Tonight’s Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute (the Montecito Award) honored Penelope Cruz, whose Oscar-nominated performance in Parallel Mothers is easily and indisputably the best in her category.

Roger Durling‘s conversation with Cruz focused almost entirely on her 25-year history with Mothers director-writer Pedro Almodovar, which began with her performance in Live Flesh (’97). The chat was easy and comfortable — Durling really knows his Pedro-and-Penelope. But the award-presentation finale was amazing.

During the last lap Cruz had spoken of her lifelong admiration for Sophia Loren. Soon after director Eduardo Ponti (The Life Ahead) introduced a video of his mother, the 87 year-old Loren, who in turn introduced Cruz following words of heartfelt praise. The Loren video was a complete surprise to Cruz.

A little more than four years ago, director-screenwriter-playwright Neil LaBute was abruptly cancelled by MCC Theater, an upscale Off Broadway company that had produced and supported his controversial plays for 15 years. LaBute has worked steadily in features and TV since and is doing “fine”, but the MCC surprise seemed to signal an across-the-board dismissal of LaBute by #MeToo and #TimesUp progressives.

LaBute’s provocative plays and films (In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors, The Shape of Things, Fat Pig, Some Girl(s), Some Velvet Morning, Reasons To Be Pretty) have been derided by certain critics as misanthropic and misogynist. His speciality is dramatizing misunderstandings, woundings and acidic currents between contentious men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s.

Anyway, it would seem (and I’m emphasizing the “s” word) that LaBute didn’t do anything specific to warrant the MCC termination. It seems, rather, that he just continued to write the same kind of stuff, and that post-2017 the woke comintern simply said “enough” and decided to get rid of him.

Last night I watched LaBute’s House of Darkness, an elevated horror film that uses (borrows?) themes and situations from Promising Young Woman and Midsommar. When and if it opens, House of Darkness, which costars Kate Bosworth and Justin Long, will probably be attacked as a metaphorical woman-hating horror film. Or a man-hating #MeToo horror film. Or something like that.

It’s definitely trafficking in social metaphor — #MeToo and #TimesUp and others in the women’s progressive movement looking to bring pain and terror to the male jerks of the world.

I don’t think House of Darkness does anything phenomenal. All it does is apply the basic LaBute attitude software to Promising Young Midsommar.

Long plays a typical Labute-ian sexist sleazeball bullshitter, and Bosworth (they’ve been actual, real-life lovers since last year) plays one of the Dracula sisters.

Bosworth and two other women play feminist avengers, and Long is a boozy, middle-aged version of Keanu Reeves‘ Jonathan Harker.

Unlike the bright and sunshine-filled Midsommar, LaBute’s film takes place in the dead of night inside a large, European-styled, castle-like abode (i.e., the real-life Dromborg Castle in Fayetteville, Arkansas). Suffice that horrible punishment happens to Long’s dipshit bad guy, whom no sensible woman would want to be within 100 yards of anyway.

The bottom line is that there’s barely a mention of LaBute’s film online. I searched around last night and it simply doesn’t exist except on IMDB Pro. No stills, no trailers, no nothin’. Very little on LaBute’s IMDB Pro page and nothing whatsoever on his Wikipedia page. No mention of the film on Long and Bosworth’s IMDB and Wikipedia pages.

It’s as if people on their respective staffs or teams went to some difficulty to erase any mention of this film. It’s almost unheard of for mentions of a completed but unreleased film to be this difficult to find.

Why guest programmer Claudia Puig chose to book this lost-at-sea film at the Santa Barbara Film Festival is anyone’s guess. Perhaps she decided to include it out of respect for LaBute’s reputation during his late ’90s-early aughts heyday?

Perhaps the producers tried to sell it and failed, not just theatrically but with streamers and cable stations….everyone shrugged. (Maybe.). I called a couple of producer’s reps today and they said they’d never heard of it.

But House of Darkness isn’t that bad. It’s creepy, diverting, socially thoughtful — altogether a half-decent sit.

It’s doubly weird that producers allowed the SBIFF to be the first-anywhere festival to show House of Darkness. And without a word of fanfare. They knew, of course, that people like me would see it and write about it, etc.

Then again 79% isn’t bad for a three-hour Japanese “Uncle Vanya” film about driving around in a red Saab and smoking a mountain of cigarettes. Four out of five popcorn-inhalers aren’t complaining.

