U2 Storms Sundance

It's an old saw that movie stars want to be rock stars and vice versa; the twist on the truism that occurred as Robert Redford sauntered into the Eccles Theater with Bono on Friday was that even Sundance audiences want their rock stars to be both. It appears that they came (like one snowboarder I spoke with who last saw the band play in Sweden) to holler, clap and even scream, but they stayed for the striking flow of images, as underscored by the group's greatest hits, in Catherine Owen and Mark Pellington's U23D. Building from scattered images of South American crowds arriving at various stadiums to an inevitable explosion with Bono's "Uno, doce, tres, quatorze!" on kick-off song "Vertigo", the documentary deftly changed pace and mood but never let the crowd's attention slip. (When the folks on film roared, so did the crowd at Eccles; and when the filmic audience waved their cell phones in tribute, so did many in the big high school assembly hall.) "We are a high school band after all," said Bono, alluding to the group's origins in a Dublin secondary school (and perhaps to their remarkable youthfulness on stage). He F-bombed a wise guy who made a dismissive comparison of the film to the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, and generally charmed the crowd in that Bono way that's somehow at once self-deprecating and rather grand. The film, a solidly enjoyable experience for not just U2 fans but anyone who wants to see where exhibition technology is heading, opens in a few days--but form the response in the packed hall, Sundance has it clasped tightly to its chest for now
Watch this site for more U2 information, including a video interview with Catherine Owen. Meanwhile, Monday brought a foot of snow and counting to the Wasatch Mountains in which Park City is nestled, snarling traffic in the region.