Several films that met or exceeded the criteria for “woke” excellence at the secular, politically correct, mountain-air Sundance Film Festival were honored this evening. All hail the PRPIA (People’s Republic of Progressive, Inclusive Agendas) along with those who’ve embraced the right kind of change-oriented, Time’s Up-embracing, gay-celebrating, forward-looking social values that Sundance culture approves of.

The only Sundance ’18 films that were honored this evening and which I personally saw and liked were Ethan Hawke’s Blaze and Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals.

To what extent will the films honored this evening penetrate or at least become known among the sprawling, sea-level culture of megaplex popcorn-munchers and couch streamers? Five words: The twains will never meet.

U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION: Grand Jury Prize: The Miseducation of Cameron Post; Audience Award: Burden; Directing: Sara Colangelo, The Kindergarten Teacher; Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: Christina Choe, Nancy; Special Jury Award for Outstanding First Feature: Reinaldo Marcus Green, Monsters and Men; Special Jury Award for Excellence in Filmmaking: I Think We’re Alone Now; Special Jury Award for Achievement in Acting: Benjamin Dickey, Blaze.

U.S. DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION: Grand Jury Prize: Kailash; Directing: Alexandria Bombach, On Her Shoulders; Audience Award: The Sentence; Special Jury Award for Social Impact: Crime + Punishment; Special Jury Award for Creative Vision: Hale County This Morning, This Evening; Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking: Minding the Gap; Special Jury Award for Storytelling: Three Identical Strangers.

There’s a new Region 2 Bluray of Tony Richardson‘s The Border, but no Region 1 version for the U.S. The Universal release was a bust (cost $22 million, grossed $6 million). Possibly because Jack Nicholson was somewhat miscast as a mopey border guard who experiences a compassionate moral epiphany after witnessing brutal treatment of Mexican immigrants by his colleagues.

Miscast because Nicholson was too closely identified with perverse behavior at the time, mostly due to his Jack Torrance role in The Shining, but also because of a series of jaded, cynical malcontents like Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, Badass Buddusky in The Last Detail, Jake Gittes in Chinatown, Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the horse thief in The Missouri Breaks, etc.

Photo taken by Mitch Neuhauser, who’s now managing director of Cinemacon.

This issue arose when I interviewed Nicholson on a very cold January morning at the Carlyle hotel, way up on the 23rd floor. I asked for his reaction to Richard Corliss‘s Time review of The Border. Jack said he hadn’t read it so I showed it to him. The review began as follows:

“When, early in The Border, Nicholson muses about how, back in California, ‘I liked feeding those ducks,’ one’s first reaction is: ‘Feeding them what? Strychnine?’ Nicholson’s voice, with the silky menace of an FM disc jockey in the eighth circle of hell, has always suggested that nothing in the catalogue of experience is outrageous enough to change his inflection. Even when he goes shambly and manic (Goin’ South, The Shining), Nicholson’s voice and those tilde eyebrows give the impression…” and blah blah.

Nicholson chuckled faintly and rolled his eyes when he read it, and then went into a minor tirade about how he was “mad” that he’d convinced the public he was a murderer, and about being stuck in that box. This image disappeared the following year, of course, after he played Garret Breedlove, the randy ex-astronaut, in James L. Brooks‘ Terms of Endearment.

Yeah, this was the same Carlyle interview that I’ve mentioned two or three times in this space. The one in which I told Nicholson that aspects of his Shining performance seemed, to me, to be a kind of inside joke. Nicholson disputed this. He wasn’t rude but his response was basically who was I, a mere journalist, to assume I had an inside view of things? He was relaxed and droll about it, but his point was that he was “inside” and I wasn’t.

One of the greatest thunderstorms of my life happened in Paris in the summer of ’03. The kids and I were staying in an apartment at 23 rue Tourlaque, not far from the Cimitiere du Montmartre and a few doors from the corner of rue Caulaincourt. The rain was coming down in sheets, and after a while there were rapids in the gutters. It felt like the city was under siege. The thunder was noisier and the general feeling of an angry, lashing-out God was more intense any rainstorm that I could recall.

Poor Paris has really been going through it over the last couple of days. I wish I was there. Hell, I wish I could live there.

On 3.5.14 Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that Steven Spielberg was pondering a remake of West Side Story for 20th Century Fox. Two days ago a West Side Story casting notice was posted on Twitter by casting director Cindy Tolan, announcing that Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner were the principals, and that they’re looking for Caucasian actors to audition for Tony (i.e., Richard Beymer‘s part in the 1961 Robert Wise big-screen version) and Latino actors to play Maria, Anita and Bernardo (played by Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno and George Chakiris way back when).

Remaking West Side Story for the screen is a bad enough idea on its own. It would have zero connection to any aspect of today’s culture, for one thing. There’s certainly no trace of gang culture in 2018 Manhattan. Maybe the angle behind the Spielberg-Kushner version is to shoot it in period (i.e., sometime in the early to mid ’50s)? If so that could work. But will Kushner dispense with phrases like “play it cool, daddy-o”? Some of the dialogue in the ’61 film made horses choke even back then.

Who except boomers and older GenXers would be interested in a reboot of (take your pick) the original 1957 stage musical or the ’61 screen version? In the case of those who were teenagers in the mid ’90s and are now pushing 40, who’s clamoring for a Stephen Sondheim-Leonard Bernstein musical version of Baz Luhrman‘s Romeo + Juliet (’96)?

True, Wise’s ’61 version seems stiff and inorganic and overly theatrical by today’s standards. The challenge, I suppose, would be to make a version that feels more “street” and set it against a real-life culture where gang warfare, turf battles and racial animosity are (or more precisely were) regular facts of life.

