Yes, it looks well done. Yes, it seems to have a certain visual scheme and stylistic discipline. On the other hand it’s the same old material — same old rehash,

Bill Maher and Ben Shapiro engaged in a substantive Daily Wire discussion on Sunday, 3.13? Sounds good. Ditto the lineup on Friday’s (3.11) Real Time with Bill Maher with Newsweek’s Batya Ungar–Sargon and N.Y. Times guy Frank Bruno. But where could Kenneth Branagh fit into this? The people-pleasing Branagh doesn’t strike me as a fellow of take-it-or-leave-it political integrity. He’ll probably just do the opening one-on-one.

Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten‘s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent will have its big premiere at South by Southwest on Saturday, 10.12 — three days hence.

The less they go for the meta-humor stuff and the more they try and tell a half-believable, character-driven story of some kind, the better this film could be. I’m sensing fatigue and possible headaches, but who knows?

We do know that most SXSW critics and audiences tend to be easy lays — they’ll cheer anyone and anything.

This Nic Cage comedy shot in Croatia in late ’20. Lionsgate will release it on 4.22.22.

It’s been 39 years since I first saw Brian DePalma‘s Scarface, and two fresh observations have suddenly hit me. Okay, one and a half.

The first concerns the “South Beach motel drug deal gone bad” scene — pure pornoviolence with a yellow chain saw. Tony Montana (Al Pacino) and Angel (Pepe Serna) have been overpowered by Hector (Al Israel), a Columbian cocaine dealer, and two cohorts, and told “give us your buy money or else.”

With Angel handcuffed to a shower-curtain rod, Hector saws Angel’s left arm off. Tony has been watching the carnage at gunpoint, two or three feet away.

But with Angel’s arm gone, he’s no longer constrained by the curtain rod, and has almost certainly collapsed into the bathtub. And yet Hector says to Tony, “Now the leg, eh?” How was that supposed to work exactly? Angel — bleeding profusely, in shock, probably close to death — is no longer hanging or standing but writhing in the tub, and probably howling for dear life. It makes no logistical sense.

The second observation is that after the shooting starts, Tony runs downs the staircase and drills the wounded Hector in the forehead. A natural revenge thing, but with dozens of horrified eyewitnesses looking on, Tony was being reckless. Are you telling me the cops didn’t get an excellent description of Tony from these onlookers? Not to mention the model and approximate year of the getaway car?

I’ll accept that no one happened to have a camera with them (even with Miami’s South Beach region having become a major tourist mecca), but if I were Montana I would have grabbed the yejo and escaped by the motel’s rear entrance and dealt with Hector later on. Way too many witnesses.

Tatiana and I visited the site of the chainsaw motel on 11.20.17, following a visit to the Key West Film Festival. The address is 728 Ocean Blvd., just south of 17th Street. Alas, it had been torn down and was being converted into a CVS.

Backstage footage taken following last weekend’s (3.5) Virtuoso panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival — (l.to r.) Spirit Awards Best Actor winner Simon Rex (Red Rocket), Emilia Jones (CODA), Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza), Ariana DeBose (West Side Story), Ciaran Hinds (Belfast) and Saniyya Sidney (King Richard). Okay, so I’m posting this three or four days late…big deal.

An excerpt from an Ankler newsletter from Nicole LaPorte, titled “It Feels Like the Last Days of Rome”:

“But if older, white men are still driving the agenda in many ways, they’re also more scared in this new world order, which has not only been defined by COVID, but the BLM and StopAsianHate movements, as well as the ongoing #MeToo currents.

“Dennis Palumbo, a psychotherapist and former screenwriter, who has an industry-heavy clientele, says his white male patients “feel very restricted creatively. Most of them say, ‘This is a very necessary corrective, but I wish it didn’t affect me so much.’ And that presents a real dilemma. I have a lot of ostensibly liberal, white guy patients who have a lot of credits. And their agent says, ‘I can’t even put you up for this job because you’re a straight, white guy. So there’s an enormous amount of internal conflict.

“Culturally, in spite of inclusion, the problem now is there’s an exclusion for you. As one of my patients said, an executive told his agent, ‘Nobody cares what a white man thinks.’”

“[A] publicist says fear is rampant in Hollywood for everyone — male or female — particularly the big, brash personalities that historically defined the business. Today they fear being ‘cancelled’ because of an offensive Tweet or poorly-chosen Instagram post, or because they just don’t understand the current vernacular and mores.

“Social media has chased away the big, old Hollywood types. You don’t hear about big names doing bold things or being naughty. Everyone is afraid of social media and getting cancelled because you partied the wrong way, you said the wrong thing by accident. So all the big execs and producers and talent — they’re hiding, mostly. That’s not the way Hollywood was.

“Every top executive is holding onto their seat, nails digging into the wood, as if riding Space Mountain. Conventional wisdom used to put studio film execs at the top of the pecking order. Then streaming people were layered over them. But they come and go fast. And now everyone would rather just lay low lest they screw up, or someone uncover something embarrassing they did way back, or maybe, possibly shouldn’t have said to an assistant in 2004.”

I love that Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall are wearing matching outfits (cream-biege suits, white shirts) but why hasn’t Amy Schumer (tweed jacket, black shirt) followed suit?

I myself never wear white-and-beige as this combo makes me look fat. Hence my strict sartorial regimen of black Calvin Klein T-shirts, dark blue & black Kooples dress shirts, slim jeans and Beatle boots or Italian suede lace-ups.

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.