THE SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW
By Kyle Newacheck of Mail Order Comedy

The Sundance Film Festival, the place where big deals are made, stars are born and filmmakers get their big break.  I recently attended the opening weekend of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah and, despite the below freezing temperatures, it was an amazing experience and reminded me what I want to do - let people escape reality for the duration of my film.

When I first arrived, Main street was packed with people trying to get into premiers of films, hunting around for the next workshop on the new cutting edge technology and others just enjoying Park City's dining and searching for stars ( I had a mini conversation with Crispin Glover- weird dude and saw Heather Graham get mobbed by relentless groups of fans - I was scared for her)

I had a chance to see the premier of Weapon, a drama starring Nick Cannon.  I really enjoyed the film and thought the story was quite good, it was a fractured story split into four parts, each part is a different point of view of a character in the story.  It begins with one of the most amazing opening sequences I have seen when one of the main characters gets their head blown off.  As the audience you learn more and more with each point of view until we realize what happened and are forced to decide who we side with.

I also saw some of the Shorts that made it into the festival, and I wasn't impressed.  I felt that the stories didn't work or weren't executed properly.  Maybe there was some "deeper meaning" to all of them and I am too lame to realize it, but nonetheless I wasn't impressed.

The best experience of the trip was going to a seminar about internet media, and the "revolution".  Youtube.com was there along with myspace.com and some other websites.  This was very informative...if you know nothing about what’s happening, basically they outlined what’s happening with the internet phenomenon and the future of it.  The most interesting part of the seminar was when they opened up the floor for questions.  The questions that people were asking basically boiled down to this, "what button on what internet site can I click to get famous?" and "Since there is no business model for internet media yet, am I supposed to wait until the model is put into place?"  Fuck this shit.  These people have just been bitten by the "fame bug" and don't want to work for it.  There is plenty of things you can do in terms of the internet media, since there is no model, there are no rules. Now is the time to be creative, take it upon yourself to decide your own fate, promote yourself, build yourself up, its all on you.

Sundance was fun and I hope everyone has a chance to go at least once in their lifetime.  For me it reassured me that the internet game still hasn't been figured out and where we are with Mail Order Comedy is on point and where we need to be right now.  It's the wild wild west out here right now, its time to reinvent the rules.