The biggest theatre at the Sundance Film Festival is the local high school's vast comfortable 1300-seat auditorium, which was built after Park City had enjoyed several years of festival income. This is where our first movie, Christine Lahti's My First Mister, is being shown. Miss Lahti's 1995 short film, Lieberman in Love, won her an Oscar and, presumably, backing from Paramount Classics for My First Mister. I drop Trevor off to hold our place in line, but I have to park the car a mile or so away. I can honestly say I walked miles through the snow in freezing temperatures to see this movie.

I step into the auditorium and the damp warmth of hundreds of people fogs up my glasses. Coats are draped across the backs of chairs, wet and steaming in the indoor heat. People have fished out their cell phones and are peering down into their LCD displays, trying to get a connection. Trevor fits right in peering down at the Game Boy. There are a lot of cell phones here, and everywhere else at Sundance. A guy could get brain cancer without even having his own cell phone. The auditorium goes dark and I have to kick Trevor's leg to get him to turn off the Game Boy. Here I am. My first movie at my first Sundance. My First Mister.

Which, unfortunately, turns out to be an awful movie in which Leelee Sobieski plays an angst-ridden, Sylvia Plath-reading, safety pin-wearing, tattooed Goth teenager who falls in love with Albert Brooks, who plays the manager of a men's clothing store who tries to order Sanka in a trendy LA coffee shop. Since this is a chick film, one of them gets cancer. I don't want to ruin it for you, so I won't tell you which one. Early on, the movie features this line: "I like chocolate. It's dark and warm. Like what I imagine a hug would be." At this point, I can feel Trevor going through his coat looking for the Game Boy.

"Don't even think about it," I whisper.

"He only said 'no cell phones'. He didn't say anything about Game Boys."

Trevor's talking about the guy who introduces the film. Here's how movies work at Sundance. One of the festival officials gets up and introduces the director. The director gets up and introduces the film. The festival official reminds everyone to turn off their cell phones. You watch the movie. Then the festival official re-introduces the director in case you forgot who he was. Then the director introduces the cast. The ones who showed up, at any rate. Then they all answer questions. One of the questions is always some kid asking, "What advice would you have for an independent filmmaker?" Every movie at Sundance goes like this. The biggest difference is that some of the movies are better than others. Lucky for us, it can only get better after My First Mister.

We bustle out of there to get to the next movie. This is pretty much the routine for our entire stay at Sundance: see a movie, stick around for Q&A, and then rush to get in the "Wait List" line for the next one. For meals, we make a supermarket run and stock up on lunch meat, 20 oz. Mountain Dews, and candy bars -- I get Nutri Grain bars because they look like they're good for you and Trevor just gets Baby Ruths.

"So what did you think?" I ask Trevor while we're in line for the next movie, unwrapping candy bars, "What was your impression of My First Mister?"

"Leelee Zabriskie's really filled out."

There are women in earshot, so I say, "C'mon, man, she's like sixteen."

"So is Brittany Spears and that doesn't stop you from talking about her hooters."

I'm pretty sure one of the women nearby hears Trevor say the word 'hooters'. "That's really not what the movie was about. What about Albert Brooks?"

"Yeah, he was good. But there were scenes where I couldn't really tell if Leelee Zabriskie was flat-chested."

"Trevor, jeez. Besides, her name is Sobieski."

"But then at the end, she puts on this really tight sweater when they go to visit her grandma's grave and I'm like, 'Whoa, Leelee's really filled out'."

"That's really not an appropriate way to be talking about the movie. What about its themes of family and forgiveness and friendship?"

"Yeah, whatever. Oh, hey, did you know Katie Holmes takes off her top in that new Sam Raimi movie, The Gift. Dude, I'm there."

Our next movie is The American Astronaut. It's a black and white science fiction Western comedy musical where the jokes consist of long pauses in the absurd meaningless dialogue. The sort of thing that would probably go over well in France. Without the pauses, American Astronaut would have been safely tucked in the 'short film' category and I would have never seen it. Instead, it's an excruciating feature length film that answers the question, 'What's the longest amount of time that 90 minutes can last?' Don't worry, you can bet it won't be coming to a theatre near you.

