Those who are familiar with the history of advertising may remember reading about the conspiracy theory behind new Coke which holds that the Coca-Cola company introduced new Coke as a means of generating interest in old Coke. The removal of old Coke from the market, and the fact that people could no longer buy it, prompted people to demand the old Coke back, and in greater volume since, the thinking went, people want what they can’t have.
A similar theory has arisen around Sony Corporation’s removal of the movie The Interview from theatres, supposedly due to threats from the North Korean regime. As real evidence of North Korea’s involvement has never surfaced, it’s been suggested that it was all just a ploy by Sony to get people to want to see The Interview. When Sony did eventually release The Interview —mostly online as video-on-demand — the movie set new records for purchases of a new online release. Mission accomplished!
I don’t think Sony was smart enough to actually come up with this idea, but having seen The Interview, and witnessed what a truly mediocre and insignificant movie this is, it’s easy to see why Sony might want to concoct a marketing gimmick for generating interest in a movie that possibly contains more jokes about defecation and colons (not the punctuation kind) than any other movie I have ever seen.
Nevertheless, just seeing The Interview became for some people a way of sticking it to the North Korean regime, which may or may not have been involved at all. Watching this movie was striking a blow for freedom we were told, although the Drudge Report’s headline “Freedom to make crap!” perhaps best describes the core human rights issue behind The Interview’s release.
The Interview begins with featuring celebrity interviewer Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen) who are masters of the art of getting celebrities to weep onscreen while divulging embarrassing or especially personal information.
After a run in with an old friend who now works for 60 Minutes, Rapaport deeply desires to do “serious” news (it’s cute that the writers of The Interview think 60 Minutes is serious news) and Rapaport seizes on the opportunity to have Skylark do an interview with Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea.
Within hours of the announcement, federal agents are at Rapaport’s house enlisting him to help them kill Kim Jong Un.
Many flatulence-related jokes later, both Skylark and Rapaport and in North Korea where Skylark is taken in by Un’s charisma, and Rapaport falls in love with a North Korean military officer who later turns out to be a secret dissident.
Eventually, the US’s plan fails, but Skylark and Rapaport assist the internal dissidents with embarrassing Un on live TV and eventually killing him.
We’re told this movie so relentlessly exposes the evils of North Korea’s regime that it ended up threatening Sony to keep the movie out of theaters. If that is true, then North Korea went through a lot of effort for nothing, as The Interview does painfully little to truly illustrate any of the horrors behind the North Korean regime. The effect of the regime on ordinary North Koreans is never once shown onscreen, but is only spoken of second or third hand by some of the characters. Kim Jong Un, by far the most interesting character in the movie, does eventually come off as a violent strongman, but how that translates into real-life agony for the people of North Korea is never shown anywhere.
If anything, The Interview trivializes the pain of living in North Korea in order to avoid too many downbeats in a zany comedy.
The film’s most redeeming quality is that it makes the US intelligence apparatus look useless and inept. After decades of stalemate, and untold billions spent, the CIA and FBI still have no access to the Korean regime, and must go to Skylark and Rapaport to do their work for them. The federal agents then invent an assassination scheme so unlikely to work, and so reckless with the lives of Skylark and Rapaport that the desperation of the US government is palpable. In the end, the US regime fails miserably, although it does get lucky.
If one wants to actually learn anything about the North Korean regime, there are many documentaries that can provide much interesting information, with perhaps the best in recent years being Kimjongilia.
On the other hand. if you’d like to see a man shove a small missile into his proctological area, this is the movie for you.
