Perhaps this year Sundance Film Festival will enthrall me

PARK CITY — I am a Utah native and a Park City resident and I have something I probably shouldn't confess but here goes: I don't quite get Sundance.

The film festival of film festivals — America's answer to Cannes, the largest and most prestigious indy festival the United States has ever produced — plops down every year about this time right in my backyard and I find myself wondering, Are you sure about this?

 Utah isn't exactly the filmmaking capital of the world, independent film or otherwise.

 Park City is, like, small.

 It's winter.

 There's no parking.

 In most of the venues you have to set up chairs to show the movies.

 Nobody comes for the skiing (perhaps most inexplicable of all).

And yet, for 10 days every January hordes of people show up, get their cars towed, try to breathe at 6,600 feet, stay up all night, rack up enormous cell phone bills and essentially take over the town so they can stand in long lines to pay $15 to watch independent films no one's ever heard of and that will be largely ignored when they play (the lucky ones anyway) at art houses like the Broadway later this year.

That's $15 apiece.

I'm a rather linear thinker. Give me dots to connect and I'm fine. But with Sundance the dots don't … quite … connect.

Another thing I don't quite get. It's a haven for independent filmmakers, right? It's a festival for the just-getting-starteds, the people the studios turned away, the underdogs, the mavericks, the nonconformists, the uncompromising artistes, the non-sellouts, the people who gladly hock their VW bus for a camera — and then the movies that attract all the attention have Jennifer Aniston or Bill Murray or Robert Duvall in them.

And when the misunderstood creative genius sells his Sundance movie for seven figures to the very studio that threw him out last summer he, or she, celebrates getting into the very mainstream they didn't want to be a part of in the first place.

And what's Paris Hilton doing here?

But as any Sundance-o-phile will tell you, that's the beauty, isn't it?