Sundance, Day 3

Stay up late, get up early is starting to look like the pattern, and for a good reason: there's just too much to do.

Layer Cake is playing at 8:30 this morning. Lorraine and I are needing a good dose of action, so why not the latest from the Lock, Stock and Snatch team? As it turns out, this was a damn good call: this movie is all about crime capery fun. I see this one hitting the states to the same excitement as as predecessors: decent in the theaters and beloved on DVD.

Daniel Craig is the movie's star but not a movie star. Not yet, anyway. Judging by the estrogen-driven reactions of every woman around us, he's on his way. Many Sundancers' best-laid plans to stalk Matt Damon or Adrien Brody are quickly switched to Mr. Craig when he proceeds to take off his shirt for half the movie. The movie is a hit, judging from the talkback questions. Too bad the director generates no reciprocal love as he answers each question as tersely as possible.

By mid-afternoon, we're back at Burgie's for some flagons when I meet a buzzsaw -- more specifically, a buzzsaw with tickets to sell. This is the Sundance equivalent of finding a duffel bag full of money in your backyard that's protected by angry hornets. Tini is a former CNN producer and newspaper writer from Hong Kong who has found herself the assistant to a stereotypically manic Hollywood boss who screams and calls her a moron. Since Tini speaks four languages and has worked around the world, she takes umbrage and tells stereotypically manic Hollywood boss not to call her that again or she'll quit.

This is the point where I come in: Tini is at this moment unemployed, her cell phone isn't working and she's lost her credit cards. Putting on my broker hat, I try to get her to unload some of her tickets on us, but she's determined first to have a drink and a smoke and borrow a cell phone. In the mad rush of things, no one gets any of her tickets and she's off to find a place to stay or possibly to kill stereotypically manic Hollywood boss.

Oh, and the movie she was there to promote? 9 Songs, generally described as 69 minutes of hardcore sex that is really good for only one thing: walking out on.

Day 3 Celebrity Sightings: 1 in the wild, 0 in captivity.