Sundance Buyers Cast DeNiro Aside In Quest For Paris Hilton and Free T-Shirts; Damn Bloggers To Blame [At Least The Skiing Is Nice]

While the docs have fared well at the fest, with HBO snapping up Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and American Teen on the verge of going for big bucks, buyers looking for another Juno or Little Miss Sunshine have pretty much thrown up their hands and begun tallying exactly how many Amstel Lights and ski lift tickets they can slip into their expense accounts without getting a red flag from accounting. While this could simply mean that, yes, maybe letting the Dodgeball guy direct Mysteries of Pittsburgh was a dumb idea and the Robert DeNiro movie What Just Happened? got its title from an audience feedback card, the media has thrown themselves into the daunting task of unraveling this head scratching whodunit.

Fingers have been pointed at Paris Hilton, who had the gall to show up and be mobbed by drunken D-girls who were so bored they mistook the celebutard for an actual celebrity, and, yes, bloggers. Tom Bernard of Sony Picture Classics told the New York Times that the true slayer of hype is, yes, text messaging:

In the well-received documentary American Teen, he noted, a photograph of a girl's breasts is circulated to her classmates in a matter of hours. "It's sort of like that here," Mr. Bernard said. "I had to leave What Just Happened? early to go meet a director, and where I was, these bloggers were getting text messages about how the movie was playing, while it was still playing. In a sense, the press is too immediate for the sellers, because they can't really dupe people anymore."

Just think, some mean-spirited blogger is simultaneously squashing a hack's career AND saving you 11 bucks. How cool is that?

• Caution's In The Air As Sundance Opens [New York Times]