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The thing I've most looked forward to since we moved to Salt Lake City is the Sundance Film Festival. While most of the action takes place in Park City, films are also screened here in Salt Lake. I got tickets to five movies, four of them in SLC and one in Park City, just for the experience. On Sunday, we drove up to Park City to see <a href="http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?section=reviews&Id=8448" target="_blank"><em>Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out</em></a>, a documentary drummer Stewart Copeland put together from Super 8 footage he shot of the band between 1978 and 1982.

We arrived in Park City around 11:30 am. The movie wasn't until 3:00, but we wanted to have time to go down to Main Street to check out the scene (i.e., celebrity hunt) and have lunch. Amazingly, we were able to park in one of the lots near the festival headquarters, nabbing the last available spot thanks to J's fabulous former-parking-lot-attendant parking skills. Psyched by our good parking luck, we hopped the Main Street Express shuttle, hoping that luck would also be with us in celeb sighting. Alas, this was not the case. We were on Main Street for two hours, including lunch at an expensive "Brasserie," and did not see one stinkin' celebrity! We passed a guy on the sidewalk who looked like Anthony Bourdain, but he was wearing sunglasses, and in retrospect was maybe a little too heavy, so who knows. 

Around 1:30, we headed over to the Eccles Center to get a good spot in line for the movie. The movie before ours was <em>Come Early Morning</em>, Joey Lauren Adams' directorial debut, starring Ashley Judd. I thought surely we would get to see <strong>someone</strong> famous coming out of that one. Not so. A woman standing next to us in line pointed out Dennis Quaid, but all I saw was the back of his black-toboganned head. Another woman in line said, "Is that Don Cheadle?" pointing to a black guy wearing glasses and a black tobogan (like 90% of the men there). I only saw the side of his face&mdash;not enough for a positive ID.

We were finally allowed into the theater and found seats that were great for movie-watching, not so great for celeb sighting. Predictably, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers attended the screening; just as predictably, Sting did not, even though he was at the festival. The movie was fun, like watching someone's home movies, only he was in a famous rock band. The best thing about it was that it reminded me how much I like The Police. Copeland's voiceover narration and text captions were quite entertaining, particularly his comments about becoming more and more removed from the "real world" the more popularity and fame the band achieved. It was a little puzzling that he chose to end the movie with the band's penultimate album, <em>Ghost in the Machine</em>, leaving out the very popular <em>Synchronicity</em> and its giant stadium tour. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film is what Copeland did with the music. In the Q & A session following the screening, he described with delight the machinations made possible by digitization, how he was able to take tracks from songs (presumably some originally discarded?) and create long instrumental pieces&mdash;or layer vocals from one song over music from another, an effect I particularly liked.

After the movie, we headed home. Hanging out in Park City for the day was fun&mdash;great people-watching, even if we didn't manage to spot any famous people. I'm looking forward to the movies will be seeing in Salt Lake, especially <em>Art School Confidential</em> (even though it's gotten the <a href="http://daily.greencine.com/archives/001557.html" target="_blank">thumbs down</a> from at least one Sundance blogger) and <em>Don't Come Knocking</em>. 