Re: The Interview movie release canceled by theaters after hacker thre
My boyfriend and I had not even planned on going to see the movie. so the terrorist didn't win the movie was still shown.
I'd argue they still won to one degree or another. The movie was "seen", sure, but getting a wide release in some 3,000 theaters is a lot different than a limited-market release of 300 theaters and streaming services. The terrorists won my provoking enough fear in theater chains to severely dampen the release of the movie.
I watched it tonight, a streaming two-day "rental" from YouTube, watched it through my parents' glitchy first-generation "Smart TV" which left me with much to be desired when it came to the experience, but I suspect it would have been easier through the YouTube app on my Playstation 3.
Anyway, it's a decent enough, humorous movie.
As you all may know the plot involves James Franco playing a cable-news entertainment-news interviewer and his producer, Seth Rogen, deciding to try and to take on more serious news stories and after discovering that the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (or "North Korea" as everyone sane calls it) is a fan of the program they decide to line up an interview with him.
Before leaving for the interview the duo are enlisted by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong Un via a ricin-laced strip and a handshake. "Hilarity" ensues.
All and all the movie seems to do okay in most aspects and oddly enough it's portrayal of Kim comes across as rather tame and almost respectful in some lights. With the inflection in his voice and his like of margaritas and Katy Perry songs it would've been very, very easy to say Kim was gay -but the movie shows him to be heterosexual- and to do a lot to make him like an utter fool (which, naturally, he deserves) but the movie makes him almost sympathetic and probably the closest thing the movie has to a three-dimension character. Kim is portrayed as essentially a man-child with daddy issues, compensating for both by over-correcting and being strong. Leading to his recent nuclear threats on America.
When he meets Franco he's star-struck and bashful, almost like the new-kid in school wanting badly to impress the cool-kid in school and to be accepted.
As the time in North Korea wears on, and Franco spends more time with Kim he grows less and less sure of their mission -much to the dismay of Rogen who, as the producer, has spent much of his time in the palace- and grows sympathetic to Kim.
The movie plays a lot of familiar notes for movies of this type, but I really think it could have done more to show the plight of the people of North Korea and how they likely really live. The closest we get is the duo passing a well-stocked grocery store with a happy-looking fat kind in front of it enroute to the palace, later Franco discovers the store was little more than a facade with plastic fruit displayed in it. That's almost as close as we get to seeing what life in North Korea is likely like.
I'm not prude, so I could deal with the movie's sexual humor, it's bathroom humor it's humor with Rogen having to shove a -rather modest sized- phallic-shaped pod up his butt. Maybe in a couple cases it plays it too far but not by too much, it's all more or less on par with many comedies of this nature these days.
Really, the weakest part of the movie is James Franco. He's too.... "James Franco-y" if that makes any sense.
Remember the movie "Wedding Crashers"? In it Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are playboys who "crash" weddings in order to pick-up horny single women revved up by the romanticism of the ceremonies. In the movie they occasionally mention the man who "invented" this stunt and how he's a master of it. Eventually Wilson meets the man and finds him to be a middle-aged man-child living with his mother, played by Will Ferrell.
In the movie the "wedding crashing" we see Vaughn and Wilson do is played straight, they are shown doing research and whatever in order to better fit in as extended family members/friends of the wedding party and they "play it straight." When we meet Ferrell he's playing it broad. He's cranked his particular dial to 11, he says he's taken up "funeral crashing" finding that grieving women are more horny and when we see him "crashing" a funeral he's broadly winking and grinning at Wilson while dry-humping a grieving woman. It's played in the usual "Ferrel at 11" way but the movie implies that he's very successful at this and that, apparently, his targets are totally willing to go down with a man who was thrusting at them in a cemetery and goes home with him, to his mother's house, to sleep with him and then hear him yell at his mom to make meatloaf.
It doesn't fit. In one scene we're shown Wilson and Vaughn taking this seriously to woo women and then we're shown Ferrell being Ferrel and wooing women as well.
Franco is Will Ferrel in this movie. He's playing it with his him-ness turned to 11. Yeah, he's supposed to be a very fashion/style-conscious dense TV personality but it doesn't really work. Had he played it bit more straight, dialed it back some, it would have been a slightly better movie. As it is now, his antics are hard to tolerate.
In one scene him and Rogen are fleeing the Pyongyang palace in a tank along with a puppy he's acquired. As the tank takes on armor-piercing fire threatening the lives of himself, his best friend and a female DPRK defector he's mawing and worrying about the damn puppy. It's just too off.
There is one moment he does a good job, somewhat of a single one, where during the televised interview as he reads the state-sanctioned questions he deviates and asks Kim, straight faced, why if Kim believes his people are so great, why doesn't he feed them?
In the end, the movie is just okay. It may have been better without Franco or Franco playing a bit straighter, or without over-the-top Lord of the Rings references or, well, pretty much just everything about him but when it's over it's hard to wonder how this movie started an international incident.
Seriously, North Korea, all of the shit you do and *this* is where you pick your battles considering the sanctions put on you by the West? Choose your battles, man.
Seth Rogen does good, the woman who plays the female NK defector does good, the whole cast is good.
Except Franco. He's shit in this and, really, I think he tarnishes the movie. He's too much. Without him, the movie may have been slightly better. Rogen plays good as our straight-man, though. But, I'm a fan of Seth Rogen.
Clearly not a Franco fan.
