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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The more a lead character is brutally beaten and the more he suffers, the nobler and purer of heart and closer to God he is, and the more deserving of worship. This was basically the idea or strategy behind Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ, which obviously paid off with conservative hinterland Christians. This idea has now been more or less appropriated by Angelina Jolie, which surprised me. All along I thought Angie was just another fair-minded humanist liberal but there’s obviously a strain of conservative sentiment within. How it got there or why is a mystery, but it’s somewhere in her psyche.

Is it worth it to fly to the Berlinale in February and stay at some Airb&b pad for four or five days and shell out at least $2500 so I can be among the first to see and review Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups? I think not. You never know with Malick these days. Will Knight contain dialogue or will the actors just whisper and roam around? Will it have a story of any kind? Will it make any sense? The fact that it’s been in the editing room for a couple of years suggests that Malick has been tossing the lettuce leaves pretty high in the air. I’ll wait until it plays at Cannes Film Festival, thanks. I attended the Berlinale last year when the big attraction was the debut of Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel, but that was a Fox Searchlight deal (air fare, hotel for three days). It just seems a bit much to fund a big Berlin thing all on my lonesome. On top of which I didn’t care that much for my Berlinale experience, to be honest.

Christian Bale, Natalie Portman during filming of Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups in 2012.

A lot of people and a lot of movies have been nominated by the Broadcast Film Critics Association, a.k.a., the givers of the People’s Choice Awards.** These guys know how to spread the love around. Birdman leads the pack with 13 nominations followed by The Grand Budapest Hotel (11 noms) and Boyhood (8 noms). Reminder with special attention to Hollywood Reporter awards handicapper Scott Feinberg — the film with the most nominations among all the award groups tends to generally kick ass and win the Best Picture Oscar…do the math.

Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler‘s Jake Gyllenhaal was nominated for Best Actor and the film was nominated for Best Picture…go Gilroy brothers! Ava DuVernay‘s Selma was nominated five times including Best Picture and Best Director. Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar collected four nominations but not for Best Picture or Best Director. The BFCA’s largesse was further indicated by the giving of four nominations to Unbroken, which has been shut out by the critics groups and blanked by the SAG and Golden Globe nominations. But the BFCAs gave it nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Angelina Jolie), Best Cinematogrpahy (Roger Deakins) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Coen brothers, William Nicholson, Richard LaGravanese).

Kevin Costner, Jessica Chastain and Ron Howard will receive special awards at the BFCA awards ceremony, which will happen on Thursday, January 15th.

** The BFCA nominations were revealed out last night but embargoed until Monday morning.

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

“There’s no black or white, left or right to me any more…there’s only up or down.” — Bob Dylan as quoted by Martin Scorsese in No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

When I first saw Mike Binder‘s Black or White last summer I knew that Kevin Costner‘s performance as Elliot, an angry, grieving attorney who’s drinking too much, was one of his all-time best. Not just a well-measured performance of skill and feeling but one that was “up” in a Dylanesque sense. Which is to say a kind of head-turner, which is to say a kind of high. Because it was basically about the old Jimmy Cagney thing of “planting your feet, looking the other guy in the eye and telling the truth,” which meant no crapping around with those little charm-school games that actors sometimes resort to. And it wasn’t one of Stanley Kubrick‘s “interesting” performances either. It was take-it-or-leave-it real which, in my mind, is always an “up” thing because the technique is more or less invisible.

Costner, I felt, had gotten under the skin of this somewhat testy grandfather of a mixed-race girl and made him whole, but he had also shown courage in playing Elliot in the first place. Because he and Binder pretty much did it alone.

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In a N.Y. Times op-ed piece titled “The Sony Hack and the Yellow Press,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has bitchslapped the editors and journalists who’ve published the Sony material stolen by the “Guardians of Peace” hackers in Thailand. These editors and journalists are slime, Sorkin is saying. That includes me, right? I’m a personification of slithery green ooze for joining in and riffing on the ramifications and so on? And what about my offering a clarification and defense of Amy Pascal? I thought that was okay.

“If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood,” Sorkin writes. “And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.”

The most interesting paragraph, for me, is the one in which Sorkin gives a new title to the much-described, much-gossiped-about Jobs project, for which he wrote the screenplay. That project is called Steve Jobs, Sorkin says. Seriously? Steve Jobs? What, like Michael Clayton and Dolores Claiborne? Sounds sucky, man. A whole different ring. Dump it and go back to Jobs. Or call it something else.

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