Jolt Country

I'm still trying to figure out if I got punked or not.

Last month, Sony got completely pwned by hackers from North Korea, upset about the release of The Interview, a movie about the assassination of Kim Jong-un. (In theory.) Due to threats of "9/11-style attacks" on theaters (almost assuredly not real), the film's Christmas Day release was scrapped. But then, the release wasn't scrapped! A few theaters showed it. It also became available via Video On Demand. Then I was told it was my patriotic duty to watch this movie. Then I decided a real patriot would steal it and watch it for free, so that's what I did.

The Interview stars James Franco as Dave Skylark and Seth Rogen as Aaron Rapaport. The two are best friends, with Skylark being a sensational television journalist and Rapaport being the successful producer behind him. Rapaport dreams of reporting "real" news and the opportunity arrives when the two learn Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, is a huge fan of the show. After a clandestine meeting between Rapaport and Kim Jong-un's people, it is agreed that the two of them will travel to North Korea and interview the leader asking only questions he himself approves.

When the CIA catches wind of this plan, they send a couple of agents to to visit Skylark and Rapaport at their apartment, where they politely ask the two if they would be willing to "take out" Kim Jong-un. The CIA's plan is to give the two strips of poison that can be attached to the palm of one's hand, transferring the poison in a handshake. The poison takes 12 hours to take affect, giving the two plenty of time to escape before Kim Jong-un meets his untimely fate.

There are many, many leaps of faith one must take to enjoy this film. For example, while in North Korea our two heroes are able to talk to the CIA and share GPS coordinates using wristwatches. We are to assume that Kim Jong-un's personal fortress does not contain an alarm and that the rooms are not bugged. This is not me picking at the film. This is me watching the film and based on events thinking these would all be plot points that never came up. It is amazingly easy to walk out of a dinner meeting with Kim Jong-un and wander around North Korea at night unescorted, apparently.

While Kim Jong-un is busy courting Skylark in hopes of earning a fluff interview, Rapaport is busy working with Sook, a high ranking female officer who has an agenda of her own.

Terms added to my vocabulary after watching this film: honeydicking, peanut butter and jealous, ky-jealous, and "they just hate us because they ain't us." At least one thing gets shoved up someone's ass, and more fingers get bitten off than you would think.

The last 10 minutes felt like nobody had any idea how to end this movie.

The Interview will be forever linked to the Sony hack of 2014. 2/3 of the trivia facts listed in IMDB about the movie are related to the hack. Without all the PR, The Interview would be just another bromance comedy that nobody would watch a second time.

I have a high degree of cynicism about this. It sounded terrible and your description of it comes off to me as a terrible, terrible film. With those two clowns involved it's clear nobody is going to watch for the performances either.

If Sony didn't want people to watch it so bad, then great! I am reminded of the few times a text game author would couch his or her game with a description of it like, "It's not very good... it's my first attempt..." Well no problem, thanks for the heads-up. If Sony felt so little about this waste of time that they'd pull it rather than stand behind it then I'll happily never, ever watch a single frame of it.

Nobody inline frames of it. Please?

I am looking forward to it. I assumed everyone with a brain and a sense of humor liked Rogen/Franco movies, but then I saw everyone at Caltrops ripping on them, which just makes me think that all the more.

Okay, so:

It's not one of their best efforts. I'd give it 2.5 stars. However, I could watch those two do their thing pretty much forever, so I liked it more than I probably should have.

It's so stupid (not in a bad way) that it's hilarious to think how "controversial" it's been. Yeah, it's "about a plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un", but the plot and all of the characters are so cartoonish as to have zero resemblance to anything in real life.

It's just dumb fun. Unless you hate those guys, in which case it's just dumb.

I still hate the ending. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they filmed half a dozen different ending, all of which will appear on the "super secret special edition North Korea didn't want you to see!"

