Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings opened domestically on 12.12 with around $24 million and is projected to hit…I’m not sure. But I know Box Office Mojo has it ranked fifth behind the weekend’s top four attractions — The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Annie and The Hunger games: Mockingjay, Part 1. (Can it be safely assumed that if a movie title has a colon in it, that it probably blows to some extent?) It also appears as if Exodus has done better overseas than domestically with the total foreign county at $45 million or thereabouts. One thing that’s apparently happened in this country is that yahoo Christians, smelling a non-religious approach, haven’t come out in droves. Scott’s instincts told him to stay way from a reverent approach and make some kind of anti-Cecil B. DeMille, non-believing version of Moses’ tale. That was probably a mistake all around. Now that Exodus is officially a domestic under-performer and can probably be called an all-around failure, do we have any final assessments as to what went wrong?

This is a greeting-cardish sentiment, but a generally true one. I’d like to dispute but I can’t think of a single film in my personal pantheon that hasn’t moved me emotionally on some level. Even Betrayal. Mediocre or bad films generally put me in a stupor, which usually results in walking out or turning them off. I won’t sit through crap, and I always know a film is a dumper less than ten minutes in and frequently less than five.

I’ll be in Manhattan for six days starting on Sunday, and one of the things I’d like to do is catch Jake Gyllenhaal and The Affair‘s Ruth Wilson in Nick Payne‘s Constellations, which opens officially on 1.13.15. A likely Best Actor nominee (but who knows?) for his bug-eyed sociopath role in Dan Gilroy’s critically hailed Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal will be topline three (and possibly four) 2015 films of a seemingly significant nature — Antoine Fuqua‘s Southpaw, Balthasar Kormakur‘s Everest (9.28.15) and Jean Marc Vallee‘s Demolition, a romantic drama that doesn’t involve any kind of physical demolition activity. The possible fourth is David O. Russell‘s long-absent Nailed, which will receive British theatrical distribution next year and will probably be available stateside as a VOD concurrently or soon after.

The combination of widespread condemnation of Sony and exhibitors for caving to an emailed threat from the hackers plus a lot of chatter yesterday about alternative distribution options for The Interview indicate, to me, that the Seth Rogen-James Franco film will probably be downloadable or otherwise viewable in some fashion before long. And when that happens the heat around this film will start to cool. Because it’s not that good or thrilling or buzzy. Diverting in some respects but generally repetitive and underwhelming. Here’s my 12.13 review for those who skipped over.

Nine foreign-language features have been shortlisted as part of a process that’ll eventually result in five nominees for the 87th Academy Awards. I’ve seen five of the nine. Of these I heartily approve of Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan (Russia), Paweł Pawlikowski‘s Ida (Poland) and Damian Szifron‘s Wild Tales (Argentina). I’m mezzo-mezzo on Ruben Ostlund‘s Force Majeure (Sweden) and Abderrahmane Sissako‘s Timbuktu (Mauritania).

I haven’t seen Zaza Urushadze‘s Tangerines (Estonia), George Ovashvili‘s Corn Island (Georgia), Paula van der Oest‘s Accused (Netherlands) and Alberto Arvelo‘s The Liberator (Venezuela).

The Dardennes brothers’ Two Days and One Night was blown off. Ditto Xavier Dolan‘s Mommy, which so many critics did apeshit somersaults for in Cannes. Some attendees at last May’s Cannes Film Festival were dismayed by the jurors giving the Palme d’Or to Nuri Bilge Ceylon‘s Winter Sleep instead of the more deserving Leviathan, but the Ceylan wasn’t even shortlisted. Jane Campion is slapping her forehead in amazement.

When I glanced at the news about President Obama having clearly said that Sony Pictures Entertainment’s decision to yank The Interview was “a mistake,” I had to get off the northbound New York State Thruway and post something. SPE is now the first movie studio in Hollywood history to be chastised by a U.S. President for turning yellow in response to threats from cyber terrorists in the employ of a foreign power. Okay, that’s a mouthful so let’s simplify. It’s the first time a Hollywood studio has been respectfully spanked by a U.S. President about anything, if I’m not mistaken.

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“Sony’s a corporation, it suffered significant damage, [and] there were threats against some of its employees,” Obama said. “I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake.”

Five’ll get you ten Obama was on the phone with George Clooney not long before he spoke.

“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like, or a news report that they don’t like.

