“Going into the Sundance Film Festival, word was not good,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt. “Coming out of the festival, you realize how little value this ‘word’ actually possesses. All that acquisition frenzy wasn’t because of the high altitude. Sundance audiences’ thunderous ovations for every movie are getting to be a joke, but in many cases they were deserved.”
And yet Honeycutt seems content to half-breeze through his own festival experience, resigned for the most part to providing cursory descriptions of the films he saw that, with a couple of exceptions, affected him in some kind of thoughtful, jolting, semi-arousing way. But no grappling or wrestling, no laying down of the Honeycutt law.
“If anything epitomizes Sundance 2007, it is the acknowledgment not just in the documentaries but also in the lightest of feature films that the world is in a bad place right now. After seeing a couple of documentaries about atrocities in one day, a festivalgoer said to me that he felt like spending the next day in bed. Yet he was very glad he saw them.”