Kissing frogs at Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah -- Things were looking pretty grim here at the Sundance Film Festival. Heading into ''Me and You and Everyone We Know," a romantic comedy from the performance artist Miranda July, there was every reason to expect the mediocre; for some reason, mediocrity is everywhere this year.

Then I saw July's film.

I trust the way my eyes welled up and the way my laughter got louder and longer as the film progressed. Those responses were true. In its own way, so is July's vividly eccentric movie, in which an awkward shoe salesman (John Hawkes) and an awkward video artist (July) fall for each other. Beautifully staged and stocked with kids as well as two lovelorn geriatrics, the movie has a romantic optimism that probably makes it seem naive. And I'm willing to be naive enough to believe in it.

I've kissed a lot of frogs at this year's festival, and, mercifully, one of them turned into July's movie. It's worrying that it took so long, but this year, worrisome activity is easy to come by. This is a land where ladies really do wear UGG boots with miniskirts; where some moviegoers turn off their cellphones but type on their Blackberries with abandon; where certain Oscar-winning stars insist their publicists run out and get them free jeans, televisions, and iPods; and where a studio really will pay top dollar for a laughable movie about a pimp's struggle to become a rap star. (This would be the John Singleton-produced ''Hustle & Flow," for which Paramount and its MTV division inexplicably paid $9 million.)

Yes, Sundance 2005 is as popular -- advance tickets are reported to be up 30 percent -- and as problematic as ever. Clearly, the festival's programmers and backers are champions of the independent spirit, yet they're increasingly insecure about what independent means anymore. The trouble begins with the festival trailers that precede every film. This year's are by the sardonic animation company JibJab, which did ''This Land," the online clip of a dueling Bush and Kerry.

In one spot, the word ''independent" fades into the word ''inept," and then cartoon technicians appear explaining why they wouldn't be caught dead ''working for the man." Another features a African-American ''demolition expert" dressed like a transvestite hooker who sends a wrecking ball flying into a house whose sole visible inhabitant is a terrified little white boy. The clip was greeted by appalled boos and hisses, but it's sad that no one involved with Sundance stopped the hipster animation company from embarrassing the festival before it started.

The programmers don't seem to have met a movie or a director they couldn't overpraise in their pre-screening remarks. When Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier's ''Dear Wendy" was introduced as a work of cinematic genius, there's nowhere for the film to go but down, which is precisely what it did.

A well-made but ill-conceived jeremiad, the movie centers on teen pacifists, led by Jamie ''Billy Elliot" Bell, who form an underground gun club. The ideas are too knotty to be clear, and things reach an incomprehensible nadir when an elderly African-American woman whips out a shotgun and uses it. (Alas, another black female demolitionist.) Before the screening, Vinterberg had thanked von Trier for ''lifting me up so I could steal the cookies and then [expletive] on them at the same time." Mission accomplished.

Much better was Scott Coffey's ''Ellie Parker," which stars Naomi Watts as a down-and-out Australian actor in Hollywood looking for her big break. It sounds autobiographical enough that you half expect David Lynch to materialize and hand Watts the script to ''Mulholland Drive," but her character is fully realized and she's dynamically funny in a way that would make her a star if she weren't one already.

One of the more remarkable nonfiction pieces is David LaChapelle's ''Rize," in which the photographer-turned-music-video-director expands on his short film ''Krumped" from last year. He fixes his lens on South Central Los Angeles ''krump" -- a post-breakdance style of movement that combines electrocuted-looking gyrations with clown makeup. LaChapelle, a white artist, wants to be responsible to his subjects (disenfranchised African-American kids) and raises important social and racial questions the movie is not equipped to answer. But he's never an interloper, and the film is at its best when his camera locks itself on the dancers moving in his candy-colored tableaux. He brings out the glamour they already know is inside them.

Too many other movies were content just to sit there. Sundance is often over-programmed with polite films about family secrets that take forever to be revealed. This year offered Tim Kirkman's earnest drama ''Loggerheads" about, among too many other things, a gay man trying to save turtles in North Carolina. Doug Sadler's tonally similar ''Swimmers," about a Maryland family, has characters that manage to surprise you, however. More overpopulated is ''Happy Endings," Don Roos's (''The Opposite of Sex") overlapping character soap-drama with a noteworthy cast (including Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bobby Cannavale, Laura Dern) doing a lot of unnoteworthy things.

Ira Sachs's ''Forty Shades of Blue" stars Rip Torn as a Memphis blues songwriter whose young Russian wife is so lost in her marriage that she starts sleeping with her husband's adult son. Except for the bride's clothes by Diane Von Furstenberg (who takes a producer credit), the movie feels lost too. Worse is ''The Ballad of Jack and Rose," Rebecca Miller's follow-up to ''Personal Velocity."

Here Miller wades into a shapeless mess about the family of a single mom (Catherine Keener), a sickly Irishman (Miller's husband, Daniel Day-Lewis), and his truculent daughter -- all on a commune. Meanwhile, Georgina Garcia Riedel's ''How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer," about three generations of lonely single Arizona women in the same family, is often too precious by half, but the characters bristle with life.

Of all these American family exercises, ''The Dying Gaul," written and directed by the playwright Craig Lucas, is the most provocative. Peter Sarsgaard is fierce as Lucas's stand-in, a writer trying to sell a gay-themed script to Hollywood. He winds up having an affair with a studio executive (Campbell Scott) whose wife (Patricia Clarkson) takes an unhealthy interest in the new family friend. Unfortunately, this seductive psychosexual thriller ends with a misanthropic cop-out that makes Lucas seem contemptuous of everybody, including himself.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.