Sunday, February 8, 2015

Film Review: The Interview (2015)


When Seth Rogen’s new geopolitical comedy The Interview was nearing its theatrical release in America, the distributors Sony made international news by seemingly bowing to supposed threats made from North Korea and pulled the movie.  This drastic reaction was widely derided and quickly reversed with a limited run in cinemas on Christmas Day followed by a bigger release and VoD campaign, which in turn garnered enormous global attention from the news media.  Cynics amongst us might conclude that this was just an enormous PR stunt in one of the most postmodern film release strategies ever conceived, or you might agree that the provocative narrative really was worthy of international tensions and threats of violence…

Dave Skylark (James Franco) is a narcissistic, vain and imbecilic TV talk show host who has a talent for interviewing a-list celebrities and making them reveal their secrets and hidden talents.  His hit show is kept together by his producer and best friend Aaron Rapaport (Rogen), who dreams of doing something less trivial and more important with the show and the wide audience that it is has developed.  After an interview with Rob Lowe (about baldness) gets cut short due to a interrupting news update about tensions with North Korea, Skylark discovers that Kim Jong-Un is a fan of his and so tries to appease Rapaport by securing an interview with the dictator.  Much to their amazement, the supreme leader agrees so they celebrate by getting wrecked on super-strength ecstasy.

The next morning they get a visit from the CIA who have a proposition for them to ‘take out’ Kin Jong-Un using a special poison, but when they arrive in Pyongyang Skylark begins to recognize himself in the lonely dictator and starts to doubt the mission… 

If a comedy film is going to threaten the very existence of the Western World, then at the very least then it should be acutely funny or satirical – yet The Interview seems to take a much more subversive stance by mostly hiding the more intelligent political humour in amongst minutes and minutes of scatological and masturbatory jokes.  It makes the controversy surrounding the film all the more ridiculous once the silliness of the dialogue/plot reveals itself.  Saying that though, there are some undeniably laugh-out-loud moments, almost all from James Franco – one of Hollywood’s most chameleonic younger A-lister.

The film will obviously be compared to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police – a far funnier and braver satire on American hard power and North Korea – yet, although The Interview does briefly reference some poignant facts about American incarceration levels and tabloid ‘journalism’, the film is closer in aesthetic and tone with Rogen’s other comedies such as This Is The End and Superbad.  It also fits into the recent run of Bromance comedies that thrive on depicting libidinous and drug-fuelled masculine men that privately profess their platonic love for each other…

Regardless of content, the film definitely benefits from the happenstance of capturing the ‘free speech’ zeitgeist.  At one point the surprisingly affable and sensitive Supreme Leader states to Skylark, “You know what’s more destructive than a nuclear bomb…?  Words”, which although delivered as a punchline, is actually a (somewhat) profound suggestion of how best to deal with geopolitical tensions: ridicule really is one of the best ways to combat absurdly straight-faced tyrants and despots.  It seems fitting that shortly after the furore surrounding the potential censorship of the film, a much more important debate around free speech and satire arose in France after the shootings of cartoonists in the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, who replied by making even more jokes that defrocked the obscene ideology of their enemies.


It would obviously be crass to in any way align the minor exhibition inconvenience/luck that The Interview was subjected to and the tragedy that occurred in Paris, yet in a strange way the two incidents are somewhat linked.  The only people who are going to get ideologically upset by the film are the people who haven’t seen it.  You might not appreciate the relentless dick jokes, but after viewing the film it would be utterly ridiculous to be actually upset by the politics…

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