After filling a steamer trunk with 400 cans of microwaveable mac n' cheese and as many magic hand warmers, we soon set out to join our trailblazing senior editor S.T. VanAirsdale, who has been busily setting up base camp at the Park Avenue 7-Eleven.

What can you expect from Defamer coverage? Like the dependable minimart we'll call our temporary home, we'll be nothing short of your one-stop, 24-hour Sundance convenience store. Come to us for screening reports and capsule reviews, marketplace news and gossip, auteur-on-the-street interviews, party pictures, drunken reality-star sightings, and other assorted slices-of-Sundance-life.

If you're going to be at the festival, we encourage all forms of interaction, including but not limited to saying hi, buying us alcoholic beverages, getting us into parties we'd never normally have a shot in hell of penetrating, etc. Also, while this may seem as easy as shooting Uggs in a barrel, we encourage your Park City PrivacyWatch star sightings.

That about covers it. Farewell, shorts—hello ridiculous-looking, Stalin-era, bearskin flappy hats, cause Sundance here we come. Last one at Harry O's happy hour doesn't find a distributor!

[Photo: Getty Images]

· Last night we got a chance to see I Knew It Was You, the short, Brett Ratner-produced documentary about the life, work and untimely death of Godfather/Dog Day Afternoon actor John Cazale. The film announces Cazale's impact in the most reductive possible terms ("He was in only five movies. Each was nominated for Best Picture") before getting to some pretty revelatory stuff: Al Pacino and Francis Ford Coppola explaining Cazale's technique as hangdog Fredo Corleone; Meryl Streep on their star-crossed love affair; and... Ratner himself, effusing some vague endorsements soon whacked aside by Sidney Lumet. But! We loved you in The Grand, Brett. Stay after it. Patrick Goldstein has much more at The Big Picture.

· The gang from /film is already in Park City, where it appears tickets aren't going fast for the festival's usually competitive public screenings. "Just for the heck of it, we decided to head over to the Sundance Film Festival Box Office in Gateway Center and were surprised to learn that tickets were still available for more screenings than not for most of next week." Great! Someone save us a seat at the Bronson premiere.

· We've called out shot for the Brosnan/Sarandon weepie The Greatest being among this year's bidding-war beneficiaries. Not so fast, sniffs one prognosticator, whose careful scientific calculations suggest the film has a 98.66% chance of sucking. Show your work, infidels.

· As we also alluded to earlier this morning, buyers are planning extra rounds of tire-kicking for this year's Sundance models. In response, sales-rep godfather John Sloss is handling half as many films as he did in 2008. That would be called preparing for a recession.

· And for the low-lying filmmaking horde with their own Sundance lottery tickets? Look on the bright side: At least you can keep 100% of what you make screening your labor of love on a bedsheet in your garage.