Posted by Newsweek‘s Jon Jackson at 1:08 pm Pacific: “Pope Francis warned on Monday about the ‘one-track thinking’ caused by “cancel culture” as well as the spread of misinformation related to COVID-19 and vaccines.

“In comments made during an address to diplomats, the pope cautioned against ‘a form of ideological colonization, one that leaves no room for freedom of expression and is now taking the form of the cancel culture invading many circles and public institutions.”

“Reuters reported that the pontiff said the words ‘cancel culture’ in English while otherwise speaking in Italian during the long speech. The news agency speculated that he chose to do so because the topic is a point of controversy in English-speaking countries like the U.S.”

Pope Francis went on to chastise Hollywood publicists and talent managers for deciding en masse last year to cancel the “flawed but human” Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Golden Globe awards.

“We’ve all recognized for many decades that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is just another an organization of prostitutes…a group looking to promote Hollywood product, and in so doing enjoy the industry perks and enrich itself and take a ride on the gravy train,” the pontiff said. “Which is exactly the same goal and attitude of Joey Berlin and the Critics Choice Association. There are no priests or nuns in this racket, and they all have their hand out.

“We all understand, of course, that the HFPA was slow to adapt to the requirements of urban progressive culture by failing to add journalists of color to their ranks. But does that make them evil? Does this mean they need to die?”

Okay, the previous three paragraphs are entirely fictitious. Pope Francis said nothing earlier today about the Hollywood Foreign Press and the Golden Globes. But he might well have come to this conclusion privately. If he cared one way or the other. Maybe.

Now that he’s joined the anti-wokester brigade, Pope Francis surely recognizes that woke cancer has spread in a thousand different directions over the last four or five years, and that the people who decided to kill the Golden Globes in order to demonstrate the intensity of their commitment to anti-racism…Pope Francis surely understands that they’ve basically decided to commit a form of award-season hari kiri, and for no reason other than virtue-signalling.

Only fools would contend that Joey Berlin and the CCA are more moral or less race-conscious or more socially responsible than the HFPA. They’re all industry whores, all shilling at the trough, and the Hollywood machine has enjoyed the enthusiasms of these two groups for many years (decades in the case of the HFPA) so cut the shit, sonny.

The 2022 Spirit Award nominations dropped this morning. Congrats to all nominees, but HE especially salutes the top nomination-getter — Janicza Bravo‘s Zola. Seven nommies = the almost certain winner of the Best Feature prize.

Otherwise, wokey-woke changes continue apace.

For decades the Spirits have been held the day before the Oscars, and were therefore wedded to that famous annual event. That’s over — the 2022 Spirits Awards will happen on Sunday, 3.6, or three weeks before the 2022 Oscars on 3.27.22. Which says, obviously, that the Spirits don’t want that linkage any more.**

Film Independent’s Josh Welsh: “At the Spirit Awards, we look for uniqueness of vision, original and provocative subject matter, economy of means, and diversity, both on-screen and off. Among [2022] nominees 44% are women and 38% are BIPOC…among the nominating committee members, 63% identify as women, 5% as non-binary, and 56% as BIPOC.”

More fundamentally: Remember the good old days (i.e., two years ago) when the Spirit Awards were widely regarded as the Indie Oscars? And when (excuse the following indelicate term) white-male filmmakers had as much of a shot at being nominated as anyone else? That’s history also. There’s always been more of a progressive p.c. emphasis among the Spirit nominees and winners (diversity, representation, indie contrarian attitude) but now it’s totally woke BIPOC feminist virtue signaling chitty-chitty-bang-hang. The only white guys who are allowed to be nominated are girlymen types (i.e., C’mon C’mon‘s Mike Mills).

East Coast f riendo #1: “Male feminists are allowed into Utopia. Just chop your balls off and you’re good.”

East Coast friendo #2: “It’s equity in practice. Achievement doesn’t matter. It makes them look good. It’s very Gen-Z on Tumblr circa 2013..”

“When talent and merit are replaced by representation, then we’re living in a world that doesn’t care about movies anymore.” — Brett Easton Ellis in a 2.19.19 guest column for The Hollywood Reporter.

