Sundance Film Festival opens

Before the film screened, director Adam Elliot described the laborious stop-motion animation process as similar to "making love and getting stabbed to death at the same time," and that's a pretty good description of "Mary and Max" itself. It's a good, eccentric movie but the audience of Park City first-nighters, all dressed up with no place else to go, were expecting something less funky. Or more conventionally funky. Either way, the movie felt like a jewel in the wrong setting.