You've already read the 378,000 posts we filed before, during and after this year's Sundance Film Festival, but now I'm back to let you know what we left on the cutting room floor! What was going on when the Cinematical team wasn't watching movies or writing about them? Where were we, who were we with and why did someone bring a farm animal with them? Fear not, I'm kidding -- no farm animals were brought to Sundance (and if they were, whoever brought them kept the things hidden pretty well). So here's some of what was left out of our coverage:

-- While watching a Slamdance screener at one in the morning, Erik got pissed off, woke up James and asked him why films set in New York City never feature characters who have New York accents, with the exception of racist cops, gangsters or angry taxi drivers. James agreed. Erik then went off on Boston, and how every film set in Boston needs to feature the Bahston accent -- but, for some reason, the New York accent always gets dissed. James and Erik agreed to write Spider-Man Begins, featuring Peter Parker with a thick New York accent (he grew up in Queens, after all).

-- At four in the morning at some point over the weekend, James woke up Erik to tell him he was snoring. Erik spazzed out because he thought he was being mugged by a giant. From then on out -- and because of his freakishly large shadow -- James referred to himself as the Cloverfield monster whenever he had a few drinks in him. In fact, while outside on a balcony with Michael Pitt, James actually referred to himself as the Cloverfield monster. Everyone laughed.

Consider Death Wish. In the original film, Charles Bronson sought revenge against the thugs who raped his daughter and killed his wife – heinous acts that the audience enthusiastically agrees ought to be punished, even if it requires vigilantism.

Now consider Red, also about a man seeking justice, only this time the murder victim is his beloved old dog, killed with a shotgun by juvenile delinquents. We agree that the act is monstrous, but what kind of punishment is appropriate? Even the most fervent dog-lovers don't generally believe in the death penalty for killers of canines.

That's the dilemma at the heart of Red, an emotionally gripping if slightly over-wrought drama based on a novel by Jack Ketchum. It's set in a small Western town that still has a general store and friendly neighbors, a place where just about everyone has a dog. (The only pet-free families, I note, are the bad guys.) Brian Cox plays Avery Ludlow, a widower whose boon companion is Red, his 14-year-old hound. The two are fishing on the lakeshore one afternoon when a trio of punks comes along to harass and rob him. The leader, Danny (Noel Fisher), ends the encounter by blasting Red with a shotgun.

After being suffocated by so many well-made but unoriginal independent films at Sundance, Baghead is like a blast of fresh air. It has warmth and innovation, and the mischievous good sense to subtly make fun of the type of film that it is.

And what type of film is it? It's essentially part of the "mumblecore" sub-movement, featuring hand-held cameras, semi-improvised dialogue, and directionless hipster characters in their twenties. It's the work of brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, whose Puffy Chair beguiled film festival audiences a few years ago and is well worth seeking out on DVD if you haven't seen it.

The Duplasses stay behind the camera this time but give us four of their kindred spirits as characters. Matt (Ross Partridge) and Catherine (Elise Muller) are long-time on-and-off romantic partners; Chad (Steve Zissis) and Michelle (Greta Gerwig) have been dating a few months, though Michelle thinks of Chad as more of a brother or pal. In fact, she has a thing for Matt.

For those of us who were at Sundance until the very end, 2008 will be remembered as the Year of That Blizzard. James Rocchi and I finally made it home safely today after getting stuck in Park City when the highway was shut down from 22" of new snow and winds up to 60MPH.

If you've never been in a blizzard, it's kind of cool if you're safe indoors, and incredibly scary if you're not. Our good friends over at indieWIRE made the drive through the storm and got through just before the shutdown. Eugene Hernandez (always on the ball, even in an emergency) shot video of the indieWIRE crew's harrowing drive through the blizzard. Check out the video right here to see why James and I, much as we wanted to get home, ended up being glad to be stuck at the Yarrow. Yeesh.

The problem with making movies in the "grindhouse" style is that true grindhouse movies, almost by definition, were not seen by very many people. The target audience for a loving homage to the genre is therefore limited. Quentin Tarantino might adore the shlocky, violent capers of the 1970s, but how many of the rest of us have even seen them, much less love them enough to enjoy a re-creation of them?

Hell Ride, which Tarantino executive produced and Larry Bishop wrote and directed, is a salute to the ridiculous biker movies that Bishop frequently acted in back in the late '60s and early '70s. With titles like The Savage Seven and Chrome and Hot Leather, these were pure grindhouse cheese, and Hell Ride is either a parody of them or an adoring tribute. The line is always fine when it comes to a Tarantino project -- does he really like these movies, or does he only like them ironically? -- and here it's nearly invisible.