In short, the 2018 “socialist summer camp in the snow” Sundance serum has spread everywhere — to New York and Toronto and pretty much every U.S. film festival except for blessed Telluride and Santa Barbara…all are now parroting the party line by favoring or appealing to your basic wokester SJW #MeToo BIPOC LBGTQ crowd (along with your garden-variety Lefty Snowflake Stalinist Sensitives) who are committed to overthrowing old norms and ensuring that independent cinema is generally more progressive and “representative” with fewer white guys of whatever age.

** Remember Spirit-Oscar overlap in terms of Best Picture nominees? That idea went south in 2019 when the five Best Feature Spirit nominees — Eighth Grade, First Reformed, If Beale Street Could Talk, Leave No Trace and You Were Never Really Here — weren’t nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

HE to Pessimistic Friendo: “You’re too much of a doomsaying pessimist at this stage of the game. You’re really bringing me down. 38% to 42% of the voters support a monster, yes, but that leaves 58% of the voters who don’t. We’re all suddenly perched on the edge of totalitarianism, fascism, a race war. You have to believe in sanity, fairness and decency. Joe recently stood up the wokester shitheads in the streets, saying that lawlessness won’t be tolerated. He’ll certainly repeat this in the debates. You have to believe, have a little faith.”

Journo Pally to Same Pessimistic Friendo: “It was in March 2016 that I first predicted that Trump would win the 2016 election.

“By the time the 2016 conventions happened, I knew just how off-the-mark the media was. I thought Trump’s nomination-acceptance speech was, in its horrific way, an incredible piece of showbiz; it was panned by every journalist as a loser of a speech. Hillary’s nomination-acceptance speech, on the other hand, I thought was the pits — I turned to my wife and said, ‘There’s no fucking way she can win.’ But the journalists were ecstatic. It was then that I realized the media was becoming a series of agenda-driven wish-fulfillments.

“So I have the bona fides and battle scars to say, ‘I got what the media didn’t in 2016.’

“But I’m honestly sensing far more enthusiasm for Biden than I did for Hillary. And much, much more weariness about Trump. That doesn’t mean a lot of the same dynamics aren’t in play; they are. Members of the woke media still don’t get, and never will, why they strike everyone in the world (including those of us who consider ourselves liberals but not woke) as a bunch of elitist hypocrites.

“But the thing about Donald Trump is: He’s not a politician, or even a true dictator (though he could become one) — he’s a TV show. (That, in a certain way, is what Hitler was too; actually, Hitler was a movie.) And there’s an eternal rule about TV shows, even the most popular ones:

“They get old.

“People get tired of them. At a certain point, after one too many seasons, everyone says, ‘Next.’ I think Trump is reaching that point.”

Why does the political atmosphere seem slightly more excitable or extreme in the Pacific Northwest than elsewhere? Consider the possible or partial influence of the graduates of the elite Evergreen State College, a liberal arts school located in Olympia, Washington.

From “Evergreen State College Wikipedia page“, under the heading “2017 Protests“:

“Every April from the 1970s until 2017, Evergreen held a daylong event called ‘Day of Absence’, inspired by the Douglas Turner Ward play of the same name, during which minority students and faculty members voluntarily stayed off campus to raise awareness of the contributions of minorities and to discuss racial and campus issues.

“In 2017, the Day of Absence was altered after students of color voiced concerns about feeling unwelcome on campus following the 2016 U.S. presidential election (i.e., Trump’s victory over Clinton) and a 2015 off-campus police shooting. For that year’s event, white students, staff, and faculty were invited to attend an off-campus event at a church that fit 200 people, or about 10% of the white student body. An event for students of color was held on the Evergreen campus.

“Bret Weinstein, a professor of biology at Evergreen, wrote a letter in March to Evergreen faculty, protesting the change in format, stating “on a college campus, one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color.

“The incident attracted national attention, with the New York Times writing that Evergreen “found itself on the front line of the national discontent over race, speech and political disagreement” and that the national exposure led “right-leaning websites to [heap derision] on their newest college target.”

“In late May 2017, student protests — focused in part on the comments by Weinstein — disrupted the campus and called for a number of changes to the college. Weinstein says he was told that campus police could not protect him and that they encouraged him not to be on campus, which caused Weinstein to hold his biology class in a public park. Weinstein and his wife, Professor Heather Heying, later resigned and reached a $500,000 settlement with the university, after having sued it for failing to “protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.”

