I’ve scoured the various Sundance schedules and picked out the 13 films that I’m most looking forward to over the course of the ten days in Park City. Note that this list does not include films that I’ve already seen, either at other festivals or through other means. It didn’t seem fair to mix up films I haven’t seen with those I have kind of an inside scoop on, and anyway, you’ll hear about those films soon enough — this is purely a catalog of my own current anticipations.

1 & 2: Moon and The Clone Returns Home

It’s the Philosophical Astronaut Double Feature! First, Sam Rockwell stars in Moon (the feature debut of Duncan Jones, AKA Zowie Bowie, David’s son) as a contract in a space pod, alone save for his trusty robot, who is nudged by the monotony (or, moonotony) of life in space towards an existential crisis. Then, there’s Clone, a Japanese feature executive produced by Wim Wenders, about a cloned astronaut who “flees the lab in search of his childhood home [and] finds his own lifeless body in a space suit. Mistaking it for his brother, he continues his journey carrying the body on his back.” Seriously, go read the Sundance catalogue description — it’s maybe the most evocative festival guide copy I’ve ever read. Clone is in the World Dramatic competition, Moon is a Premiere.

3. Humpday

A bromance directed by a broad. Lynn Shelton’s follow-up to My Effortless Brilliance (and her return to Park City after taking the Grand Prize at Slamdance in 2006 for her first feature, We Go Way Back) stars Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project) as two college buddies who reunite as thirtysomethings and end up entering an amateur porn contest. Defintiely the domestic Narrative Competition feature that’s come up most in conversation with friends and colleagues since the lineup was announced.

4. The September Issue

RJ Cutler’s portrait of editor Anna Wintour spans the nine months of work that go into the creation of fashion’s annual bible, the September issue of VOGUE. I’m bit of a sucker for fashion documentaries, but even if you’re not, one hopes Cutler (producer of The War Room, director of A Perfect Candidate) will apply lessons learned in the deep end of politics to the politics of the superficial.

5. Cold Souls

Method actor existentialism inspired by Descartes — who’s excited? In Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls, Paul Giamatti plays a version of himself, an who freezes his soul in the hopes that it’ll help him better prepare for playing Uncle Vanya. Something goes awry, and when Giamatti’s soul is given to a Russian soap opera actress, he’s off to St. Petersburg to track it down. Also starring Emily Watson, who seems to have a thing for meta ensembles these days.

6. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Who’s not a little bit curious about Men, directed by Office star John Krasinski based on the short story collection by David Foster Wallace? The film, the only adaptation of Wallace’s work yet filmed, was shot two years ago and Krasinski was still in the cutting room when word came last fall that Wallace had hung himself; this Variety story implies that the project was not made with market insanity of Sundance in mind. Even so film’s Sundance catalogue synopsis is troubling; apparently Krasinski has shaped the screenplay around a female grad student (the questioner in the book’s interview segments is never identified by Wallace) and her quest to “remedy both her heartache and her academic challenges with a new research project” through which she “discovers much more about men—and herself—than she bargained for.” Um … maybe whoever was assigned to the synopsis knew that whatever they wrote wouldn’t matter because of the morbid curiosity factor, and decided to just use Sundance boilerplate with a few sparse details changed, just to fuck with us? It worked — we’ll see it anyway! Of note, sort of: a brief, very shaky YouTube clip of Krasinksi reading from the book can be found here.

7. A French Gigolo (Cliente)

Really, you just have to say “French sex farce starring Nathalie Baye as a career lady cougar who pays for sex” and I’m there. Cliente has the added appeal of having inspired  a New York Times story on the sex lives of older French women, with quotes from academics and everything. Now I feel like my basest guilty pleasure instinct is sort of highbrow and cultured — thanks, New York Times!

8. Lulu and Jimi

Could this interracial romance set in 1950s Germany, featuring “a couple that fearlessly takes on the evil powers of a deeply bigoted society” against a backdrop of “bright garish colors, rock and roll and wild dance numbers” be the next Once? I hope not, because if Sundance launched a foreign musical breakout hit that was actually good, that would be kind of cool.