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What, the ghost of George Floyd descends upon rural Pennsylvania?…the return of defund the police?…intrepid Kate gets to the bottom of a conspiracy among ugly racist cops? Terrific.

For at least four years I’ve been calling the Sundance Film Festival a wokester cul de sac…a dead end in itself, a dog in a box. Robert Redford‘s annual Park City gathering was alive and crackling between the early ’90s until 2016, pumping new blood and attitude into Hollywood and in some instances even reaching Average Joe multiplexes — 25 years of vitality.

Then the wokesters began to take over in ’17, and within a year Sundance had become a festival for woke purists. Or, as I wrote in ’18, “a socialist summer camp in the snow…largely about woke-ness and women’s agenda films — healings, buried pain, social ills, #MeToo awareness, identity politics, etc.”

I’ve said this four or five times, only to be met by a consensus view from the HE commentariat that boiled down to “aahh, pipe down… you’re just pissed off because they yanked your press pass.”

But now finally…finally!…a writer director has told The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield that “the indie Sundance machine” has indeed woked itself into a corner, “creating films that no one wants to see…there’s a reason why you don’t have many indie breakouts because the stuff that has been deemed important is completely out of touch.”

Thank you!! Someone has finally joined me in saying how over the last four years the Robespierre contingent have all but poisoned the indie realm, which is annually celebrated in Park City. Indiewire would rather slit its collective throat that admit this, but now there are two of us…me and this writer-director guy!

Monday (12.27) update (NY Post via Deadline):

Last night (12.26):

Eight years ago Dallas Buyer’s Club, directed by the 50-year-old Jean-Marc Vallée, was one of the most talked-about Oscar contenders. In early ‘14 costars Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto won Oscars for their performances, and Vallée was suddenly a hotshot, prestige-level helmer.

Then he directed Wild (‘14), a Reese Witherspoon long-hike survivalist drama. Next came two HBO projects, Big Little Lies, which Vallée directed two episodes of while exec producing, and Sharp Objects, for which Vallée won an Emmy for direction.

Now comes a report that Vallée, 58, has been found dead in a cabin outside Quebec City. Regrets and condolences. Quite a shock.

When I was 22 or thereabouts I fell into a hot affair of the soul with a tall, quite slender 20 year-old brunette, at the time a junior at Boston University. She was a little bit taller than I (which was cool), and might have been the greatest hugger I’ve ever known. But going out with a woman nearly a full head taller…I don’t know, man.

…for popularizing the term “friendo” in No Country for Old Man. (Cormac McCarthy or the Coen brothers wrote it, of course, but Javier brought it home.) Favorite Bardem performances, in this order: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, No Country, Before Night Falls, The Counselor, The Dancer Upstairs, Biutiful, The Sea Inside, Skyfall, Being The Ricardos. One of the very few name-brand actors to stand by Woody Allen when spears and missiles were raining down, and to throw shade upon the fanatics. One night on the Cote d’Azur beach in ’07 or ’08 I bummed a Marlboro light from Javier, and as we parted company a few minutes later he gave me another — one to grow on, so to speak.

…are almost certainly going to get killed in next year’s midterm elections. We’re all summing up 2021 in our heads and making lists about the highlights and misfortunes, etc. And the coming destruction of what’s left of a sensible liberal agenda…a destruction authored entirely by wokester identity-politics zealots…is pointed out chapter and verse in these six “New Rules” riffs, which I watched between 5 am and 6 am this morning.

There are many things I despise about the here-and-now in a social-political sense, but the “J’Accuse!” chorus of condemnation on Twitter has been near the top of my list for a good four years now. And right behind this (i.e., almost as bad) are the HE commenters who keep saying “man, you’ve lost control of yourself” and “is woke terror an obsession?” and so on.

The content in these six Bill Maher essays is 100% real, and the left isn’t modifying or toning down the rhetoric or the insanity. It’s getting worse by the cycle. They won’t listen.

The defeat of Virginia’s Terry McAuliffe was but an appetizer. Main course on its way.

We’ve all heard the famous story about Tallulah Bankhead flashing hairpie during the making of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat (’44), and Hitch’s reply when told that some guys on the crew had complained and that he needed to ask Bankhead to show a little modesty. “Not my job,” Hitch allegedly replied. “This could be a situation for wardrobe, or it could be a makeup issue or perhaps even one for hairdressing.”

For me this story never quite lands because no sane or rational-minded Hollywood crew person (sound-stage professionals were entirely male in those days) would ever complain about being flashed. Who would be anti-social or arrogant or priggish enough to complain about such a thing? Ludicrous.

Another version of the incident (offered by Steve Hayes) was that the complaint came from a woman affiliated with the Catholic Legion of Decency who was visiting the set. But since when did such a person have anything to say about behavior or work practices during the shooting of a film? The Catholic Legion of Decency was about judging the moral nature of films awaiting theatrical release…right?

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A month ago Licorice Pizza‘s Paul Thomas Anderson told N.Y. Times Hollywood columnist Kyle Buchanan (aka “The Projectionist”) that he doesn’t believe in presentism, or the current industry-wide aesthetic that requires all films set in the past to reflect 2021 values and culture, especially concerning racial matters.

Anderson to Buchanan: “I think it would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021. You can’t have a crystal ball…you have to be honest to that time.”

And of course, he and the film have taken hits from wokester fanatics about “casual racism” blah blah, etc.

How many other name-brand directors would even consider saying “you have to be honest to the time period in question, which means not necessarily integrating your film with current wokester sensibilities”? Answer: Very few — Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Roman Polanski, Oliver Stone and you tell me how many others**.

Over the last four or five years the vast majority of helmers (The Tender Bar‘s George Clooney, The Green Knight‘s David Lowery and Cyrano‘s Joe Wright are three recent examples) have become fools for presentism, if for no other reason than to simply keep out of control.

99% of film critics and essayists won’t even mention presentism. Jordan Ruimy: “Except for Armond White and damn few others, today’s film critics would never dare tackle woke casting in any review they write. It’s blatantly obvious in many movies today, but it’s an unwritten rule to never talk about it.”

I’ve said this 67 times so far, and here comes the sixty-eighth: Intimate relationships between older persons and teenagers are totally verboten, of course. The law is the law. But the in-and-out romantic current between Licorize Pizza‘s Alana Haim and Connor Hoffman, which never involves any kind of sexual activity, is totally fine.

I was once 15, and if a 20something girl I’d been daydreaming about had winked at me and left the door ajar for some possible forthcoming action down the road…are you kidding? That would have been wondrous, glorious, etc. Older males who say or do the wrong thing in the presence of a minor deserve everything that comes from that…different rule book. But a 20something Valley girl and a precocious dude in his mid teens? Fine…don’t sweat it.

** Joel Coen was a non-believer in presentism until he made The Tragedy of Macbeth. The idea, of course, was to not have Denzel Washington be the only Scotsman of color (SOC) in the film.

…but a 77% RT approval is certainly more than a passing grade. The IMDB crowd gives it an 8.3. The only resounding thumbs-down reactions are from Metacritic users — 5.6.