Bishop stars as Pistolero, the leader of a motorcycle gang called the Victors. Fellow members include Comanche (Eric Balfour) and The Gent (Michael Madsen); a comrade named St. Louie has just been murdered by a rival gang, the 666ers, led by Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones) and The Deuce (David Carradine). The Victors want revenge for this, but the often incomprehensible plot has them searching for a buried treasure, too, planted by a woman named Cherokee Kisum before she was killed back in 1976. Adding to the general mayhem is the reappearance of Eddie Zero (Dennis Hopper), a first-generation Victor who was presumed dead but has now returned to offer guidance to his successors.

When MTV Latin America honcho Ricardo de Montreuil made his first film, La Mujer de Mi Hermano, I thought (and wrote): Here is a man who ought to be making TV movies for Lifetime or Telemundo. His follow-up, the generic coming-of-age story Máncora, is more of the same -- selfish, gorgeous people having sex and lying to one another while undergoing a bland process of self-discovery.

Were it not for the sex and drugs, Máncora would be a completely forgettable movie. Never underestimate the power of sex and drugs to spice up an otherwise useless picture!

It's set in Peru (de Montreuil's native land), where Santiago (Jason Day) is a club-hopping, heavy-partying 22-year old who is having sex with an anonymous woman in a public restroom when he gets the call that his father has died. Wanting a break from Lima, he decides to take a road trip to the beach town of Máncora, where he can clear his head and do a lot of drugs and have some more sex with strangers -- you know, the usual grieving process. The first stage is denial, the second is anger, the third is cocaine.

Had a busy last couple days here at Sundance. I caught four films on Friday: Alan Ball's Towelhead, American Teen (my fave doc of the fest), Good Dick and Sunshine Cleaning. Yesterday I saw Mia Trachinger's Reversion, an interesting science fiction-inspired flick about mutants who don't operate within linear time, and today I wrapped up my Sundance screenings with two award winners, Trouble the Water and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

Last night the Yarrow Bar was hopping, so even though I was feeling like I was coming down with the nasty virus that's swept through the Sundance folks like crazy, I moseyed down to the bar to check out the scene for a while. It was like a Who's Who of Sundance there last night: Quentin Tarantino was on hand once again, resplendent in black tux pants and a gray shirt and being incredibly nice to all the fans who kept asking for photos with him.

In the future, our immigration problems will be solved by having Mexicans do their menial work with remote-controlled robots. We'll get our cheap labor, and the Mexicans will stay on their side of the border.

That's according to Sleep Dealer, which makes the suggestion satirically, of course. Set in the near future, the film is loaded with interesting sci-fi concepts but suffers in the execution of them. It falls back on too many clichés and spends too much time on an uninteresting subplot -- problems that could have been avoided if the film weren't so focused on presenting its nifty futuristic quirks.

Our hero is Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a young man in an arid Mexican village that was ruined several years ago when a water company dammed up the river. In this world, private companies control the water and charge ridiculous prices for it, protected and enabled by the U.S. government. Also in this world, the Internet has expanded to such a degree that you can have nodes implanted into your arms and neck and plug directly into the Information Superhighway. Once you're connected, you can upload your memories and broadcast or sell them a la YouTube.

Well, James Rocchi and I were supposed to be on our way to the airport, but instead we just rechecked into the Yarrow, thanks to blizzard conditions here in Park City closing the highway to the airport. I'm probably the person from our Sundance team who most loves seeing and playing in the snow here in Park City, but at this point I'm just ready to go home and not see snow for another year. The storm has been raging all day, with strong winds blowing the snow around and making conditions so bad that we actually ate lunch at the hotel rather than walking in the storm. Even the snowplows were having a hard time getting through.

We're going to hole up in the hotel and get some writing done tonight, and maybe have a drink by the fire at the Yarrow Bar. I expect the bar won't be quite as hopping tonight as it was during Sundance, when Tarantino and various other filmmakers were here hanging out -- Sundance is gone, and a convention of surgical pathologists has taken over the hotel. You never know, though, those pathologists might be wild and crazy.

Hopefully the weather will clear by tonight and our 6AM shuttle will be able to get us to the airport and get us home.\ More reviews and interviews are forthcoming; in the meantime, some pics of the blizzard after the jump ...

James is at the awards ceremony, and I'm back here at Cinematical headquarters liveblogging the results. The theme, James tells me, is apparently "cowboy," because William H. Macy is in a cowboy getup.

7:20: Macy is apparently doing a "wildly obscure monologue incorporating the titles of all the Sundance films. Macy: "That, my friends, is The Complete History of my Sexual Failures, and the end of my comedic monologue."

7:23: Tony Hale: "nothing says Sundance and independent film like people dancing in covered wagons."

Awards after the jump ...

