The Interview

I don't really follow the news, but from what I gather, the vanity Road comedy from Seth Rogen and James Franco known as The Interview caused a little international kerfluffle recently, and after seeing it, I'm not entirely surprised. The wafer-thin plot consists of the affable, goofy duo traveling to North Korea to interview a margarita-sipping, Katy Perry-listening Kim Jong-Un, and its scatological humor falls flat. Failing as a comedy, The Interview only just succeeds as a US Government propaganda weapon. Check out this spoileriffic shot I snapped, where two of Rogen's fingers are bitten off during a pivotal moment near the end of the film.

Having wrapped his bleeding hand with the North Korean flag, Rogen leaves his middle finger extended in a salute. Onscreen for a fraction of a second, it's a surely ad-libbed but probably suggested by CIA moment in a film that has the half-baked aroma of being ghostwritten by a secretive Washington agency.  I can only guess that the team of Rogen and Franco were seemingly allowed by a round-table of shadow operatives working within the framework of a stale 1960s TV skit to dead-horse their chummy, literally crotch-focused humor over an excessively redacted Cold War-era anti-Communist memo from a conspiratorial closet of the US government, somehow hammering it into the vague shape of an actual film, and if someone were to trim an hour and 20 minutes and replace James Franco with Barbara Eden and North Korea with Cocoa Beach, the end result wouldn't seem out of place slipped into a season of I Dream Of Jeannie. The Interview is as cuddly as a puppy, and a few of their drawn-out, awkwardly-smoochy shenanigans warrant a weak smile, but it's best enjoyed as a nefarious, breadcrumb-laden honeypot of espionage created to embarrass and undermine a dictator.