Movie Review: The Interview (by Eric Farwell, contributing blogger)

While watching the notorious The Interview, and thoroughly enjoying it, the question is begged: If a movie needs all the attendant controversy and bells and whistles and dogs and ponies in order to deliver a fun night at the pictures, does it still count as a success? We know that this slight, relatively constrained (by Seth Rogan standards) comedy would have fluttered by the holiday box office and then been completely forgotten, if not for an anonymous hacker making terrorist threats.  Does that decrease the enjoyment… or does that goose it? Is it even okay to laugh in the face of Realpolitik horror while some nameless somebody with twisty aims is making actual threats? Is it cheating if a movie is so meta?

To answer the last question first: yes, it’s cheating. And yes, it’s meta. There’s no escaping the real-life implications of the story. No escaping the media fascination that came with Sony yanking the movie from theaters in the wake of threats, or the speculation that they might not have come from North Korea. The theory that the hacker was an inside man is perfectly reasonable, since the threats turned a turkey into an event. Or perhaps a better way to put it: turned a bomb into a BOMB.

While it wouldn’t have been in North Korea’s interest to call so much attention to the movie, the country’s leaders had good reason to loathe it. The story concerns Kim Jong-un, the latest dictator of a ruthless dynasty. Though played by the much more attractive Randall Park, and though his staff was fictionalized, an effort was made to include some real quirks of the North Korean regime. School children actually are taught to sing anti-American anthems. Attractive young women really are yanked out of their villages to serve at the pleasure of the ruling class. Visitors really are shown sets, props, and actors when they visit, rather than the realities of North Korean life. And, since Kim Jong-un was educated in the West, he really does have cosmopolitan tastes. He likes some of America’s pop-culture, and he’s been known to entertain guests like Dennis Rodman in extravagant style.

So it isn’t too far-fetched that the dictator might be a fan of a frothy TV interviewer by the name of Dave Skylark (James Franco). When his producer, Aaron Rappaport (Seth Rogan) journeys north of the DMZ to negotiate an interview with Kim Jong-un, the CIA takes notice. They want our heroes to assassinate him. It’s sort of a reversal on the story in American Dreamz, where a Middle-eastern terrorist enters a talent contest in order to get close enough to the US President to kill him. And, in many ways, this movie has a similar style. But only to a point. This is, after all, a Seth Rogan / James Franco movie. These guys like to get up to shenanigans; the kind of shenanigans that require their crotches to be pixilated.

Ultimately, what we have here is a sort of 21^st Century Hogan’s Heroes, only with BobCrane’s real life raunch mixed in.

We know that it’s perverse to parody ruthless enemies as if they’d be easy to punk, but we watch anyway. We enjoy it because it’s like we’re mooning that scumbag Kim Jong-un just by watching it. The meta flavor is even sweeter when it’s revealed that he’s a Katy Perry fan, because CIA Agent Lacey is played by Perry lookalike Lizzy Caplan. We take some satisfaction in the idea that a North Korean propagandist played by Diana Bang could fall for an American slob like Seth Rogan.

In 1999, a curiosity known as The Blair Witch Project became one of the most profitable indy movies of all time, because it was marketed in a very meta way. As long as it could be thought of as a true story, the experience seemed to go beyond the screen. As for The Interview, none of this works without the dread Sony hacker. Without the hacker, this movie is a big nothing. Rogan and Franco are fun when they start to get loosey-goosey, but the grimness underlying the plot always pulls them back from the brink of hilarity. Doesn’t matter. This is a fun movie to watch anyway. It does count as a genuine comedy, but only in the context of the current times. It must be watched NOW. We’re getting close to the sell-by date… and pretty soon, it’s gonna stink.