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I’ve seen Into The Woods (Disney, 12.25) twice — once three and a half weeks ago (on Monday, 11.24 — the night of the Ferguson Grand Jury announcement) and a second time on a DVD screener a week or so ago. I’d nearly forgotten about it with everything else going on, but then the reviews broke today…of course! My reaction was and is basically positive — this is easily the best film ever directed by the not-tremendously-respected, more-or-less-regarded-as-a-hack Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine, Memoirs of a Geisha). He hasn’t gotten in the way or otherwise fucked up the spirited ingredients that made the original 1987 Stephen Sondheim stage musical such a triumph, and has actually enhanced the material in a reverent and respectable fashion. It may not be gloriously or rapturously inspired, but Into The Woods has spunk and smarts and more or less gets it right. It’s an intelligent, thoughtful musical that actually says something about storybook fantasy vs. reality, and it does so with rigor and discipline and a mesmerizing, high-Hollywood style. The tweener idiots might be shifting around in their seats (“Hey, we want more escapism!”) but the over-25s will get what’s going on and enjoy it as fully as they should.

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Update: The Interview is apparently a dead duck as far as theatrical exhibition is concerned. Or do I mean a dead shark? Or a duck eaten by sharks? I obviously haven’t decided on the metaphor, but Deadline‘s Jen Yamato and Dominic Patten are reporting that all of the major chains including Regal (7318 screens), AMC (4988 screens), Cinemark (4434 screens) and Cineplex (1672 screens) will be joining Carmike, Bow Tie and Arclight cinemas in a decision not to show the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg comedy following a most-likely bullshit threat of 9/11-style theatrical violence that was posted yesterday by the Sony hackers. So that’s it — Sony has to get in front of this situation and offer The Interview on a day-and-date VOD basis. There’s nothing else to do. Unless, of course, Sony distribution execs would rather just pull the plug altogether and retire to their respective offices and weep.

Earlier: It was reported this morning that Bow Tie Cinemas has joined Carmike Cinemas and possibly Arclight Cinemas in deciding not to show The Interview because a message threatening attacks on U.S. theatres was typed out by some Asian guy (probably in his 20s, probably an asshole) within the last couple of days. Imagine the potency this guy must be feeling today! A little impudence, a few keystrokes and wham!…giant U.S. corporations tremble and run for cover like mice. I am a kind of 21st Century anti-imperialist hero, this guy must be telling himself. I am a real-life James Bond villain, only cooler! Kim Jong-Un is my new homie. I am now sexier than ever before. Beautiful moist-lipped Korean women are dropping to their knees when I enter the room. What kind of car should I buy? Oh, wait…I’m not being paid that much.

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“If Sony is worried about theaters being targeted, why not release The Interview day and date on demand?” — suggested a few minutes ago by Bill McCuddy, a regular panelist on NY1’s “Taking Pictures on Demand.” McCuddy is obviously invested in this idea to some degree, but it does make sense in this situation. If Sony suddenly announces a day-and-date VOD premiere of The Interview on 12.25, they’ll probably do fairly well. They might do very well. Presto, no bogus terror concerns!

Deadline‘s Jen Yamato is reporting that Sony has more or less folded in the face of a blustery, probably full-of-shit threat from the Sony hackers who have warned of 9/11-style attacks upon theatres that play Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg‘s The Interview. “Sony isn’t yet cancelling the Christmas release of The Interview,” Yamato wrote, “but the embattled studio has given its blessing to concerned theater owners who choose to drop the controversial comedy.”

A Sony source has told Yamato that “we’re leaving it up to the discretion of the theater owners and chains, and we will support their decision.” Variety‘s Dave McNary is reporting that Carmike Cinemas had decided not to show The Interview in their theaters. 8:55 pm update: The Arclight Cinema chain has also bailed.

Some chains or theatres may choose to play The Interview all the same but others, I suspect, may follow Carmike’s lead.

I realized earlier this afternoon after speaking to a couple of publicists about the threat that fear had quickly taken hold. Would that Americans are made of sterner stuff. But even if only a fraction of U.S. theaters decide not to show The Interview, the bottom line is that a major corporation has blinked and basically surrendered by saying, in effect, “Okay, maybe we shouldn’t do this but we don’t feel tough enough…maybe the bad guys are tougher than we figured…so they win.”

This decision will make a big impression, trust me, on hackers the world over. A light bulb is turning on in thousands of hacker brains right now. Is there anyone who doubts that Sony’s surrender has established a precedent that will encourage other bad guys to go to town?

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Early this afternoon I stepped into in a palatial reception room inside the Four Seasons hotel for a chat with one of the nicest and most large-of-spirit guys I know in this town — Birdman director and cowriter Alejandro G. Inarritu. He’s on a break from filming The Revenant, a rugged revenge drama with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, in a really cold elevated area an hour or two from Calgary. He called Birdman “an unhappy comedy”, and Michael Keaton has said that Inarritu was drawing from his heart and mind when he created the somber and somewhat dour Riggan Thomson. And yet on his own Inarritu is alert, brilliant, good-humored, thoughtful. My initial impression when I first met him, 13 years ago at a Hollywood party for Amores perros, was that he seemed delighted….enjoying the moment, his work, his life. “There’s nothing downish in your personality,” I said, “or not in public at least, so why did it take four films for you to crack out a comedy…a movie with mirth, snark, wit and subversion? Inarritu basically said that the mirth is a front: “You know me and what I can be…I can be extremely dark and down…I have a complex, multi-dimensional personality that I embrace…I have to navigate through that and I don’t quit, I don’t surrender, but there’s an underlying negative [that] I’m fighting all the time.” But I’ll never think of him in this light. And I think Birdman is by far the most enjoyable, electric, live-wire film of the year. Again, the mp3.

