Friday at Sundance

On Friday I only managed to take in 1 1/4 movies. I will explain.

I got up to Park City in time to see Kaboom, the new film from Gregg Araki (The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin). It ended up being a great first movie.

The story is about Smith, a bi-sexual college student. His best friend is a lesbian named Stella. He is attracted to his straight roommate, Thor. For the first while, it seems like it is just a movie about these characters. And they are very enjoyable characters.

Then things start to get wierd. The girl Stella is seeing seems to have magical sexual powers. These creepy guys wearing animal masks start lurking around. A red haired girl asks Smith for help, slips a flash drive in his pocket, then seems to be killed by the animal masked men. Was it a dream, a hallucination, or did it really happen?

The movie was a lot of fun, but I haven't decided how I feel about the end. It starts ramping up the crazyness, and the audience I saw it with was laughing the entire last 5 minutes. The end comes so abruptly that it's like a punchline. In a lesser movie, the ending would ruin it for me. But I liked it enough that I think it just adds to the fun.

After Kaboom I decided to see Magic Trip, which is a documentary about author Ken Kesey's 1964 trip across America. It was doing absolutely nothing for me and bored me to tears, so I left after 20 minutes or so.

I had to leave the festival early for a family thing, so that was it. Saturday I plan to stay in Park City all day and see as many films as I can.