The Interview (2014)

The Interview (2014)

By: Ghost Writer

One have to wonder if life in North Korea is really the way it is shown in 2014's film The Interview, personally I must admit I'm guilty of a little obsession at watching and reading pics and articles on the so called “Hermit Kingdom”, I recently watched a documentary on Netflix on NK which shows basically what other documentaries show about dictatorships, just what the filmmakers are allowed to record, just what the dictators ant the world to see, but the thing that really grabbed my attention about it, was the Spanish guy who went there to work for the NK's government, what an abusive and exploitative character, a mercenary should I say.

The Interview was set originally to become a movie about the killing of a dictator from an authoritarian country, it evolved, I guess the same way that the Red Dawn film remake (where the original enemy was the USSR), a book by Chuck Palahniuk (Pigmy) and a Simpsons chapter (last name Xoxha like the former dictator of Albania), the point that with delicate relationships with Russia and China going on, the best candidate for the new romantic "evil empire" was NK, with Kim Jong Ill as head of the state, Jong Il was such a colorful character, he was said, or apparently believed in North Korea, to have powers over the climate, he was a hardcore fan of James Bond movies, was responsible for the kidnapping once of South Korean movie directors and actors to create a cinema industry in NK, he was reported to own a big porn film collection and to have fashioned his glasses after Elvis' own golden ones, in other words, he was the perfect weird and evil character for a Bond movie, but after Jong Il's death, his successor, the young Kim Jong Un is a little offbeat character, more looking like a shy and friendly chubby kid, making the movie and the whole thing about NK as an evil empire a little bit perversely weird.

I must admit that neither Seth Rogen nor James Franco are favorite actors of mine, they are a little too much over the top , lacking the talent to use the toilet humor created by John Waters and popularized by the Farrelly Brothers, but I can't deny really that the idea of The Interview looks better on the screen than on paper, and that's in big part thanks to actor Randall Park who plays Kim Jong Un in a wonderful way, making him human and vulnerable the way I guess things are in reality, without falling into a cartoonish character, Rogen's and Franco's story is nothing relevant but I'm really impressed by the visuals which seem to be created after careful study of the most significant features in NK' landscape, a big production wise triumph.

Of course The Interview may be offensive to the government of NK's, but to me it opens the door to the thought of going beyond the true character of a dictator, certainly Jong Un is no Vladimir Putin or Basher Al Assad,even his own father shows might bee too big for him to fill, he looks more and more like a kid trapped in a difficult role, too big for him to play, who knows? The Interview might be a really bad movie, but Park performance leaves us something good performers should give to its audiences, something to think.