It's not often that we critique Arts coverage, but this Times piece was so dreadful and misleading and just plain pointless, it needed to be called out.

It's by Michael Cieply and headlined “The Films Are Green, but is Sundance?” The soggy point was that the famous film festival is hosting a number of movies with environmental themes but that Sundance....well, honestly we're not sure of the point. We think it's something like, but people used up gas while traveling to Sundance so therefore there's a conflict with the environmental theme. (Did we mention how pointless this exercise is?)

Some lowlights in an article that was literally brimming with them:

Still, a stroll here this week down Main Street — where a dozen idling trucks were unloading supplies and equipment, while an oversize band bus, with trailer in tow, spewed fumes outside a soon-to-be-busy party site — framed the obvious quandary: how can you cram some 46,000 people, roughly equivalent to a fifth of Hollywood's total work force, into a pretty little mountain town without contributing mightily to the problems your films hope to solve?

Are you following? Do you see the false premise the Times constructs? If you're concerned about the environment, if you want to spread the word about environmental activism through film, than you basically shouldn't participate in our society because if you are associated with an industry in which a bus idles, than you're a hypocrite. Or more accurately, an “obvious quandary” is created.

Honestly, we expect this nonsensical logic from Lou Dobbs who points to snow storms as proof global warming might not exist. But to see the Times traffic in this kind of forced jibberish is depressing.

The groans in the article just kept coming [emphasis added]:

Los Angeles to Park City is about 692 miles by the old wagon route, though most visitors seem to come by air through Salt Lake City

Yes, the Times thought it was noteworthy that Sundance attendees did not drive to Utah.

And this:

Utility officials said there was no way to determine how much extra wattage was being poured into the valley for the festival's spotlights and the strings of colored bulbs lining Park City's streets.

Too dumb for words? We think so.

And those were the first two--the best two--examples the Times provided in an effort to show that Sundance was not Green.