Suicide, don't do it

When you tell people you're going to Sundance, they tend to get this excited look in their eye as if part of the assignment involves sharing a tent with Heath Ledger. In reality, you're sharing a large tent with a lot of volunteers who have tickets to movies you want, and the Badge-ism begins. Some venues set aside only five press tickets, handed out on a first-come-first-serve basis to people with a General Press badge. It's the best press badge one can have; at least that's what a volunteer tells me every year before she makes me wait an hour for a hard ticket. In the Sundance chain of command, there is Robert Redford (absentee landlord that he is) and right below him are the volunteers.

If you have a General Press badge you get to know the most powerful volunteers pretty well, but you can't just breeze into a Sundance movie. That's an Express Badge privilege, and in the badge hierarchy those people are filthy rich. Having a buddy with an Express Badge can try a friendship. Being the lone General Press badge holder in a party of Express Badgers can try a soul. A real test of devotion is whether, once inside, an Express Badger will hold a chair for her lowly friend. You learn a lot about people that way.

I could argue for a ritzier badge, I suppose. ("Do you know who I am? ...Yes, I gave the 'The Transporter' three and a half stars. What of it?") But I'd like to think I've come to value the stress of arriving barely in time for the press ticket giveaway. I'd like to think it's made me and my badge stronger.

Today, all my badge got me was a seat in "Wristcutters: A Love Story." This is a road comedy, and it's pure Sundance, meaning somebody's depressed, and our challenge is to find it funny. Patrick Fugit, Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" alter ego, slits his wrists in the opening scene and winds up in a washed-out limbo full of other suicidals. He hears that the girlfriend who provoked him to take his life is around somewhere, so he, his Russian pal, and a pretty girl go looking for her. Goran Dukic is the director, and he applies an Eastern European sense of irony that at its best feels like a deadpan "Wizard of Oz" or an inside-out science-fiction. But this is a conceit (based on an Etgar Keret novella) that's been stretched too long. (The wrists aren't what need cutting.) There are beautiful patches, but more awkward ones. Once Tom Waits and Will Arnett from "Arrested Development" show up, the whole thing starts coasting on cool. I hope not everyone else in the festival is this thrilled to be dead.