Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu Dec 25, 2014 11:18 am 
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A vivid, ebullient and crude comedy-satire about media culture and international politics

Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan's The Interview arrives almost as an international incident, something of a free speech issue, and certainly a serious embarrassment to Sony Entertainment for its on-off-on release issues in the wake of a bad hack attack, embarrassing in itself, on its executives and employees. Free speech issues are often seemingly unworthy, famously in the ACLU Skokie Nazi case. The Interview has good production values (it cost more than any previous Seth Rogan comedy) but though it may be political, its style and concept are blithely sophomoric. It utterly lacks in the rapid-fire verbal wit of Armando Iannucci's In the Loop. The Interview has the boldness of the utterly childish. It's marked by a series of crude "butt" jokes. To begin with, who but a child would think of making a joke of blowing up the head of Kim Jong-un, the current Supreme Leader of North Korea? And who would be foolhardy enough to find an actor who looks just like Kim Jong-un, and not changing the name?

But The Interview's grossness also has a certain depth to it. Despite what some say, this has much more to it than a Saturday Night Live skit that only high-level show-biz connections and big-studio means and feature run-time permit. We begin for example with funny, gross "revelations" about two surprise personalities on Dave Skylark's TV show, the popular entertainment "news" interview program featuring James Franco's character, and run by his best buddy Aaron Rapaport (Rogan). While the movie has been criticized (somewhat absurdly) for not showing much of "the North Korean people," its version of the monumental sub-Stalinist architecture, uniforms, and royal amusements of the youthful Supreme Leader are spot-on. Randall Park, the actor who plays (and looks quite a lot like) Kim Jong-un, is also very good. His performance saves a certain side of the story, the "honeypot" side and the "bromance" side.

Researching this movie, one learns new things. I wasn't aware of ricin, a poison so powerful a few grains of it can kill you. Nor was I aware of Dennis Rodman's recent actual semi-bromance with the actual Kim Jong-un and flirtation with North Korea. The latter may be a partial inspiration for this movie, and a sign that fiction is rarely much stranger than truth.

In Dan Sterling's not uingenious screenplay, Dave and Aaron get the interview as the result of a shared identity crisis. Despite having presided over a thousand well-watched iterations of his show, Dave knows it's just fluff. Aaron meets a former colleague who's a senior producer of "60 Minutes," and is looked down on. So when they learn Kim loves American culture and their show, Aaron makes a phone call and they get themselves invited to North Korea. Sklylark doesn't care that it will all be scripted by the North Koreans: if he can't achieve seriousness, he'll settle for publicity. He says ten years from now Ron Howard will make a movie about this. And then, the CIA "honeypots" them, via the sexy Agent Lacey ("Freaks and Geeks" fellow alum Lizzy Caplan), wearing alluring glasses that turn out to have been fake, and they agree to "take out" Kim Jong-un following CIA instructions.

Of course all that happens in North Korea is absurd, and buffoonish. But thanks to Randall Park, the complexity of Kim Jong-un is nicely nuanced. He really is charming and boyish. His "daddy issues" appeal to Skylark's scandal-mongering, while his purveying of frozen margaritas, girls, American pop karaoke (focused on Katy Perry’s “Firework") and a ride in a Stalin-era tank, are nothing but fun for Dave, till the fake vegetables appear and Kim gives a show of his violent, maniacal side. Meanwhile Kim's key female officer, Sook (Diana Bang, a Vancouver contact of Rogan's) "honeypots" Aaron, but turns out to be an ally with revolt against the regime in her heart. In the end, this whole thing turns out to be, just like the other Seth Rogan-James Franco comedies, a celebration of bromance -- male-to-male ultra-bonding.

This is about as far as the good stuff goes, but the violent finale seems less jarring and unexpected than the ending of Pineapple Express. The latter ruined the laid-back preliminaries; here, it's exactly what's expected, and not so prolonged. The Interview has amusing introductory material in which little North Korean children in proper outfits sing a song reviling and threatening harm to the United States. Perhaps this movie is just a throwaway, an artifact of a moment, but it's a vivid and ebullient one, and in its crudeness and bold defiance of diplomacy there is a kind of Rabelaisian vigor that should be encouraged, not condemned. But mind you, I said this is Rabelaisian, not Rabelais. And making fun of North Korea isn't, for Americans, ultimately very risky. It's the easiest and safest of all nations to mock.

The Interview, 112 mins., premiered in Los Angeles 11 December, with internet release 24 December and limited theatrical release the 25th. At the moment, in the US you can watch the entire movie here. Viewers should also look for Mads Brügger's Red Chapel, which I reviewed in New Directors/2009: Mads actually talked his way into North Korea with a film and acting/performing crew and shot a documentary film from inside the country.

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


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