…I was imagining that my wrists had been slit and I was slowly bleeding to death.

It wasn’t a matter of Annie Baker’s directorial talent or a lack of…it was a matter of my own personal misery….a feeling of being drained to death.

Janet Planet is not, as IndieWire ‘s Harrison Richlin has passively noted, an “understated gem.”

And it is not, as New Yorker critic Justin Chang has written, “wondrous”.

It is the kind of delicate, soft-spoken, slow-moving film that some of us adore hating.

And yet hours after seeing JP in Telluride I was seized by an instinct to sidestep and go easy. And so I simply wrote…

A few days earlier a journalist friendo had shared the following:

I don’t feel any particular animosity toward Janet Planet star Julianne Nicholson; nor do I feel any discomfort about Nicholson feeling “under-used” and “under-appreciated.”

My reply to Nicholson is “if you’re going to make faint-pulse movies like Janet Planet, how do you expect people to respond…do you expect they’ll be excited?”