But this kind of thing seems way out of Spielberg’s wheelhouse. What does a suburban Jewish kid from Arizona know about mid 20th Century gang culture anyway? Of all the directors in all the world who could possibly pull this off, Spielberg would have to be at the bottom of the list. Helming a new West Side Story would arouse every treacly, gooey, sentimental impulse in his system.

Hollywood Elsewhere just landed at Burbank’s Bob “Join The Peace Corps” Hope Airport. And speaking of Mike Figgis’s landmark 1995 film, I’m wondering why I’ve never watched it on DVD or streaming. Haven’t seen it since ’95, and it’s brilliant. Arguably Nic Cage‘s greatest-ever performance. Okay, this weekend for sure.

A day or so ago a Care2 online petition about Kobe Bryant’s animated short film, Dear Basketball, which has been Oscar-nominated, began collecting signatures. The petition demands that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “rescind” the nomination for Dear Basketball because of the 2003 sexual assault case in which Bryant was accused of rape.

Dear Basketball was written and narrated by Bryant. The director is Glen Keane; the producer is Gennie Rim.

Boilerplate: “On 9.1.04 Eagle County District Judge Terry Ruckriegle dismissed the charges against Bryant, after prosecutors spent more than $200,000 preparing for trial, because his accuser informed them that she was unwilling to testify. Bryant subsequently admitted to an adulterous sexual encounter with his accuser, and then paid her off following a civil lawsuit.” Or something like that.

The signature count is now 15,807, but why does Care2 have a goal of 16,000 signatures? Why not 15,000 or 20,000 or 25,000? Just asking.

Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody‘s Tully (Focus, 4.20) is more of a potential awards-bait vehicle for Charlize Theron than a Reitman comeback thing, which is what I was sensing after catching the trailer a couple of weeks ago.

Tully is a better film than Reitman’s disastrously received Labor Day and Men, Women & Children, so it’s an image-burnisher to some degree. But it’s on the slight side.

Cody’s script is amusingly sharp and sardonic, and Theron’s portrayal of Marlo, a stressed suburban mom coping with pregnancy and child care, is her boldest since playing an alcoholic writer in Reitman and Cody’s Young Adult (’11) and her most Raging Bull-ish performance since Monster (’03), lumbering around Tully with her Aileen Wournos bod.

Mackenzie Davis, Charlize Theron in Jason Reitman’s Tully (Focus, 4.20).

I don’t know if Academy members will be cherishing Tully ten or eleven months from now, but Theron’s performance is angry, open-hearted, prickly, lived-in — an obvious awards-level thing.

Tully is partly a family-unit sitcom and partly a tricky psychological drama. It mostly takes place in a New York-area suburban home occupied by Marlo, her husband Drew (Ron Livingston) and their three kids — a special-needs six year-old boy, a slightly younger girl and a just-born infant.

It’s one of those stories that (a) portrays a problem and then (b) introduces an outsider who not only makes things better but becomes a kind of magic healer. The question is how this agreeable situation will pan out in the long run.

With Drew barely paying attention to the kid-rearing situation, focusing on his job during the day and playing video games at night, pregnant Marlo is exhausted — whipped — by maternal responsibilities. And then the baby arrives and the burden is even more crushing with middle-of-the-night feedings and wailings and whatnot. So Marlo’s rich brother (Mark Duplass) tries to persuade her to accept the gratis services of a night nanny — a younger woman who will drop by in the evening and take care of the baby so that Marlo can get some much-needed shut-eye.

The headline “Trump booed at Davos” got my blood up. Then I watched the clip. At the 22-second mark Trump says, “It wasn’t until I became a politician that I realized how nasty, how mean, how vicious and how fake the press can be…as the cameras start going off in the back.” Then he’s mildly booed for three seconds — 33, 34, 35. But in a chickenshit, half-assed way. If you’re going to boo somebody, do it like a man…”Boooo!” Throw in some hisses and maybe a “bullshit” for good measure.

Three days ago Newsweek reported that Common Cause has filed a complaint about the $130K paid to porn star Stormy Daniels (aka Stephanie Clifford) by Donald Trump‘s personal attorney Michael Cohen. The motive was to ensure Daniels’ silence about having had an affair with Trump in 2006.

The complaint alleges that the payment was an illegal campaign contribution or, according to a 1.22 Newsweek story, “an in-kind contribution, which would violate several campaign finance laws.”

But think about this. Every presidential candidate’s staff has two main purposes — increase his/her chances of being elected and decrease his/her chances of being defeated. Squelching a story about Trump having indulged in a sexual affair with Daniels obviously decreased and increased. How could the $130K be anything other than a legit campaign expense?

Campaign funds weren’t spent for Daniels’ sexual services or some other sundry purpose — they were spent to prevent damaging information getting out about Trump. This is what campaigns do — spin or highlight positive information and obscure or suppress negative information about a candidate.

James Franco‘s un-person status in the Hollywood realm, a result of five allegations of sexual misconduct that broke on 1.11.18, led to his being digitally removed from Vanity Fair‘s special Hollywood issue cover, according to a story by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Chris Gardner.

“According to multiple sources familiar with the shoot, Franco sat for [the] photo shoot and interview and was to be featured in the magazine’s Annie Leibovitz-shot portfolio,” Gardner writes. “He was removed from the cover digitally, however, due to allegations of sexual misconduct that surfaced in the wake of his Golden Globe win for The Disaster Artist.

“Subjects for the Vanity Fair cover are often photographed separately in small groups and combined via digital imaging — Franco’s removal, then, did not require a reshoot. That said, it’s highly unusual for a star to be removed from an elaborate photo layout, especially so close to publication.”