This Thursday, I head off to the Sundance Film Festival, during which I will not be blogging at all. Before each such film festival, I usually say that I’ll be covering things online, day by day. And then, I get there, post once or twice, stop posting completely, and end up guiltily summarizing the rest of the fest after the fact. So, lest it be said I never learn from my mistakes, this year, I make no such promises. If I post something during, consider it icing on the self-aggrandizement cake.

But, to set the stage for any possible though certainly not promised posts, allow me to repeat an observation I make yearly: by most counts, Sundance, Slamdance, and the other concurrent festivals bring some 70,000 people to Park City, Utah. And while that’s not far off from the numbers the Toronto or Tribeca festivals attract, dropping 70,000 bodies into New York or Toronto barely makes a dent. Whereas with 70,000 people added to a city of 7,882, like Park CIty, the infrastructure is completely overwhelmed, everything starts falling apart, and life more or less grinds to a functional halt.

That, along with countless other factors – certainly not the least of which being the nature of all too many of those 70,000 attendees – similarly leads me yearly to the same conclusion about Sundance: it’s everything I love about movies, and everything I hate about the movie industry.

Should be ‘fun’.