This movie teaches us an important lesson in tact. A few days later, we run into someone we had previously met in the Wait List lines. We end up making lots of friends in these lines, mostly from people seeing Trevor with the Game Boy and asking him what kind of Palm Pilot it is. Our new friend asks us what we've seen so far.

"We saw this horrible movie from New Zealand called American Astronaut," Trevor blurts out.

"Actually, it's from the U.S.," she says.

"Yeah, well, it's horrible. It's not even funny. It's stupid and senseless and long. They didn't make a movie. They just burned film."

"My friend is the director of photography on that."

"Yeah? It really looked good." For a 38-year-old guy, Trevor can be pretty quick.

From then on, we know to preface any unfavorable comments with 'you don't know anybody who worked on that, do you?' It's like when mobsters or drug dealers meet each other. Before they talk too much, they say 'do you now or have you ever worked for any federal, state, or local law enforcement agencies?' to flush out informants.

Many of the other bad movies aren't immediately awful. Donnie Darko starts out promising. It looks great and there are some really creepy sequences, but it eventually becomes clear that the writer and director, newcomer Richard Kelly, is as confused as he leaves his audience. Donnie Darko is probably one of the most expensive-looking movies we saw at Sundance, so odds are it'll be picked up for distribution. Consider too Noah Wyle, Drew Barrymore, and Patrick Swayze in pointless bit parts to give it some middling star power.

Like My First Mister, Donnie Darko is a teen angst movie, but it has a different angle. Jake Gyllenhaal, who looks as much like Tobey Maguire as Leelee Sobieski looks like Helen Hunt, plays a high school kid haunted by a gruesome six-foot tall rabbit with a demonic voice. But what starts out as a great metaphor for teenage alienation becomes a convoluted time travel movie, a sort of limp attempt at Harvey meets Back to the Future meets Jacob's Ladder meets Lost Highway.

As we're leaving, Trevor says, "I didn't get that one."

"That's because you kept falling asleep."

"Yeah, but I kept waking back up, so I should still be able to understand what was going on."

"Well, I was awake the whole time," I tell him, "and I'm not real clear on it either."

"Where do I know the kid who played Donnie Darko from?" Trevor asks.

"Jake Gyllenhaal? He was the kid in October Sky."

"Yeah, I knew I'd seen him before," Trevor recalls, "He was really good."

Trevor's right. Gyllenhaal does a good job wading through the movie with a sense of purpose, even if the movie itself can't keep up with him. We see another movie that gets similarly lost. It's called The Deep End. Tilda Swinton plays a mother who goes to great lengths to protect her children. I guess you could say she goes off -- wait for it -- the deep end.

The Deep End begins with a single questionable decision that has Tilda Swinton hiding a body in Lake Tahoe. From here, it plummets rapidly from interesting to implausible to ludicrous. Goran Visjnic, the guy from ER who Trevor says has the perfect name for a Star Trek villain, shows up to blackmail Tilda Swinton on behalf of the Reno mafia. But he's such a softy that he shouldn't be in the strong-arm man line of work; he performs CPR on Miss Swinton's father in law, looks through all her family photos, and kind of falls in love with her. But then Visjnic's mob boss gets personally involved, which leads me to believe the Reno mafia must be bored silly if their mob bosses are taking a hands-on approach to blackmailing housewives. The whole thing ends, well, stupidly. The filmmakers figure if the characters get in a tight spot, they can just have someone lose control of his car to tidy up the ending. "Oops, I wrecked," The Deep End finally says, "Oh well, I guess the movie's over."

But Tilda Swinton is really good, even though Trevor says she looks weird. "Dude, she looks like a half elf," he says. The best part of her performance was when she got up for the Q&A after the movie and said good things about the script.

"I don't know that I can take many more like that," Trevor says as soon as we're sure we're out of earshot of anyone who might have worked on The Deep End. "How many movies get submitted to Sundance every year?"

"Around a thousand," I tell Trevor.

"And how many get accepted?"

"There were 115 this year."

"Oh, man, I hate to think of the 985 movies floating around that got rejected."

"Yep," I say, steeling myself against the cold with a pull from the bottle of Mountain Dew and not correcting Trevor's math, "The world is a scary place." Lucky for us, it gets better. Much better.

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