A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

One other thing

They play a humorous "short" before any feature screening at Sundance. Last year, you had little skits featuring puppets caught in typical festival scenarios (waiting in the freezing cold for public tickets in front of the Egyptian, for example). These were cute and usually drew a guffaw or two.

This year, the festival organizers got the guys from JibJab to do the shorts. Now, people assured me their pre-election animated clip "This Land" was quite the gas, as you hep cats say, but I never really found it all that funny. Whatever. I'm a crank. So I was certainly willing to give these guys the benefit of the doubt.

Gah, they were awful. On top of creating only three shorts for the whole festival - thereby ensuring most festivalgoers would see the same one repeated endlessly (I sat through one particular segment eight times) - they seemed to miss the point of the whole thing.

Each short would take the word "independent" and slowly fade several of the letters out until it read "inept." We were then treated to someone calling themself an "independent demolition specialist" or the like who demonstrated their disdain of playing by "the Man's" rules by causing general death and mayhem.

Don't get me wrong, Sundance can be - if you allow yourself to swallow the hype - one of the most overblown instances of self-congratulatory wankitude you will ever experience. These weren't sticking a welcome pin in the audience's sense of ego, however, but weak gags that weren't even mildly amusing upon initial exposure, much less a half dozen times.

I suppose it's possible they were being deliberately antagonistic. If so, more power to them, though biting the hand that feeds you isn't exactly the way to get invited back.