Sam Loomis (John Gavin) and the Pheonix-residing Crane sisters (Janet Leigh‘s Marion and Vera Miles‘ Lila) were, of course, never in the same room together. But once you get past this and after you contemplate the fact that Lila has her palm pressed against Sam’s rib cage, you immediately consider the possibilities.

Could straight-arrow Sam have been two-timing Marion with a concurrent affair with Lila? No — that would have been too much, too reckless, too thoughtless for a financially pressed owner of a hardware store.

But after Norman Bates was arrested for the murder of Marion and Martin Balsam‘s Arbogast and the whole thing had been put to bed, could Sam and Lila have gradually become lovers? As a way of embracing life and renouncing death? This, to me, seems conceivable.

I always assumed that Peter Bogdanovich falling in love with and marrying Louise Stratten, the younger sister of his murdered lover Dorothy Stratten…I always thought he was motivated by the same spirit of renunciation and renewal — an attempt to replace the trauma of murder with the bloom of fresh love.

Contrary to the Getty Images caption, the woman with Nightmare Alley director-cowriter Guillermo del Toro at today’s Oscar Nominees Luncheon is not a “guest.”‘ She’s GDT’s wife and Nightmare Alley co-author Kim Morgan.

Earlier today HE reader “Mike” complained about my Santa Barbara Film Festival doings thus far. “Why the obsession with the festival’s back-slapping, glad-handing interview sidebars?,” he wrote. “What about the bread and butter? It’s a film festival, for Christ’s sake. Surely it’s not hard to see a couple a day and drop a few comments. What are your favorites so far?”

HE to “Mike”: “The back-slapping, glad-handing interviews ARE the festival’s bread-and-butter. Bringing brand-name celebs to town in the heat of Oscar season is what the SBIFF does — what it’s famous for.

“The films that show at SBIFF are always curated with care — Roger Durling and his staff do the best they can, and most are quality-level as far as it goes — but for various reasons the SBIFF never gets the pick of the litter. You would hope that they’d screen some of the more interesting Sundance titles, but they never do (and not for lack of trying).

Every so often there’s an interesting doc or odd foreign feature in the lineup. I take them as they come.”

Right now I’m watching Neil LaBute‘s House of Darkness, an eerie seduction drama with Justin Long and Kate Bosworth. Synopsis: “A man drives a woman home after they meet over drinks in a local bar. When she invites him into her home for a nightcap, the evening doesn’t follow the familiar path toward seduction.”

Later this week I’ll catch Justin Kurzel‘s Nitram, a drama based on the saga of Australian mass murderer Martin Bryant. Costarring Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia,

Nitram had its big premiere at last July’s Cannes Film Festival; Jones won the Best Actor award. Pic received a limited theatrical release in Australia last September.

“It was one of those surreal moments when light entertainment mugs history. Vladimir Putin crooned the song ‘Blueberry Hill at a children’s charity benefit in St Petersburg in 2010, as a crowd of celebrities — including Sharon Stone, Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn, Gérard Depardieu, Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci – clapped along like they were in kindergarten.

“When the politician reeled off the opening line — ‘I found my thrill’ — thoughts of the Georgian invasion or the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko didn’t seem to be urgently popping into anyone’s head. Knowing what we know now, the spectacle plays more like Dr. Evil’s rendition of ‘Just the Two of Us’ but far less funny.” — from “Putin’s Hollywood pals – the stars who snuggled up to the Russian dictator,” a 3.7.22 Guardian piece by Phil Hoad.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone is asking her readers to pick preferences among the ten Best Picture nominees. She’s asked me to ask the HE community to join in. Right now Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog seems to be leading, she says.

If you believe in fairies and if you care about doing your part to halt the scourge of homosexual panic in 21st Century cinema, please vote now. Within the realm of this small but culturally significant poll, only YOU can stop The Power of the Dog.

This is arguably the best Jake Tapper editorial piece he’s ever written and composed — Putin-the-brilliant-murderer has been coddled and approved of or certainly not strongly challenged by U.S. Presidents all along… Clinton, Dubya, to some extent Obama, and certainly Trump–nuts. They all looked the other way.

YouTube commenter: “I had no idea just how complicit the West had been in all of this until now. Now the world is reaping what it sowed, just like it did in 1939 after years of appeasing and half-trusting the word of an autocrat with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. It’s fairly trite to reference him at this point, but just read a little history on the Third Reich and the foreign policy taken with them and it is hauntingly familiar.”