By David Preston
How bad was The Interview? It was so bad that 10 seconds into the film I was already rooting for the North Koreans. And I never stopped rooting for them until the bitter end. It’s not that I like those commie bastards, mind you. It’s simply that the Americans were such bad actors – such bad human beings really – that I wanted every last one of them to die. And if that meant cheering the commies on, then so be it.
Call me Pyongyang Jane.
I particularly wanted Sith . . . er, I mean SETH . . . Rogan and James Franco to suffer.* Does that make me anti-American? No. It simply makes me anti-Rogan and Franco. And pro-good taste.
Doing parody is tough; I’ll give you that. (It’s tougher yet when the target of the parody is already ridiculous, as is the case with North Korea. It’s like staging a cage match between a clown and a mime. Each one, by itself, can be funny. But when you put them together, the tend to cancel each other out.)
Still, it is not impossible to score genuine points off the likes of Precious Cabbage Patch President. It just takes a little extra thought is all. You have to be subtle. Slapstick and crude jokes are out here. Unfortunately, crude is all Rogan and Franco seem to know. And they don’t even know that very well.
The uninspired pop-culture references . . .
The cheap-o ethnic and sex jokes . . .
The hack characters and forced plot . . .
That shit just doesn’t cut it with anyone over 12. Or anyone who appreciates the subtlety of political satire. Or just anyone who knows anything about North Korea. Still, there were lots of young people yukking it up in the theater I was at. They all knew about Katy Perry’s insipid music, but I wonder if any of them could’ve found North Korea on a map. Or Asia, for that matter.
I dunno. Maybe I’m just getting cynical in my middle age. But even at 16 I don’t think I would have found this dreck funny. Cuz frankly, it’s not. And yes, I did get all the jokes. And yes, I do have a healthy sense of humor. (Good thing, too, because otherwise I would’ve had to shoot up an elementary school in my despair over this film.)
Rumors are being bruited to the effect that Sony might have made up the whole “North Korea Hacked Us” story in an attempt to salvage this abortion of a movie. Until yesterday, I would’ve dismissed such stories as so much paranoid fantasy. But then I recollected that this is North Korea we’re talking about here.
And Hollywood . . .
*I also want George Clooney and Sean Penn – and everyone who was a public apologist for this film, and everyone at Sony who was connected in any way with it’s production – to suffer for their imperialist crimes against humanity, but that’s a story for another post.