“Two women (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D’Anna) do some role-play that involves some kind of librarian–grad student dominatrix fantasy. Wigs are worn, sheets are grabbed. There are bugs and butterflies and a big black box into which one of the women climbs and is locked up while whispering to be let out. A colleague labeled this a class movie: Who but the gentry can spend whole days looking at bug books and dressing up in corsets and capes and having sex this sensual? He’s right, but that’s not what struck me. The Duke of Burgundy is both a vertiginously styled relationship movie and an erotic fable about being in a relationship (the fear of routine, of boredom, of limits). [Director Peter] Strickland keeps pushing the tight quarters further and further so that the fantasy starts to grow domestic wrinkles. One of the women actually complains to her lover about the costumes she asked to wear. The other complains about how not-hot her pajamas are.” — from a Toronto Film Festival review by Grantland‘s Wesley Morris.

My Virgin America flight was uneventful but uncomfortable as far as “sleeping” went. Sitting upright in 3C without a blanket, I was almost in a kind of agony as I caught a few pathetic non-winks. At least I wasn’t seated next to a Jabba. We landed at Newark Airport around 7:40 am. I gradually made my way to downtown Hoboken via NJ transit, Newark Penn Station and the PATH train. I’ll soon be picking up a renter and driving up to Woodstock and Saugerties. Part of the plan is to visit Big Pink and maybe snap some photos. I asked the owners through their website if it’s cool to say hello and poke around.

The winter air in Hoboken this morning demanded muffs, gloves, hats. Bitter and snappy.

In a curious passage about halfway into a 12.18 N.Y. Times story about the Sony hack (“Sony Attack Is Unraveling Relationships in Hollywood”), reporters Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes pass along an opinion held by certain Sony lot sources that more or less blame Interview star and co-director Seth Rogen for the whole debacle. Or at least hangs much of the responsibility around his neck. The Times story suggests that Rogen “may [be] a significant loser” in the aftermath of this tragedy. It explains that “there [is] growing sentiment on the Sony lot that Mr. Rogen and his filmmaking colleagues had exposed employees and the audience to digital damage and physical threat by pushing his outrageous humor to the limit and backing the film to the last.” In other words, Rogen and Evan Goldberg…what, ruthlessly bullied Sony chief Amy Pascal into making The Interview, and more particularly forced her and other Sony execs into going along with the third-act climax in which a fictional version of real-life North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is killed? Wow, okay…but I didn’t think Rogen had that much power. I thought he was just good at being himself and laughing that laugh and swaggering around and punching out scripts with Evan Goldberg as well as acting in some of these projects. Obviously he and Goldberg enjoyed considerable power in the making and shaping of The Interview, but ultimately Pascal runs the shop…right?

“Honor is a private matter within, and each man has his own version of it,” Thomas Becket said to Henry II in Jean Anouilh‘s classic drama. In a town mostly built upon expediency, exploitation and fast footwork, you might cynically suppose that the words “Hollywood” and “honor” are incongruous and best not mentioned in the same breath. But reactions to North Korea’s successful bullying of Sony Pictures Entertainment indicate that the industry’s best and the brightest are not only appalled and angry but tangentially ashamed of the cowardice shown by Sony management and exhibitors. This morning Variety reported that the cyber-terrorists behind the SPE attack congratulated Sony execs for the “very wise” decision to not release the The Interview in any format. The hackers emphasized that “we want you [to] never let the movie [be] released, distributed or leaked in any form of, for instance, DVD or piracy.” Who are they to give us orders? The honor of Hollywood has been bruised, wounded. How to restore it?

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming has posted a chat with George Clooney about the North Korean Sony hack debacle. Clooney says he “just talked to [Sony chief] Amy Pascal an hour ago. She wants to put [The Interview] out. ‘What do I do?’ My partner Grant Heslov and I had the conversation with her this morning. Bryan Lourd and I had the conversation with her last night. Stick it online. Do whatever you can to get this movie out. Not because everybody has to see the movie, but because I’m not going to be told we can’t see the movie. That’s the most important part. We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong Un, of all fucking people.”

So Pascal “wants” to put The Interview out and is more or less in Clooney’s corner or something like that, and yet Sony announces the movie’s not going out at all, not on VOD or online or anything. No offense but something in the equation is missing.

“If you see only one film about 17th century French landscape gardening [next] year, it probably ought to be A Little Chaos, a heaving bouquet of a picture. Kate Winslet stars as a fictional character in 1682 called Sabine de Barra, who is hired by the landscape architect André le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts) to gaze, longingly, at his perfect stubble and mane of lustrous hair. It’s an indulgently actorly piece, but in a thoroughly pleasant way. Director Alan Rickman costars as a very droll Louis XIV, who likes to take a turn through the palace grounds and throw off his wig after a long morning’s kinging. The film is powdered up to the nines, with a wig count in Madness of King George vicinity and a lot of sporting cleavage. ” — from Tim Robey‘s Daily Telegraph review, filed on 9.11.14 from Toronto.