Birdman director Alejandro G. Inarritu at the Four Seasons hotel — Tuesday, 12.16. 2:05 pm.

Variety‘s Scott Foundas beat me to the punch in posting about the parallel between Michael Mann‘s Blackhat (Universal, 1.16) and James Bridges‘ The China Syndrome (’79). Both films achieved notoriety because real-life events, occurring within days of their release, spiked public interest. The Bridges film, a thriller about a meltdown at a California nuclear power plant, benefitted from the notorious Three Mile Island meltdown happening less than two weeks after the film opened. Blackhat, a cyber thriller about hackers and counter-hackers opening on 12.25, will probably get a boost from interest in the ongoing Sony hack.

The difference is that after today’s almost certainly bogus threat of attacks upon theaters playing The Interview, Nervous Nellies are probably going to stay home or perhaps even avoid the megaplexes altogether. Fear is illogical. Once it sinks in it’s very difficult to turn it off. An MSNBC interviewer led off a chat today with L.A. Times reporter Joe Bel Bruno by asking “is Sony going to pull this movie?” It would be shameful if Sony does this, of course.

During his recently-popped interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, The Interview star, co-director and co-producer Seth Rogen delivered the following about the level of humor that tends to be popular at the megaplex: “Although the public clearly has an appetite for garbage, how much of that garbage should you provide them with? And how much should you try to insert something that is a little bit above garbage in your garbage?”

The following paragraph concludes my 12.13 Interview review: “[The Interview] is basically saying to the guys it was made to please that they really are ball-scratching apes. It’s basically a huge insult greeting card, this film. Rogen’s film is saying, ‘You get that we made this film for you guys, right? And that we emphasized what we emphasized because we think you’re too stupid to be interested in anything more evolved or sophisticated? You’re cool with that, right?'”

What is the substantive difference between what Rogen said and what I wrote?

Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Sony hackers out of Bangkok have released the promised “Christmas gift” of hacked files, which apparently focus on SPE CEO Michael Lynton. But their big play, which is almost certainly bullshit, has been to threaten some kind of terrorist havoc upon theaters that show The Interview, the object of North Korea’s ire. The goal, of course, is to scare American fraidy cats out into not seeing the film theatrically and therefore damaging Sony’s bottom line.

Interview in which Kim John Wayne Un (Randall Park) meets terrible death. I’m sorry…Jungle Jim Jong. Shit….King Kong Jong. Seriously, Kim Jong Un.

The latest message is comically ungrammatical but here it is: “We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places [that] The Interview be shown, including the premiere, how bitter [the] fate [of] those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to.” Wells insert: Haven’t the Interview premieres already happened? I was at the Los Angeles one and nobody blew anything up.

“Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made,” the Bangkok goons have written. “The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001. We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time. If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.

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Audiences the world over cheered when Kirk Douglas and fellow gladiators broke out of Peter Ustinov‘s gladiator school in Capua, Italy. They were heartened when Steve McQueen and dozens of other Allied soldiers escaped from that German P.O.W. camp. And every November we smile when President Obama saves a turkey from the axe. So naturally our hearts went out when a cow somehow escaped last Friday from Anderson Custom Pack in Pocatello, Idaho. And then we were appalled when the poor cow was shot to death. They shot a cow like a bad guy in a movie? And now everyone totally understands why four more cows slipped out Sunday through a suspiciously open gate. Somebody was stirred by the cop’s heartless response to Friday’s escape and decided to spread the feeling around, even if subsequent capture and death were sure to follow.

Marshall Fine on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, posted on 12.15: “It’s as if filmmaker and novelist [Thomas Pynchon] alike are commenting upon the art form by denigrating it, poking mirthless fun. Even as Anderson trots out notable actors playing what could be memorable characters — Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, a wildly lascivious and knowing Martin Short and a hammer-headed Josh Brolin — he strands them on little islands of his own whimsy.

And if that’s not enough: “I was an early fan of Anderson but over his past three films he seems to be playing a game of chicken with the audience: Bet I can make you watch without actually revealing anything about what you’re watching. How long will you remain engaged with a work that seems to purposely challenge the viewer to understand what the filmmaker’s getting at?”

Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups appears to be some kind of riff on La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2 or something along those lines. The Christian Bale character is some kind of louche Hollywood guy with too much dough, too many choices, too many women, not a lot of discipline…adrift in corruption, plagued by misgivings. Or something like that. Do the characters (Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman) talk to each other in it? Using words, I mean? Or will they mainly talk to themselves a la Tree of Life and To The Wonder? Is there any kind of (excuse this inexcusably vulgar term) story or is this just another impressionist Malicky meandering? I’m slightly intrigued but until it’s been proven to me that Cups is composed of actual scenes in which (a) characters have goals and demons and interact with each other and (b) a semblance of a story happens due to things actually happening, I’m not paying $2500 to see this puppy at the Berlinale. No way. And don’t call me a Philistine for not wanting to muddle my way through another To The Wonder again. Stories and characters used to manifest in Malickland…really. Doubters need to check out Badlands and Days of Heaven.

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George Stephanopoulos: “Are there any second thoughts, at all?” Seth Rogen: “At this point it’s too late to have any.” Why didn’t Stephanopoulos ask Rogen if he and Evan Goldberg would pitch and make the exact same movie if they could do it all over again? Or if he felt The Interview would have been diminished if a fictitious Asian dictator has been substituted? Or if he agreed with Aaron Sorkin‘s N.Y. Times anti-press screed?

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