Just Another Love Story is not just another love story. It is from Denmark, it has elements of film noir, and it has an outlandish batch of twists in its final 20 minutes. There is nothing "just another" about it.

We begin with images of our hero and narrator, Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen), lying on a sidewalk in the rain, apparently dying. He is a crime-scene photographer by trade, with a wife and two kids at home, the very picture of domestic tranquility. He is happy but somewhat unfulfilled – or at least he's allowed his middle-aged imagination to convince him that he is. In truth, his family loves him and his job is steady. Many men would be envious of his situation.

Jonas witnesses a car accident in which a desperate young woman named Julia (Rebecka Hemse) is critically injured, and something about her makes him want to check on her progress. At the hospital, through a series of events that would be downright zany if the film weren't so serious, Jonas comes to be mistaken for Julia's boyfriend Sebastian. Her worried parents and siblings have never met Sebastian, but they are comforted to know that he is being so supportive during this trying time.

The place to be Thursday night after the late press screeings was the Yarrow Bar, where Elvis Mitchell and Quentin Tarantino were holding court. The press crowd was rocking the bar; we had the guy with the guitar in there again providing impromptu music and the small bar was packed. And of course, everyone was watching Tarantino, and simultaneously pretending not to be watching Tarantino. Frankly, he's so expressive it was hard not to watch him, which was a bit tricksy because he was sitting in front of me, and was directly in my line of sight.

Last night I saw Ballast, which I really enjoyed, at a packed Raquet Club screening. It's a contemplative, character-driven movie, nothing fancy except a great script and superb acting, which is what I love to see in an independent film. This morning I caught Towelhead, directed by Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) which I've heard a lot about. It's about the sexual awakening of a young girl, and the situations she gets into as she wrestles with her blossoming sexuality. Very intense, but a very well done film that a lot of women, especially, will relate to from their own teen years -- particularly the conflicting messages young girls get about themselves as sexual beings and learning to express that sexual power in a world where a girl who has sex is a slut, but a boy who does the same is just "becoming a man." Very powerful film. Oh, and William H. Macy was at the screening, a couple rows ahead of me.

Several other critics and I were chatting yesterday about how, so far, the festival has been only so-so. We all liked several things a lot, but we hadn't totally loved anything. Like optimistic youths, we were eager to fall in love. But when would the right film come along?

For me, it happened last night, when I saw American Teen. I'd heard good things about it, but the description in the festival guide didn't really interest me. Knowing it had been picked up by Paramount Vantage, and that so many people liked it, I thought I'd give it a try. But even as I took a seat in the Yarrow screening room just before 10 p.m. last night, I was considering changing my mind and going back to the hotel instead.

I'm so glad I stayed. It's absolutely my favorite movie of the festival. It's a documentary that follows a handful of teenagers during their senior year in high school in Warsaw, Indiana. That format invites comparison to TV "reality" shows like Laguna Beach -- except that these kids are real people, with all the flawed decisions, enthusiasm, emotional meltdowns and melodrama of real teenagers.

The film captures all the drama of these kids' lives, and it's as touching and funny and -- above all -- hopeful as anything I've seen in a while. And so my festival is not a bust after all! I have found love.

(Written 5:32 PM, Jan. 24.)

Between the cold and the elevation, Park City is dry. You go from cold, dry air outside, to warmer dry air inside most of the time. Seeing as how I am used to the atmospheric humidity of a city that is surrounded by water at sea level, Park City's a fairly big shift. It's a lovely city -- I've yet to have a trip up here that wasn't made even more delightful by the courtesy of the city's residents -- but you can physically feel the air tugging the moisture out of you, and the electric heating in most places doesn't exactly help. I've had a couple of interviews this week in the glassed-in solarium/pool area of the Sidewinder Marriott, and I don't mind it when the subjects are running late here for one simple reason: It may have the grimly sterile scent of chlorine as an undertone, but it's the most humid place in the whole city. I'm waiting to do an interview there right now as I type this into my blackberry, and hey, let 'em run late; my eyes can use the break, and my skin can use the water.

The Sundance Film Festival is starting to wind down a bit, but there are still plenty of films I want to catch. A fair amount of the press had bailed already; Jeff Wells from Hollywood Elsewhere wrote last night that Sundance is "officially over," but James Rocchi and I will be here until the very end.

This is the point of the fest where things aren't quite as crazy. I've seen most of the films on my initial coverage list, and I start adding films based on word-of-mouth. Also, at the tail end of the fest you can actually walk down Main Street without feeling claustrophobic, and tables at decent restaurants are easier to come by. At this point, I'm still hoping to catch Anvil, American Teen, Red and Sunshine Cleaning, and we'll see what else I work in.