I just paid $94 so I can get the hell out of here a day early. If I’d stuck to the original plan of leaving Saturday afternoon I could’ve caught three or four p&i screenings tomorrow, but I’m so sick of this place I can’t stand it any more. I always burn out on festivals after seven or eight days; today is the ninth.

The last big hoo-hah screening — Jason Reitman‘s Tully — happens tonight at 6:30 pm. My Salt Lake City to Burbank flight leaves tomorrow afternoon at 1:55 pm, and good riddance.

At best this was a mezzo-mezzo Sundance. If you ask me it was a fairly weak one.

Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here was the only home run, but it was more of a Cannes replay than a bona fide Sundance film. Ethan Hawke‘s Blaze and Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals were triples. Jesse Peretz‘s Juliet, Naked, Brad Anderson and Tony Gilroy‘s Beirut, Tamara Jenkins‘ Private Life and Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot were doubles. Plus those four conventional docs that I really loved — Studio 54, Hal, Jane Fonda in Five Acts and Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind.

Sundance festivals can be fun and exciting and all the rest, but the programming this year was so heavily tilted toward the agendas of socially progressive “woke” zombies that my spirit began to wilt and I began to dream about the joys of edging away from this goose-stepping community and embracing contrarianism for the sake of my own sanity and independence.

I’ll be missing two or three films that I really wanted to see (Hereditary, Madeleine’s Madeleine, Assassination Nation), but if they’re any good they’ll find some form of distribution and will screen down the road. Maybe some of them aren’t good enough. I can tell you this much: I just don’t care any more.