Friend: “The whole ‘wokester’ thing is just beating the world’s deadest horse. It’s become tiresome, pedantic, repetitious, relentless, a drag, a bore, a distraction. Perhaps you’ve got a traffic report that tells you something good, but I hate those traffic reports. I would follow the instinct to serve and protect. Focus on films, filmmaking, awards season, the business, releases, cultural trends…anything but the same daily sledgehammer on this obsession. I say this as a daily reader of your site and a fan of your depth of knowledge and passion for all things film-related. Whatever, moving on…”

HE to friend: “Nobody wants to be an obsessive sledgehammer, but punitive wokeness and cancel culture have become a cancer and a pestilence. On top of which I’m reading a note from a literary agent to a certain screenwriter, written in the spring of 1951: “This whole ‘complaining about the persecution of leftist screenwriters for past Communist ties in the 1930s’ is just beating the world’s deadest horse. It’s become tiresome, pedantic, relentless, a drag. Get past it.’

“But I hear you and intend, as always, to focus on the beauty, the art, the death, the pizazz and the eternal uplift of cinema. As always. But we are living through siege times, through an actual, real-life political nightmare. I don’t see how it benefits anyone to hide their heads in the sand about this.”