more places. But the affable crowd at OR will probably be having a better time in Utah.

Stay tuned for more updates…

Linas Phillips (writer/director/actor) in a scene from "Bass Ackwards," a film I'll be following. Photo by: Sean Porter / A Furnace Films Release

Linas Phillips (writer/director/actor) in a scene from “Bass Ackwards,” a film I’ll be following. Photo by: Sean Porter / A Furnace Films Release

I’ve spent my career writing about arts, entertainment, relationships, travel, outdoor recreation—the fun stuff. The stuff that makes life worth living. Now that I’ve left the full-time newspaper world to focus on writing books, I find myself still wanting to find out about cool stuff and tell people what I’ve discovered.

This blog is meant to do just that—scour the Seattle area and beyond looking for the things that make life worth living. Despite the sincere-sounding name, I don’t intend this to be inspirational in the traditional sense; if you know my writing, you know I might not even be capable of such a thing if I tried.

The name of the blog comes from the movie “Dead Poets Society,” in which Robin Williams plays a teacher who inspires young men at a hoity-toity school. Although the movie doesn’t rate all that high in my film pantheon, I did like some aspects—especially Williams, who throws poetry around as if it were a call for social change (which, come to think of it, poetry sometimes is).

Here’s what he says:

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

This is my philosophy. There are the things that keep us alive, and the things that make staying alive worth it. And if you don’t have the latter, the former isn’t worth much.

This is a small part of my contribution to life’s play, I suppose, a thought that seems both ridiculous and somehow important. Or necessary. At least for me. I’m hoping the writing here (by me and maybe an occasional contributor or two) will be opinionated and occasionally entertaining with a slight potential for edification. That is, I hope it’s worthwhile.

I hope to bring some of my journalistic background into the mix. For one thing, I don’t intend this blog to be about me or my life, though that will undoubtedly sneak in. Also, I’m not going to write about something just because someone tells me to, although I’ll always appreciate suggestions and feedback.

I really hope to make this a collaborative enterprise, with readers sending me their suggestions. What new, strange, cool, startling or mundane thing makes your life worth living?

Walt Whitman himself (photo by George C. Cox. Library of Congress image)