Oh Sundance, has it been a year already since last we ventured to your snowy, film-filled climes? We had barely touched ground before we heard the usual gripes: there's less free parking, more expensive tickets, and it was way better back in the day. Of course, this year there's also no Lindsay Lohan in attendance (thanks rehab!), and the big theme is "Focus on Film," which means, amongst other things, "My idea of 'celebrity' is the filmmaker who directed my favorite film at the Festival." Hear, hear. With that in mind, what we've seen in our first ~18 hours:

Son of Rambow. We actually went to this movie under the impression that its title was Son of Rainbow. Eh, not quite. Instead, it's a crowdpleaser (made by the team behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) about the unlikely friendship that develops between two young boys in 1980s Britain. There's Will, the spazzy, imaginative, sheltered kid and Lee Carter, the wealthy, undersupervised troublemaker. They bond over Rambo: First Blood and attempt to make a sequel of their own (hence the misspelled title). Of course, wackiness ensues. The movie isn't exactly reinventing the wheel, but it's cute enough (the kids were novices, yet preternaturally gifted) and left the audience well-satisfied. It's childlike in a good way, with fantastic art direction, allowing Will's fantasies and drawings to come to life. No better way to start off the fest than with a solid film about the joys of filmmaking.

And then there was Summer Rains, directed by Antonio Banderas. With that pedigree, we weren't expecting much. While it wasn't as bad as we imagine it could've been, it still wasn't so great. Based on a the Spanish novel El Camino de los Ingleses, the film is a coming-of-age story about three young men in Southern Spain, and it suffers from a bad case of Much Too Much. Too long, too unfocused, too "poetic," too many characters, and waaaaay too much smooth jazz. It's nice to look at (especially with so many hot young Spanish actors, including the lead Alberto Amarilla, who is bite-your-fist-worthy), but we left with the impression---especially after the Q&A---that Banderas thinks the film is much more complex than it actually is.

But the best film we've seen so far, the one that was most fully fleshed-out, is Broken English, written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes and starring Parker Posey as a version of herself. Which is to say, she's a real woman, not some emotionally-stunted guy's version of what a woman should be (cough Zach Braff cough cough). We hesitate to call the movie a romantic comedy, because we dare not cop to loving a film in that genre, but it *is* funny and it *is* about Posey's character, Nora, attempting to find a lasting romantic relationship, but instead finding a bunch of jackasses. Hmmm...why does this feel so familiar? In fact, that's exactly what won us over: the film is so real, the characters so perfectly flawed, that we couldn't help but relate.

Now off to finagle our way into Seattle's own Zoo. We'll blow a horse if we have to.