Skip to main content
In our real time amnesiac society, writing about The Interview today may be like arriving a little late to the party, but I have to say that, watching it last night with the Katherine and the kids, some notes are in order.

For starters, don't be fooled. This is a family movie. Today's American 12 and 14 year olds are really adults disguised as children. They will see more on the interweb and talk more supposed "trash" at school than The Interview could possibly hope to do. Furthermore, if you are looking to suspend your disbelief because you seek realism, look somewhere else. The Interview shamelessly mocks itself and kids not only get that "it's only a movie", but this knowledge grants the filmmakers and audience license to ill. Satire, parody, and comedy, as we have seen recently in Paris, can really piss off individuals, splinter groups, clans, tribes, or nations. It would be too much to say the "offended" parties lead humorless lives. After all, do they not giggle at their own human foibles (like when they fart in public)? But it may not be too much to say that these same offended parties are kinda messed up in the head when a satirical film "threatens" their national security causing them to unleash a cyber war upon Sony Inc. (One of my favorite companies, by the way, because they make cameras I really like to use, notably the Sony EX1 hi def camcorder).

The Interview is an expertly made satire that actually pushes the conversation about the family of nations squarely into the public forum. I am not kidding. Can you imagine a more powerful movie that would get apathetic, apolitical American viewers (and the stoner crowd) politicized? When the lights came up I was asking myself why North Korea has isolated itself so completely. How can a nation so large and so powerful not want to join the inevitable international move to a global economic and cultural marketplace? Or maybe they do but their leaders won't let them? Are there millions of North Koreans who have so deified Kim whatever-your-name-is that they will willingly starve themselves to death? Conversely, why should we care? Because they have the bomb? Will they really use it?

The larger point (and one - among many excellent points - which the film makes) is that America likes to export democracy - even to places that may not want (or may not know they want) it. What Rogen, Franco, and Goldberg are saying is: this North Korean state is one of the last - and unfortunately nuclear - nations that not only oppresses its own, but refuses to play along with with liberalism and free market capitalism. Can't we all just get along? But they are packaging this message in a bawdy, raunchy, politically incorrect, satire that audiences from 12 to 80 can understand.  I plan to see it again - if only for Eminem's cameo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interview_%282014_film%29

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The End of the Tour

Great poster! Beautiful concept. The image tells us everything we'd want to know about the film. Especially gutsy is the decision to exclude Jesse Eisenberg's and Jason Segel's faces.  It's called a  two-hander . In the theatre it connotes a play with only two actors. hink  Driving Miss Daisy  or most plays by Samuel Beckett. In  The End of the Tour , Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg and director James Ponsoldt take the two hander into movie land, albeit with a supporting cast (including a hilarious comedic acting turn courtesy of Joan Cusack) and make it into a genuine, moving, funny, and heart-wrenching bit of cinema.  The celebrity writer and his admirer. Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel.  We may never know who David Foster Wallace really was. Already his estate is disowning this film - but the truth about that is also  up for grabs. All we have is the film, exhibit A (if you will), and what we read about it, along with Mr. Wallace'...
Post a Comment
Read more

BY ORDER OF THE PEAKY BLINDERS

The Peaky Blinders were a criminal gang based in Birmingham, England during the late 19th century and, to a lesser extent, in the early 20th. Allow me to impose a break from the insane reality of American electoral politics and invite you to take a fictitious trip back to Birmingham, England, 1919. The obvious heir to Coppola's Godfather epic, with a dash of DePalma's Scarface, mixed together with Soprano-style family values gone hopelessly and blissfully wrong, Peaky Blinders is easily one of the most entertaining, well crafted, expertly written long form series I've seen in a very long time! I'd forgotten there was a genre called "epic gangster family saga" - yet here it is, the brainchild of writer/director Steven Knight (Locke, Dirty Pretty Things, and - yes - the creator of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but that's another story - 'Millionaire was his day job until the high end work took over).  Playing the sociopathic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Locke

Locke's poster suggests speed. In fact, the BMW Locke drives down Britain's M6 motorway never goes above 60 mph. The movements here are all inside Locke's mind. Wonderful. Watching Locke you get the feeling the film was written and directed by a twenty five year old upstart. A kid , really, more interested in innovation than emotion. I looked up the writer/director. He is 56 year old Steven Knight, a Brit, and with a string of screenwriting credits behind him. So...that was my first misconception. The second one actually took place before I saw the film. I had read that the entire film took place inside a moving car, the camera trained on Mr. Hardy, and that was pretty much it. How, I wondered, could this possibly be anything more than an interesting, meandering, but ultimately failed experiment? As I say, that was my second misconception. The landscape of Tom Hardy's face in Locke registers a gamut of feelings. It's as much of a canvas as the surrounding l...
Post a Comment
Read more