Swag and Sunshine

It's a wonder any of us journalists actually get to the screenings here at Sundance — we're too busy deleting the hundreds of e-mails inviting us to the myriad swag shops that spring up like poisonous toadstools all over Park City during the festival. I wouldn't care if we were actually being offered some decent swag. No, they want us to witness celebrities who already have everything scrambling for even more for free, and then give this edifying spectacle coverage. Don't look for any in this space, unless someone makes it worth my while.

Just to give you some idea of how hot the buzz was around Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Little Miss Sunshine Friday night — a rumor I'd like to think was apocryphal was circulating among the dense mass of ticket holders outside the capacious Eccles Theater that tickets for the public screening were going for $200 on eBay. Actually, if I didn't have press credentials, I'd willingly have coughed up $50 for this uproarious caper featuring a terrific Steve Carell as a suicidal gay Proust scholar (I swear) who's forced to move in with his sister (Toni Collette) and brother-in-law (Greg Kinnear)'s screwed-up family, then drive cross-country with them to California so that their seven-year-old daughter (a very capable little Abigail Breslin) can compete in a kiddie beauty pageant. Michael Arndt's script is sharp and funny, and the direction swings confidently between broad farce and a genuine feel for the pain of all kinds of failure. The ending, a bravura set piece skewering the insanity of commercial beauty contests for children, not only drove the audience wild, but had half a row of ordinarily dour critics around me rolling about laughing. In the post-screening Q&A, a dewy-eyed audience member asked Alan Arkin, who plays the recreational-heroin-using lech of a grandfather, if it was true that he hated film festivals. "Not at the moment," he said sweetly. A bidding war was going on during the screening, and though one studio executive told me afterwards that he had doubts the movie would go for a large sum because it was "too American" for the crucial international market, it was snapped up for a cool $10 million by Fox Searchlight.