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.

The image below is the cover of a Christmas card from a couple I know. Two things hit me yesterday when I opened the envelope. One, this is pretty good face-pasting, at least by greeting-card standards. And two, I’ve never wanted to see Billy Wilder‘s The Seven Year Itch (’55), and I’ll probably steer clear for the rest of my life. Reason #1: I don’t want to hang with Tom Ewell, who never did it for me. Reason #2: I hate movies about paunchy, schlubby guys getting tempted and teased all through the story but never quite getting there. I just don’t like that. There must be hundreds if not thousands of films that people have heard of and been told are respectable or very good or even pantheon-level, but they’ve never seen them and probably never will, and all for reasons that make as much sense as mine.

Irish Heartbeat might be my favorite Van Morrison album, but Moondance ranks a close second. It’s not on my iPhone so yesterday I decided I’d buy it…what the hell. Then I happened to watch about half of Howard Hawks‘ To Have and Have Not last night, and I was reminded how much Hawks seemed to love music and musical sequences in his films, judging by the sheer number of them over the decades. (I’m thinking especially of Ball of Fire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and that sappy sing-along jailhouse scene in Rio Bravo). And I began to wonder what the reaction would be if Morrison and his Moondance-era band were to time-travel back to Fort-de-France in Martinique in 1945 and play some of their tunes at one of the bars there, and if Hawks, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall happened to saunter in and listen. Albums don’t get much more mellow and soothing than Moondance, but it came out 25 years after To Have and Have Not and you never know. My guesses are that (a) Bogart, something of an upper-crust, old-school, wise guy know-it-all, would have scoffed at Morrison’s “wah-wah-wah-waaahah” singing style, but that (b) Hawks might have found a place in his head for it, and that (c) Bacall would’ve totally loved it. Especially “Caravan and “Into The Mystic.” If drunken Walter Brennan had stumbled in and listened he probably would have winced and shaken his head and stuumbled right back out again. I understand that Hoagy Carmichael could sometimes be a cranky, obnoxious shit so he probably wouldn’ve joined Brennan.

I don’t have any special inside track on Sundance ’15, but Rupert Goold‘s True Story, a true-life drama about a bizarre relationship between a discredited N.Y. Times journalist (Jonah Hill) and a family murderer (James Franco), is certainly at the top of my list thus far. Based on a memoir by ex-Times reporter Michael Finkel. Costarring Felicity Jones. Coproduced by New Regency Pictures and Brad Pitt‘s Plan B Entertainment.

President Obama‘s decision to recognize Cuba and attempt another, less belligerent approach to “that imprisoned island,” as JFK described it 52 years ago, is a good move. I’ve never visited Cuba and within a year or two I’ll probably be able to without much difficulty. For the sake of his likely 2016 Presidential run and because he’ll need to appeal to hinterland yahoos, Jeb Bush was obliged yesterday to sound like a hardline enemy of the dictatorial socialists who’ve been running things in Havana since early 1959. But Bush surely knows, and as anyone who understands why Communism toppled in Europe and Russia between ’89 and ’91 will tell you, when a population starts to get a taste for Western comforts, lifestyles and technology, Democratic change is all but inevitable.

Flag of Cuba that’s been hanging above my desk for over a dozen years.

Paramount has reportedly kibboshed plans by the Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse chain and by Cleveland’s Capitol Theatre to show Team America: World Police in place of the now-cancelling bookings of The Interview. A Deadline report says that Paramount “won’t be offering” Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 2004 satire (which focuses on Kim Jong-Un’s dad, the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il) to Drafthouse or anyone else. Which means, I gather, that they’re not “offering” a DCP of the film. Are they also forbidding Drafthouse and others from projecting the Bluray? If I were in Austin or Cleveland I might be inclined to buy a ticket to a Team America Bluray presentation as a general endorsement of showing political satires on U.S. screens.