I think 2.5 is fair. Those guys need to learn the art of the call back. Set up the finger-biting with the fact that Rogan wants to retire when he gets back and play the piano. Set up the thing up the butt scene with the fact that Rogan hasn't had a physical because he's afraid of that. Something. Anything. Wouldn't it have been funnier if Rogan had hid under the tiger and made it move, scaring off the soldiers?

I agree with the fact that it's not worth all the controversy. I think it was based a lot more off of Dennis Rodman's trips to N. Korea than any modern political agenda.

Hating the ending is an indication that you cared about the plot. I did not. For me, these movies are about moment-to-moment hilarity. Still, 2.5, because for significant stretches there were no jokes or jokes that didn't work.

Having made This Is The End is working against them, because that was the funniest movie of the last 15 years, by a wide margin.

I think Craig Robinson is the secret sauce, personally. Christ, even Hot Tub Time Machine was better than this, and it had a greater Craig Robinson count (1).

The ending was 10 minutes of no jokes. They ran away (not funny), thought they were captured (not funny), rode in a boat (not funny), and then got back to America (not funny). At the end we see Skylark talking about his book and not selling the female CIA agent up the river (not funny). It was just like a long stretch of "shouldn't there be some jokes here?" and it seemed even longer because I was waiting for one to happen.

Craig Robinson is the fucking bomb and I actually caught part of Hot Tub Time Machine on cable the other night and stayed on it until his band performed and then kept flipping.

Salmsn Rushdie wrote a nothing piece of shit - yes, I actually read it. or at least part of it until the vomit reflex kicked in - which one of Iran's religious leaders issued a death sentence against Rushdie for writing: The Satanic Verses. A book which, at that time, had only been published in English, a language the religious leader who issued a fatwa against Rushdie could not read.

Some Ayatollah in Iran issued a death sentence for the author of a book whose contents he only knew of through what a third party told him was in the book, and turned what would otherwise have been a nothing book into a worldwide bestseller as a result of the Streisand Effect.

I was surprised how easy it was to find a site making The Interview available for free less than 10 days after its release. And I think North Korea's threats more-or-less did the same thing to The Interview that Iran did to The Satanic Verses: turn a minor entertainment work into a major public event.

I agree with the 2.5 stars rating (out of 5) as it was okay, and in effect, for what is purportedly a screwball comedy it works. (I might have given it a 3 myself, i.e. a "C" grade as opposed to a C-.) I agree with some of the comments that there are things that could have been done to make the movie better (either riding the tiger or hiding under it), and I felt some of the incidents in the film were a little ridiculous. I felt the ending did work although some of it was a bit unbelievable.

I felt the foreshadowing items added to the movie and tossed in a bit of silliness, like the suggestion the guy should wear a bullet-proof vest and does so; the suggestion that the CIA have Seal Team Six rescue them, and exactly that happens; he suggests to the CIA agent they can escape from the dictator's palace using a hidden tunnel and they do so; his mentioning he'd write a book about what he did, the CIA agent telling him he can't, and (because of the publicity about how he shamed Mr. Kim into revealing his true nature on worldwide television) he writes the book anyway.

The part where the tank shoots the helicopter to stop the attack was "stolen" straight out of the movie Sahara (the one about fortune hunters in Africa, not the one about fighters in World War II) where they do the exact same thing to get the military to stop, i.e. cut the head of the snake off and the snake dies.

If it hadn't been for this incident The Interview would simply have been just another silly comedy that some people would have seen and is forgotten in a month. I figure this will mean the movie becomes a silly comedy that a lot more people will watch and is forgotten in six weeks.

As for Sony, some say that North Korea doesn't really have the technical people to do the kind of attack upon their computer systems that happened. I can believe that; in a severe totalitarian dictatorship where the simple act of making an unauthorized international phone call gets you executed, you are unlikely to get people with independent creative thought. But China does have the capacity and has been known for doing some cyberattacks and letting the incident be thought of as coming from somewhere else is entirely within he range of possibility. However, it's been noted that Sony had some of the worst computer security and was basically a Target waiting to be hit (pun intentional).