How dare the French Film Academy ignore the army of anti-Roman Polanski protestors by giving him the Cesar award for Best Director? Don’t they understand that the Cesars are not about honoring the finest in artistic achievement but about submitting to the current political narrative among #MeToo progressives and in furtherance of concurrent cancel-culture decrees?

Seriously, the members who voted for Polanski are to be commended for not allowing the militants to intimidate them into voting differently.

Variety is reporting that “numerous walkouts” happened at the Salle Pleyel when the Polanski win was announced. One of the evacuees was Best Actress nominee Adele Haenel, star of Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables, one of the HE’s 2019 faves, won the Cesar for Best Picture. It also won the people’s choice prize. Les Miserables costar Alexis Manenti (he played the pugnacious racist cop) won for best male newcomer. The film also won for best editing.

I realize that institutional film awards are rarely about quality in and of itself and are usually about what the majority of voters believe to be the most the urgent political concerns (or moods or trends) of the moment.

In the French film industry there are two camps — the old guard and the progressive anti-Polanski-ites. The latter group, wanting to send a message to the industry about patterns of sexism and sexual exploitation, were angered that Polanski and An Officer and a Spy were nominated for several Cesar awards, and are now doubly appalled that he won.

The director and co-writer of An Officer and a Spy (aka J’Accuse) actually took two Cesar awards in Paris on Friday night — one for Best Director and another for Best Adapted Screenplay, shared with co-writer Robert Harris. An Officer and a Spy‘s Pascaline Chavanne also won a Cesar for best costume design.

Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy: Polanski didn’t attend the festivities. He announced a day or two ago that he feared a “public lynching” by feminist protestors if he went. Earlier today An Officer And A Spy producer Alain Goldman and star Jean Dujardin also announced they also wouldn’t be attending the Cesars. Goldman told AFP “an escalation of inappropriate and violent language and behavior” towards Polanski was the reason.

I’m told that 46% of the directors of the forthcoming 2020 Sundance Film Festival are women…cool. The highest percentage ever. And I’m sure the annual ten-day event (1.23 through 2.2) will be…I don’t what. Snowy? Wokey-wokey? Inspiring? A lot of whoo-whooing before each premiere screening? A sense of zeitgeist fatigue? A feeling of “here we go again”?

A Taylor Swift doc (Taylor Swift: Miss Americana). Julie Taymor‘s Gloria Steinem biopic, titled The Glorias. Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted. Sean Durkin‘s The Nest. Viggo Mortensen‘s Falling. Rodrigo Garcia‘s Four Good Days. Nat Faxon and Jim Rash‘s Downhill. Brenda Chapman‘s Come Away.

But Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods, the Last Flag Flying-ish Vietnam gold-hunt film, won’t be there.

You know why? Because Sundance is a secular woke-spiritual get-together that has kinda sorta stopped mattering, and Spike knows Cannes is a better deal. He knows and I know that Sundance of 2020 is about itself — movies for the woke devotional — whereas the Sundance festivals of 2015 or ’10, ’05, ’00 or ’95 were about movies looking to ignite and connect and bust out and generate currents of serious consequence, and perhaps even some award-season action down the road. No more. That era has past.

Now the filmmaker deal is “come to Sundance to introduce your film to the Sundance friendlies, and maybe they’ll tell their Instagram friends about it when it starts streaming four or six or ten months hence…whenever. But you’re almost certainly not breaking out. You and your film are members of Sundance Village, and you’ll never, ever step out of that realm. Unless you’re Kenneth Lonergan or someone in that fraternity.”

If you believe in Sundance Village movies and the values that they stand for and/or are endorsing and seeking to bring about, then Sundance Village is for you. Buy your ticket packages, lay out the dough for the condo, buy your snow gear and your Southwest Airlines discount tickets.

But I know some people who aren’t going this year. Because they know that the high-voltage Sundance necessity of years past is ebbing, and that it won’t be a total tragedy if they don’t attend. Because they’ll see the hotties (there are always four or five) in good time. Maybe some will be streamable while the festival is underway.

