December 28, 2014, - 9:50 am
The Interview: Juvenile Crap w/ Some Funny Lines
Reader I Am Me warned me it was bad. “It’s AWFUL. It may be the worst movie I have ever seen,” he wrote me. He paid to watch the controversial “The Interview” online, “out of some probably misplaced sense of patriotism.” I went to a theater to see it, last night.
It’s not a great movie. In fact, I agree with him that it’s somewhat crappy, although I’ve seen many far worse movies just this year, and I didn’t hate it as much as he did. It’s a low-rent movie with a lot of silliness and juvenile, crass, gross humor–the kind that appeals to teens and 20-somethings raised on a steady diet of MTV’s “Teen Moms” and assorted Kardashian Kartrashian. I’m surprised it actually cost $40 million to make because it looks more like a $4 million (or less) budget movie.
But I thought it was very funny. I will be the first to admit that I went to the movie ready to laugh, and that makes a huge difference. I laughed a lot, especially during the first third or half of the movie, probably more than anyone else in the theater where I saw it.
But the movie isn’t just a crude, low-humor vehicle for Seth Rogen and James Franco. It made a lot of good points about the low taste of America, these days. Rogen plays a serious journalist stuck producing Franco’s celebrity-culture interview show. Rogen longs to do serious stuff and be taken seriously by his colleagues at other journalism outlets. But Franco argues with him that Americans want this kind of low-brow celebrity culture. He says that the American TV-viewing public is constantly saying, “Gimme s–t, gimme s–t!” To me, that’s spot on. If it weren’t, TMZ wouldn’t have soared to become THE influential “news” source in America in just a few years. And if it weren’t true, the Kardashians would be working minimum wage jobs sweeping up hair at a salon, instead of multi-million dollar annual earners, famous for being famous.
The movie makes the point repeatedly about the dumbing down of America’s taste and description of what is journalism and news. And that’s on-target. But after that, it’s downhill. And while it makes other journalists seem more serious than the celebrity “journalists,” that simply isn’t the case anymore and hasn’t been for a long time. All three of the major network nightly news broadcasts are more than peppered with celebrity news, whether it was about Joan Rivers’ death or Bill Cosby’s alleged multiple rapes or NBC News Anchor Brian Williams’ daughter Allison’s starring role in NBC News’ live braodcast of “Peter Pan.” And “60 Minutes”–which is portrayed in the movie as a serious news program–constantly does celebrity profiles and interviews. Just last Sunday, Reese “I Am an American Citizen! [so don’t arrest me for drunk driving]” Witherspoon was profiled and interviewed on “60 Minutes.” And you know what they deliberately didn’t mention in the puff piece? Her drunk driving arrest and outrageous behavior on video. It’s as if it never happened.
Back to “The Interview.” As you probably know, the plot centers on a celebrity-obsessed interview show and its host (played by Franco) and its producer (played by Rogen). As I mentioned, Rogen wants to be taken seriously (which makes you wonder why he agreed to produce a celebrity show with a semi-dim-witted host), and the host wants to make news. Franco reads that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un is a fan of his show, and he convinces Rogen to make contact with North Korea to request an interview. Once the interview is on, serious journalists are all angry, afraid that Franco is being played for a patsy (which he essentially is) by Kim. And the CIA manages to convince the duo to assassinate Kim. But when the two of them get to North Korea, Franco buys into the propaganda and is “honeypotted” (I won’t use the phrase here that they actually use in the movie) into liking Kim, and it’s up in the air whether a hard-hitting interview and the assassination will actually happen.
Amidst all the controversy about this movie, I heard many (liberal) commentators whine that Rogen and Franco and Sony shouldn’t have made a movie about killing an actual sitting world leader (which is funny because all of them were dead silent when a movie about killing President Bush, “Death of a President,” was released while he was President–read my review). I thought this movie actually humanized Kim and undersold what a madman and mass-murdering human-rights abuser he is. There were no shots of concentration camps or starving people. No scenes of citizens murdered en masse. None of that. And you have to wonder, “Is this all there is? Is this nothing of a movie really what North Korea was upset about?”
While Sony may still lose a lot of money after initially canceling the movie’s release, North Korea’s strategy over a really stupid movie was even more stupid. Had they done nothing and not released hacked messages (at least until after “The Interview” was long gone from theaters), this movie would have quickly bombed and died a quick death, unnoticed by most. It’s not a good movie, and it would have failed against relatively better Christmas-time fare. But North Korean hackers and terrorist-threat-issuers created controversy and publicity for the movie that made people want to go see it or pay to see it online. North Korea created a demand for crap–crap that isn’t really that negative against North Korea as much as it is negative against America and Americans.
Watching this movie, I didn’t even think it was original, as some claim it is. It reminded me of real-life boob Dennis Rodman traveling to hang out with Kim and singing his praises to all who would give him a forum. And it reminded me of assorted cold war movies in which we Americans are the idiots versus clever Communist dictators, such as “Spies Like Us.” And it has notes from Michael Moore’s totally unwatchable, failed attempt at a fiction movie (though all his documentaries do qualify as fiction movies), “Canadian Bacon.” Both of those movies stank, and this stinker is a doubly smelly derivative of those. There is nothing new under the sun, except for North Korea’s help in making this a questionable “must-see” movie for the masses by making it forbidden fruit. North Korean hackers turned this unworthy target into the most talked about movie of the year.
There’s nothing patriotic about this movie in which Americans are dummies (though, sadly, we often are in real life, today). The bottom line is that this movie isn’t worth the hype, and definitely not worth the ten bucks-plus and two hours of your life you’ll never get back.
Says reader I Am Me, “Not only did the movie stink, but I am now fearing the North Koreans may hack the database containing my credit card information.”
He gave me yet another reason to see it at a movie theater. And to pay for my ticket in cash.
TWO OBAMAS PLUS THREE DENNIS RODMANS
Watch the trailer . . .
Tags: Dennis Rodman, James Franco, Kim Jong Un, Kim Jung Un, movie, movie review, Movie Reviews, North Korea, Seth Rogan, Seth Rogen, Sony, The Interview, The Interview movie, The Interview movie review, The Interview review
I thought it was really funny and cleverly written and directed. And I ended up liking Franco and Rogan even though I had previously despised them both.
However, the most refreshing point for me was that they finally referenced the Korean practice of eating dogs which has become taboo to do in p.c. culture.
DS_ROCKS! on December 28, 2014 at 11:21 am