Brutality a LaBute  Director dissects depraved and
depersonalized urbanites  As the lights came up after a
screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and
Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, "That
was a nasty movie." For LaBute -- whose divisive debut film, In
the Company of Men, is probably the worst date-movie ever made
-- this comment would no doubt come as the highest praise. He's
the kind of writer/director who doesn't think he's giving us a
good time unless he's making us squirm. He has a horror
filmmaker's mindset -- except LaBute doesn't resort to
bloodletting. He does it all with words. He wants to make our
skin crawl by demonstrating how morally depraved people can be.
But the funny thing about this prince of darkness is that he's
really a softy. Beneath all his men-and-women-behaving-badly
scenarios beats the bleeding heart of an innocent who can't bear
the bad news. He's aghast at the ugliness of the species, which,
given how much ugliness is out there in plain view,