10 or 15 years ago the slogan was “Sundance spelled backwards spells depressing.” Now it’s “Sundance spelled backwards means ‘does anyone give that much of a shit?'”

My honest attitude after attending for 25 or 26 years? I think I’ve conveyed that.

Sundance 2020 (1.23 thru 2.2) will begin announcing this week. World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is hearing that Netflix may want to premiere Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods there. There’s also the possibility of seeing Josh Trank‘s Fonzo, Barry Levinson’s Harry Haft, Julie Taymor’s The Glorias: A Life On The Road, Dee Rees’ The Last Thing He Wanted, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks, and Benh Zeitlin‘s allegedly problematic Wendy.

So eight keepers plus the usual five or six docs (possibly including Todd Haynes‘ Velvet Underground portrait) — enough to make the trip worthwhile — fine. I’m naturally interested, but then again Sundance isn’t really classic Sundance any more, As I lamented last week, it’s become Camp Woke.

For a ten-day period in January, Sundance used to be the hippest and most vital winter wonderland and spiritual getaway in the world. It was like this annually-renewed, extra-cool reality TV series that took the temperature of the culture — you had to be close so you could breathe in the vapors and receive that special ahead-of-the-curve information. It was essential, necessary — a great way to begin the new year.

I know that Sundance ‘20 will probably deliver the usual five to eight…okay, ten noteworthy films that will be part of the early conversation, but the odds of another Manchester By The Sea playing there (or even another flash in the pan controversy like The Birth of a Nation) are slim to none. Or so it seems right now.

For Sundance has basically woked itself into a corner — it used to be one of the big three powerhouse festivals (along with Cannes and Telluride/Toronto) but now I’m not so sure.

Right now it’s flirting with being a larger, snowier but more politically secular version of SXSW.

Sundance is where films go to get their official badge and stamp of approval from the indie-woke-feminist-MeToo-identity politics-POC-LGBTQ, anti-white-patriarchy SJW comintern crowd. But then what?

The question is, what kind of serious cultural or commercial value does that badge deliver these days? The 2020 version of a Sundance breakout hit almost certainly means it’ll be received with muted enthusiasm (if that) when it opens, but of course most indie-level films don’t “open” any more — they go straight to streaming.

USC student wokesters want John Wayne cancelled in absentia, or at least as far as a USC School of Cinematic Arts Wayne exhibit is concerned.

Mainly, I gather, because eight months ago the long-dead Wayne was targeted by progressives — not incorrectly — as a sexist, hawkish rightwing racist. Wayne’s objectionable views were part of a 1971 Playboy interview that resurfaced last February. Why this is blowing up now instead of last winter is anyone’s guess.

A week and a half ago a pair of SCA students, juniors Eric Plant and Reanna Cruz, made some noise on the USC campus by protesting the Wayne exhibit with a banner.

Eric Plant, Reanna Cruz and their anti-John Wayne protest banner. (Photo snapped by Leanna Albanese.)

USC Annenberg Media correspondent Leanna Albanese reported the protest on 9.27. “When you have an exhibit up that celebrates the idea and the legacy of someone that is blatantly racist, a white supremacist and directly says that he is a white supremacist…it seems as though SCA does not care about [its] students,” Plant told her.

“[The exhibit] being in SCA just makes me feel uncomfortable as someone who is Native American,” Plant explained. “Take down the whole exhibit. There’s no other way that this can be remedied. This is something that I’m going to fight for the entire time that I’m here.”

Three days after the Albanese story (or on 9.30) USC’s Assistant Dean of Diversity and Inclusion Evan Hughes announced that the Wayne complaint would be discussed at a meeting on 10.2, or eight days ago. I wrote Hughes a couple of hours to ask if any course of action had been decided — crickets.

A 7.5 N.Y. Times opinion piece called “The Dominance of the White Male Critic” has been written by Elizabeth Mendez Berry and Chi-hui Yang. My first thought was that the article could have been co-authored by Sundance honcho Keri Putnam, who voiced a similar beef at the beginning of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

During a 1.24 Sundance presser Putnam said that organizers had noticed “a disturbing blind spot” in the press credential process. “Diversity isn’t about who is making the films,” Putnam said. “It’s about how they enter the world.” She said that the festival noticed that they were admitting “mostly white male critics,” adding that “this lack of inclusion has real-world implications.”

