Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Santa Barbara late this afternoon, and then attended a big SBIFF tribute for The Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe at the Arlington theatre — a 90-minute q & a with Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, the usual array of clips, and a presentation of the Cinema Vanguard award by The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone.

Huzzah for one of our most gifted and tenacious indie-level actors, a guy who’s been digging in and chugging along for 40 years now, and was lucky enough to enjoy a brilliant nine-year streak from ’85 to ’94 — the counterfeiter in William Friedkin‘s To Live and Die in L.A., Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone‘s Platoon, Jesus of Nazareth in The Last Temptation of Christ, FBI agent Alan Ward in Alan Parker‘s Mississippi Burning, a pissed-off paraplegic in Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, Bobby Peru in David Lynch‘s Wild At Heart, Jon LeTour in Paul Schrader‘s Light Sleeper, and John Clark in Phillip Noyce‘s Clear and Present Danger.

Dafoe often works with the strongest and most innovative directors around. I especially respected his performance as Pier Paolo Pasolini in Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini (’14). Sure, Dafoe appears in crap from time to time, but who doesn’t?

Earlier this month Dafoe’s Florida Project performance was an apparent lock for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but all of sudden Three Billboards‘ Sam Rockwell stole the heat with Golden Globe and Critics Choice wins, and now…who knows?

Dafoe spoke a bit about playing Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel‘s At Eternity’s Gate, which recently finished shooting. He said it would be a more inward-looking, painter’s-eye study at Van Gogh’s struggle.

Hollywood Elsewhere couldn’t attend the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s opening night screening of Emilio Estevez‘s The Public, but I’ll be there later today. Within a couple of hours. Probably. I think.

The Public costar Alec Baldwin.

Costar Jenna Malone.

Peter O’Toole portrayed Henry II of England twice, first in Becket (’64) and again in The Lion in Winter (’68). I own the Becket Bluray and have seen it nine or ten times, but I’ve sat through The Lion in Winter exactly once. Studiocanal’s Bluray restoration of Anthony Harvey‘s film popped in Europe in October 2016. Kino is releasing the same Bluray as a “50th anniversary celebration” on 3.13.18.

Sebastian Lelio‘s Disobedience (Bleecker, 4.27) was one of my more satisfying viewings at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It’s a classy, heartfelt hot-lesbo thing. That makes it sound a bit tawdry, I realize, but that’s the hook and the filmmakers knew that going in.

Ronit (Rachel Weisz) is a British-born Jew living a louche life in Manhattan. She returns to England when her Rabbi father passes away, and gradually reconnects with Esti (Rachel McAdams), a former lover who’s now married to an Orthodox Rabbi (Allesandro Nivola). Needless to add, Ronit and Esti get into it again.

I regret to say that my only Toronto-based comment about Disobedience was that it’s “so well-made and full of feeling that I’m not even going to use the phrase ‘hot lesbo action,’ although it does have that.”

When Abraham Lincoln passed away on 4.15.65, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Since that moment any allusion to “the ages” has had a special apartness, a ring of dignity and reverence. Until two months ago, that is, when Vanity Fair‘s Yohana Desta called Get Out “a film for the ages.” Universal marketers seized on that quote PDQ and put it on a big fat billboard near the corner of Highland and Franklin. There’s no disputing Desta’s observation that Jordan Peele‘s horror-thriller “captured the zeitgeist,” but if the ghost of Edwin Stanton was somehow listening, he’d most likely be thinking “hmmmm.”

Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff was beaten up badly during a Morning Joe segment this morning. It was over an inference, first mentioned on Real Time with Bill Maher, that President Trump may have had a sexual relationship with a woman in his administration. Wolff told Maher that the woman’s identity is indicated by “reading between the lines” in a section near the end of the book. Nobody knows anything, but as far as I can tell Wolff never hinted that the party in question might be U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, Haley has strongly denied the alleged inference, and Wolff got hammered this morning on Morning Joe (and was interrogated yesterday on TheSkimm) for vaguely or indirectly floating this notion. The bottom line, as one of the Skimm co-hosts said, is that this is the wrong thing to hint about during “a watershed moment for women, especially in the workplace.” Correct — Wolff should have let well enough alone.

It’s been 63 and 1/2 years since the debut of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window, and it’s still the greatest film about voyeurism. (Right?) For me the second best is Steven Soderbergh‘s sex, lies and videotape, followed by Michael Powell‘s Peeping Tom, Francis Coppola‘s The Conversation, Brian DePalma‘s Body Double.

There’s one more that I’ve mentioned a couple of times but has all but disappeared — Jeannot Szwarc and Michael Crichton‘s Extreme Close-Up (’73), which you can’t rent or stream or anything. (There was a VHS version available in the ’80s under a different title, Sex Through A Window.) Not a top-tier film, but a smart, intriguing, well-written one.

I’m trying to decide if I want to spend $6 bills to stream Aaron Harvey‘s The Neighbor. It’s obviously a B-level thing, but maybe. To me William Fichtner will always be Roger Van Zandt in Heat.

Old story: During an early ’70s visit to The Dick Cavett Show, Jack Klugman told a story about watching his wife try on different evening outfits in their living room. No underwear, he said, so every time she changed she was Venus di Milo. And she was near a large window. And Klugman thought to himself, he said, “Gee, I wish I was across the street with a pair of binoculars.”

Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals, based on a 2012 Justin Torres novel, “is trippier and more affecting than Moonlight ever dreamed of. Adolescent queer stirrings aside, the analogy is not Moonlight but magical realism, Beasts of the Southern Wild, flying above the trees, animated drawings, Malick-like impressionism a la The Tree of Life, family conflict, dreamscapes.” — from 1.22 HE Sundance review. The Orchard has acquiredWe, The Animals for theatrical distribution later this year.

Sometime this afternoon (and hopefully before 3 pm), Hollywood Elsewhere will be driving up to the Santa Barbara Film Festival. The festival is operating under some spiritual duress, as recent trade stories have made clear.

There’s been much hand-wringing over the recent Montecito mudslide tragedy, which has caused the Four Seasons Biltmore to close until April 1st. No debris is littering Santa Barbara’s State Street, but the mantra of SBIFF director Roger Durling has been “never say die,” “let’s stand together” and “sticks and stones may break our bones, but mudslides will only make us stand taller.” Or something like that.

Actual Durling quote: “People want to be together and the festival is a way to do that. It was essential for us to get our act together.”

All I know is that the Montecito region of the 101 freeway has been open for about ten days now. I’ll probably encounter delays, but perhaps not hellish delays. Update: I couldn’t get it together in time. Driving up tomorrow morning.

A 1.31 N.Y. Times piece by “Carpetbagger” Cara Buckley asks, “Why Didn’t Steven Spielberg Get an Oscar Nomination for The Post?” I thought that question had been answered earlier this month. In this space, I mean.

“In some views, the failure to gain much awards traction is an indicator of a shifting Oscars landscape,” Buckley writes, “where Moonlight, a small independent film with an all-black cast, won Best Picture over the white-on-white spectacle of La La Land.”

Bullshit — Moonlight eeked out a win because a sufficient number of Academy members wanted forgiveness or better yet erasure on the #OscarsSo White thing, which peaked in early ’16.

“In this awards season especially, one distinguished by underdog stories and diversity in Lady Bird, Get Out and other pictures, The Post felt out of place,” Buckley explains. “For all of its important messaging, it remains a very white, very upper-middle-class film.”

Lester Friedman, author of “Citizen Spielberg,” tells Buckley that ‘this isn’t the year for a middle-of-the-road Hollywood drama.'”

Or, as I said in a 1.13 post called “Oscar Bait Movie Is Over,” “Oscar-bait movies are regarded askance by younger industry types plus the new guild and Academy members. This is probably why Steven Spielberg‘s The Post never caught on. People smelled Oscar-bait calculation from the get-go, and they don’t like the mindset (an “important” story or theme done classy, aimed at 50-plus types, bucks-up stars and screenwriters) and the “game” of it all.

“The 45-and-unders looked at this well-written, respectably made prestige flick with two boomer superstars (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks) and said, ‘Where is it written that we all have to stand up and salute traditional Oscar-bait movies like little toy soldiers every fucking November and December?'”

The fact that Sally Potter‘s The Party (Roadside, 2.16) runs a mere 71 minutes is, in itself, a fascinating selling point. For me at least. Most dramas of this sort are mining their second acts at the 70-minute mark. People often complain about longish running times, but I wonder if the average ticket-buyer feels vaguely shortchanged if a film is too short, whatever that might mean.

Last year Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan, Nate Jones, Kevin Lincoln and Jada Yuan ran a list of 50 films with running times under 90 minutes, but how many well-regarded films have run less than 80? I can think of exactly one — Woody Allen‘s Zelig, which ran 79 minutes.

Not to mention The Party‘s 93% and 74% scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

Respect for Party costar Cherry Jones, who also appears in Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York, for saying the following to the N.Y. Times: “There are those who are comfortable in their certainty. I am not. I don’t know the truth. When we condemn by instinct our democracy is on a slippery slope.”

Filming on the sixth and final season of House of Cards resumed yesterday, with the newly-added Diane Lane and Gregg Kinnear playing (according to the N.Y. Times‘ John Koblin) a brother and sister. In a 1.31 post, Vanity Fair‘s Yohana Desta wondered if Lane and Kinnear will play “a pair of elite D.C. spin doctors ushered in to smooth out the kinks of [President Frank] Underwood’s disappearance.”

Have I missed something? Where has it been hinted that Kevin Spacey‘s chief executive might vanish? That would be an odd way to go, no?

If I were running House of Cards, I would keep it simple. Just as Spacey became an instant dead man last fall in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations, Frank Underwood needs to succumb to a heart attack. Nothing tricky or complicated — he just drops dead. (An act that can’t be performed, of course.) Start the season with a funeral procession down Pennsylvania Avenue. Flag-draped casket, muffled drums, the clop-clop of horses.

I for one would love to see House of Cards continue beyond a sixth season. The saga of the presidency of Robin Wright‘s Claire Underwood, and whether or not she can put forth a vision and a way of governing separate from her late husband’s. Priorities, finaglings, battles and challenges. What does she have to hide, and what do her enemies have on her?