2010 Sundance Film Festival Screens More Films That Will Probably Never Show in Your Neighborhood

The snowflakes are falling in Park City, Utah almost faster than the hopes of the creators of many of the Sundance Film Festival’s unsold movies for failing to realize that only the low-budget dramas with indie guitar will rise up to be the talk of the town.   Time to break out the Uggs and traipse through the snowy cinema landscape.

“Entombed,” the Ryan Reynolds thriller, screened very solidly over the weekend.  Industry insiders believe a deal for the movie – in which a civilian bus driver held for ransom in Iraq tries to escape from being buried in a casket using only his cellphone and his abdominal muscles – could happen as early as the next festival.

In a more traditional vein, the dramedy “Dorkus” has been causing a bidding war amongst indie buyers after its premiere last Friday.  It has been described as very similar to “The Hangover,” but without Las Vegas, or any chance whatsoever of seeing fake breasts. 

On a less typical note, the film “Burn to the Bone” a drama about a teenage girl’s search for her missing chemist father whom she hopes will make up for missing child support payments by helping her start a meth lab, generated the most enthusiasm after its screening Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, a lot of star-studded vehicles, like the one with Kirsten Stewart as Patti Smith and Dakota Fanning as her photographer friend Robert Mapplethorpe, “Robert Models a Nipple Clip,” garnered less favorable reactions over the weekend.  A festival director commented, “Sundance needs to get back to its low-budget roots.  Independent films have never been bound to adhere to any hard and fast codes of production.  The aim is to create art, which means they are not even bound to any self-imposed rules to be entertaining.”