Excerpt from Berry-Yang piece: “For decades, those given the biggest platforms to interpret culture [have been] white men. This means that the spaces in media where national mythologies are articulated, debated and affirmed are still largely segregated. The conversation about our collective imagination has the same blind spots as our political discourse.

“Consider how this played out around the movie Green Book,” Berry and Yang observe, adding that “when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, most of the reviewers heralded it as a heartwarming triumph over racism.”

HE response: Yes, a number of reviewers who attended the Green Book premiere at the Elgin on the night of Tuesday, 9.11.18 (myself among them) passed along rave reactions, but mainly because the crowd had really flipped for it. Not because anyone saw it as any kind of “heartwarming triumph over racism” — that certainly wasn’t my impression — but as a well-mannered, nicely buffed capturing of the various shades and permutations of American racism coursing through the body politic back in the Kennedy era, and that’s all.

“Is Green Book anywhere close to daring or nervy?,” I wrote after the Elgin screening. “Nope — it’s a nice, safe, entertaining middle-class dramedy, tidy and affecting and right out of the big-studio handbook, but man, it really hits the spot. You can call me a square or a sap for succumbing to a film of this sort, a liberal-minded social-issue dramedy that could’ve easily been made 20 or 30 years ago, but you should’ve heard that audience go nuts when the closing credits began. I mean, it was like thunderbolt and lightning.”

But the Toronto afterglow didn’t last long. One day after the Elgin screening — one day! — I posted a piece called “Fussies & Pissies Mulling Green Book Pushback.” How did I know that the film snobs would be coming for it? Because of a tweet posted by Variety snootmeister Guy Lodge, a living, breathing barometer of elitist critical disdain in our day and age. Sure enough the grenades were soon lobbing in.

Berry and Yang: “But two months later, when [Green Book] started screening in movie theaters across America, black writers saw it as another trite example of the country’s insatiable appetite for white-savior narratives.”

HE response: Over and over last fall I explained that there’s nothing the least bit white savior-ish about Green Book, and that it’s basically a parent-child road dramedy — Mahershala Ali‘s Don Shirley is the strict if constricted father, and Viggo Mortensen‘s “Tony Lip” is the casually brutish adolescent. It’s a spiritual growth and friendship flick. If anyone does any saving it’s Mahershala who saves Viggo from his crude Italian-meathead-from-Queens attitudes. Peter Farrelly‘s film is simply about listening, kindness and compassion. But that’s me.

Did the white-savior thing get thrown at Green Book regardless? Yeah, of course, but those who took potshots in this vein were hardly confined to critics on the urban fringes. It was mostly attacked during award season (and in some cases savagely) by under-40 white wokesters along with know-it-all palefaces who’d been around for decades. Trevor Noah‘s much-discussed Daily Show billboard slogan (“Don’t Green Book This One, Guys!”) wasn’t aimed at critics of color, trust me.

The Green Book haters included Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, the N.Y. Times‘ A.O. Scott, Variety snootmeister Guy Lodge, London Times‘ Kevin Maher (who actually called it a “botch job”), Claudia Puig (“insensitive”), NPR’s Mark Jenkins, eFilm Critic’s Peter Sobczynski, The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, Toronto Globe & Mail’s Barry Hertz (“not quite Racism for Dummies, but close”), The Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern, Screen International‘s Tim Gierson, etc.

Berry and Yang” “The initial positive buzz [for Green Book] set such a strong tone that its best-picture win at the Academy Awards seemed a foregone conclusion. But that didn’t stop the white filmmakers from going after black reviewers like K. Austin Collins of Vanity Fair who found it problematic.

“’What the makers of this movie are missing is just that many black critics didn’t get to see this movie until it came out‘ during Oscar season, well after early screenings for critics, Mr. Collins said during a panel at the Sundance Film Festival. ‘When black critics do finally get to see this movie, it is seen as disrupting the Oscar campaign. I don’t think any of us really care about that. We care about representation.'”

Obviously critics of merit should be given a chance to see and review the big films at the same time as established hot-shot critics. No one’s arguing against this.

