Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 7:34 am 
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These Interview posters have come down: collectors items now?

Controversy over The Interview (Seth Rogan, Evan Goldberg).

The NY Times explains (16 Dec. 2014): Sony is in trouble over release of its $44 million comedy starring Seth Rogan and James Franco, The Interview, which focuses on a US government plot to assassinate the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. Hackers have attacked the company and its employees and there have been threats mentioning Sept. 11-like retaliation for opening the movie. (US authorities have said North Korea did the hacking; North Korea denies it and calls for a joint inquiry.) On the one hand if Sony pulls back, they will lose cred and clients in Hollywood. On the other it could be in legal and moral trouble if there's violence. It also might lose a lot of money: the movie could be a box office winner (and has been hugely promoted). But is the trouble worth it for what early reviews suggest isn't even a very good movie? (The Metacritic rating currently based on nine reviews is a lousy 54%.) Is North Korean the safest of all nations to mock? Doesn't showing the assassination of a sitting president -- an unprecedentedly undiplomatic gesture -- go too far? (Not of course in college humor, but in a Hollywood comedy, maybe yes.)

The threats to mulitiplexes, where important holiday releases will be playing side-by-side with The Interview, are particularly worrying. There could be personal danger and financial loss. See the NY Times article for the many ramifications of this story. (Earlier article here.)

Strongly favorable reviews (and there are some) say this is risk-taking, hammy gold. Sterner writers aren't impressed. "An intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target," writes Todd McCarthy in Hollywood Reporter. "Considering the controversy and chaos Sony Pictures Studios is undergoing because of it, The Interview fails to live up to the hype, floundering as a rowdy comedy as it grows duller by the minute," writes Claudia Puig of USA Today. And Scott Foundas of Variety says it's "about as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted."

It also seems that after the hacking of Sony Pictures, Hollywood is not feeling very brave and strong. Now a newspaper article reports that Paramount has "pulled the plug" on any screenings of the alternative film a lot of movie theaters were planning to fill the hold left by The Interview -- the stop-motion marionette satire TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE, which included assassinations of a lot of world leaders, including Kim Jong-il (but not Jong-un).

George Clooney circulated a petition that nobody was willing to sign, and he describes the dangerous precedent this spinelessness sets in a recent interview on Deadline. By the way, will the artist who designed the poster dare to come forward? It's been said it's by Shepard Fairey, but it just looks like a knockoff of Soviet era or Chinese Cultural Revolution poster style, and could really be by anybody, though it's fun by current US poster design standards and apart from that, a real collector's item.

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More back and forth on The Interview (22 Dec. 2014).

In a CNN interview Friday Obama said hacking the Sony files was "cybervandalism," "not an act of war." But he's not saying North Korea isn't to blame since he says the US will consider whether it wants to put North Korea back on the list of state terrorists. Obama reiterated that he thinks Sony's withdrawing The Interview from release was "a mistake." "If we set a precedent in which a dictator in another country can disrupt through cyber, a company's distribution chain or its products, and as a consequence we start censoring ourselves, that's a problem," Obama told CNN. He pointed to the Boston Marathon, where the attack was worse, with people killed and many injured, and yet the next year the race went on and was successful.

This led Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton to reposte in his own interview on CNN. He said he was "disappointed" with Obama's response; that contrary to what Obama said, Sony did consult with Washington on the hack attack and that Obama was wrong about why they withdrew The Interview -- not because of the hack or the threats but due to the distributors' and theaters' prior withdrawal from showing the movie. Lynton said if they had it to do over they "might have, uh, done some things slightly differently" but he'd still have made the movie. He said he wants the public to see the movie by some means, but no Video on Demand (VOD) company has come forward.

Christine Hong, an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz specialized in Korean matters was interviewed (along with writer Tim Shorrock) on "Democracy Now! saying the real issue was not free speech but the US's strategy of using threats from North Korea as an excuse to maintain local bases aimed primarily at China. She claimed Bruce Bennett, a Rand think tanker, advised that The Interview might "possibly get the wheels of a kind of regime change plot into motion." suggested the line between the movie and government policy was thin this time; that a Rand Corporation person to bring down the North Korean government and think that "taking out" the leader would be an effective way to do it; that a rough cut of movie was vetted and approved by the State Department, who "actually gave the executives a green light with regard to the death scene." This comes from hacked Sony emails that were reported on The Daily Beast 17 Dec.

500 The Interview posters are for sale now on eBay. At one point a lot of 100 of them was on sale for $4,000.

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[ AP Photo/David Goldman, Atlanta 17 Dec.]

Tues., 23 Dec.: Sony reverses itself: showing THE INTERVIEW okayed.

Seth Rogan tweets:
"Seth Rogen
‏@Sethrogen

The people have spoken! Freedom has prevailed! Sony didn't give up! The Interview will be shown at theaters willing to play it on Xmas day!
"
See USA Today article.

It's not clear who'll be showing the movie, so far, other than the clearly feisty Alamo theaters in Austin and Dallas, Texas, Atlanta, and northern Virginia. Fox news says "a few hundred independent theaters" will show it. "We have never given up on releasing 'The Interview' and we're excited our movie will be in a number of theaters on Christmas Day," said Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO of Sony Entertainment. "At the same time, we are continuing our efforts to secure more platforms and more theaters so that this movie reaches the largest possible audience." Reportedly it will begin showing this week at "a few hundred independent theaters."

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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