What has my attention are the last four words in the above quote, for they constitute the kind of admission that Tom Wolfe once wrote about in “The Painted Word” when he described the classic “obiter dicta” — words in passing the give the game away.

When people talk about Oscar-season distinctions they’re usually referring to qualities that have touched or impressed a wide swath of viewers by way of theme, metaphor, emotional poignancy or commanding applications of skill and craft — the kind of stuff that moviegoers and Academy members tend to associate with classic keepers.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Collins seemed to be saying that he and like-minded fellows regard this kind of thing as less than vital or perhaps even peripheral when considered alongside the much important issue of representation, which basically means “rewriting codified racist narratives and in some cases evening the score by way of progressive approaches to casting and story-telling.”

Maybe, but if you ask me that sounds like a rather limited and politically-minded place from which to absorb and assess the wondrous and delicate art of filmmaking. Making great movies and using movies to alter social consciousness can be achieved in the same effort, sure, but can also be understood as separate challenges, no? At least in some instances.

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Two years ago the Sundance Film Festival withdrew my beloved Express Pass, which I was honored to carry for five straight festivals (’12 thru ’16) and by which I had easy access to screenings and therefore some extra, extremely valuable writing time. I was initially devastated but I gradually adjusted to grunt status during the ’17 and ’18 festivals. But now the Sundancers have really lowered the boom. Two days ago they told me they’ll be “unable to accommodate your request for press credentials at [the 2019] festival.”

Seriously — they actually said that.

I’ve been “going out” with Sundance for 25 years, and suddenly we’re done? I’ve been attending Sundance festivals each and every year since ’93, and if memory serves I filed a New York Post story about Robert Redford‘s launching of the Sundance Institute way back in ’80. A quarter century’s worth of round-trip plane tickets and condo rentals and hobnobbing and working my tail off to see and review everything…two and a half decades of wearing that cowboy hat and working and wailing and watching the history of independent film unfold in the snowy Wasatch mountains.

Has any other longterm Sundance veteran been told to take a hike after 25 years of devotion? I doubt it. Can anyone imagine the Cannes Film Festival guys doing this? I think this is fairly historic on some level. It’s been nice, Jeff, but that’ll do…we don’t like you any more.

I’ve been advised by journalist friends to let this go and just attend next month’s festival without a pass, and basically mooch tickets from publicist pals. Which I may do. But this is an instructive moment that tells us a little something about the punitive mindset of the cabal that’s running Sundance these days.

For this is clearly a censorious and illiberal response to my having written critical riffs about the matters near and dear to wokeness. I’ve lamented the off-with-their-heads Robespierre mentality within the #MeToo movement. I’ve stood by Woody Allen and particularly Moses Farrow. There exists, I gather, a suspicion that I’m not sufficiently supportive of woman filmmakers, which I’m sure will come as a surprise to Kathy Bigelow, Marielle Heller, Jennifer Kent (nobody worshipped The Babadook more than myself), Andrea Arnold, Sarah Polley, Lynne Ramsay, Sofia Coppola (whose direction of Somewhere reminded me of classic-era Michelangelo Antonioni), Ava DuVernay (whose Middle of Nowhere I flipped over six years ago) and Olivia Colman (whose performance in Tyrannosaur I found so devastating that I raised money to pay for press screenings that Strand Releasing wouldn’t spring for).

And it’s possible, I suppose, that my having called last year’s festival a “socialist summer camp in the snow” rubbed them the wrong way.

In a 1.21.18 piece titled “Sundance ’18 Feels Sluggish, Listless, Agenda-Driven,” I wrote that “this festival seems to be largely about woke-ness and women’s agenda films — healings, buried pain, social ills, #MeToo awareness, identity politics, etc.”

I’m not going to offer any sweeping judgments about the recently announced 2019 Sundance Film Festival slate, except to suggest that with a competition slate that is 53% female (i.e., nine of the 17 directors eligible for the festival’s top prize are women) it would appear that 2019 Sundance is going to be just as progressive-minded as last year’s festival, if not more so.

But even with the currents of p.c. instruction every Sundance delivers at least four or five knockouts, and the 2019 crop seems like it might be a little better than normal.

I’ve naturally written an appeal to the Sundance press office, and have been told they may change their minds.