Showing posts with label Kim Jong-Un. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kim Jong-Un. Show all posts
Friday, 1 January 2016
Tuesday, 12 May 2015
Wednesday, 24 December 2014
Review: Why 'The Interview' Insults America More Than It Insults NorthKorea
It takes a special type of stupid to miss a target as big and ugly as North Korea yet 'The Interview' does just that.
Watching it tonight, I was reminded that Charlie Chaplin made The Great Dictator in 1940. Rogen and Franco made The Interview this year. In the space of those seventy four years, we've gone from one of our great screen comedians dancing with a globe in order to satirise the megalomania of Adolph Hitler to James Franco mimicking the climax of a hardcore porn movie to ridicule Kim Jong-Un. Yet possibly the most twisted part of this very modern satire is that it actually left me feeling sorry for the North Korean dictator and that's not how any of this narrative should have played out.
That's the central problem with the film. The main performance by Franco is so irritating that I found it hard not to find myself siding with the more understated performance by Randall Park. Park's version of Kim Jong-Un is the reason the film works as well as it does. He plays Kim as the sensitive son to the dictator father. His moments on screen are played low key. He speaks softly with a calm good nature. This is a man who is still a boy seeking friendship because he can't live up to the standards expected of him as a living god. When he tries to play basketball, he fails in the way you see the fat kid at school fail. If you were the kind of bully who'd have laughed at that, then you might laugh at this. I just felt sorry for the poor bugger.
The attempt to humanise Kim is clearly by design. We're meant to follow Franco as he goes from would-be assassin to Kim's confused friend before he then becomes the enlightened revolutionary. However, the reason for his eventual move back into the sunlight isn't strong. There's no view of life inside North Korea. To show the gulags and famine would obviously have tainted the broad comedy. So, instead, we have poverty by proxy in the form of concrete fruit. Kim's moments of madness aren't revealed until the end of the film and, by then, there's a sense that he's been provoked by the two Americans.
Park's performance is in stark contrast to the utter boorishness of the American leads. Seth Rogen is just Seth Rogen. He's likable or dislikeable, depending on how you find Seth Rogen. Personally, I find it hard to dislike Rogen. He gets away with so much because of his character which is slightly out-of-place in a Hollywood movie. Yet because he's big and hairy and slightly out-of-place in a Hollywood movie, you warm to him. If I were to watch this film again, it would be because of Rogen who understands the beats of comedy.
It didn't feel like a particularly long film but the second hour is the better half, simply because of Park who always holds the attention. The first hour of the film is the very worst kind of modern stoner humour. Every joke involves either drugs or sex (and usually porn sex). It's the kind of film where you're mean to laugh loudly when James Franco talks about the smell coming from his genitals. It's the kind of film where the maker's don't believe a quip can be funny unless it's accompanied by a graphically mimed sex act.
Ultimately, where the film fails is in the performance by James Franco. It is just horrible and would be worth analysing scene by scene to show young actors how not to play comedy. It's almost satisfying to see Franco, the very worst kind of pseudo intellectual haunting the halls of academia, here revealing himself to be a lousy comic actor. It's all about ego, speaking loud, rolling his eyeballs and slack jawed gawping. I can't think of a performance as bad/irritating as this one by a major Hollywood star, if, indeed, you consider Franco to be a major Hollywood star.
One final word should be said about the violence. This really is a gory movie and the gore seems very out of place in a comedy. The gore didn't offend me. I suppose it might be said to be in the style of Monty Python. Yet it was of a kind I haven't seen in a movie since, perhaps the last Rambo movie. There it fit with Rambo's nihilistic tone. Here it seems wrong. If the film is meant to be a condemnation of North Korea, it actually becomes a horrible indictment of American culture: arrogant, pompous, vulgar, swivel eyed, bombastic, violent, and pretty immoral. In the end, 'The Interview' seems to say more about the problems of America than it addresses any of the real problems of North Korea. Not only is that a terrible shame but it's a film that America would do well to quickly forget. It's a travesty to a sometimes great nation.
[As I type this, The Interview has a 9.8 rating the IMDB. 'The Great Dictator' has an 8.5. It will be interesting to see how long 'The Interview's lead lasts and how far it will fall. If I had to rate it, I'd probably give it a 6 out of 10 mainly for Park and the second hour, but I'd then downrate it to a 5 because I really disliked James Franco's performance.]
Watching it tonight, I was reminded that Charlie Chaplin made The Great Dictator in 1940. Rogen and Franco made The Interview this year. In the space of those seventy four years, we've gone from one of our great screen comedians dancing with a globe in order to satirise the megalomania of Adolph Hitler to James Franco mimicking the climax of a hardcore porn movie to ridicule Kim Jong-Un. Yet possibly the most twisted part of this very modern satire is that it actually left me feeling sorry for the North Korean dictator and that's not how any of this narrative should have played out.
That's the central problem with the film. The main performance by Franco is so irritating that I found it hard not to find myself siding with the more understated performance by Randall Park. Park's version of Kim Jong-Un is the reason the film works as well as it does. He plays Kim as the sensitive son to the dictator father. His moments on screen are played low key. He speaks softly with a calm good nature. This is a man who is still a boy seeking friendship because he can't live up to the standards expected of him as a living god. When he tries to play basketball, he fails in the way you see the fat kid at school fail. If you were the kind of bully who'd have laughed at that, then you might laugh at this. I just felt sorry for the poor bugger.
The attempt to humanise Kim is clearly by design. We're meant to follow Franco as he goes from would-be assassin to Kim's confused friend before he then becomes the enlightened revolutionary. However, the reason for his eventual move back into the sunlight isn't strong. There's no view of life inside North Korea. To show the gulags and famine would obviously have tainted the broad comedy. So, instead, we have poverty by proxy in the form of concrete fruit. Kim's moments of madness aren't revealed until the end of the film and, by then, there's a sense that he's been provoked by the two Americans.
Park's performance is in stark contrast to the utter boorishness of the American leads. Seth Rogen is just Seth Rogen. He's likable or dislikeable, depending on how you find Seth Rogen. Personally, I find it hard to dislike Rogen. He gets away with so much because of his character which is slightly out-of-place in a Hollywood movie. Yet because he's big and hairy and slightly out-of-place in a Hollywood movie, you warm to him. If I were to watch this film again, it would be because of Rogen who understands the beats of comedy.
It didn't feel like a particularly long film but the second hour is the better half, simply because of Park who always holds the attention. The first hour of the film is the very worst kind of modern stoner humour. Every joke involves either drugs or sex (and usually porn sex). It's the kind of film where you're mean to laugh loudly when James Franco talks about the smell coming from his genitals. It's the kind of film where the maker's don't believe a quip can be funny unless it's accompanied by a graphically mimed sex act.
Ultimately, where the film fails is in the performance by James Franco. It is just horrible and would be worth analysing scene by scene to show young actors how not to play comedy. It's almost satisfying to see Franco, the very worst kind of pseudo intellectual haunting the halls of academia, here revealing himself to be a lousy comic actor. It's all about ego, speaking loud, rolling his eyeballs and slack jawed gawping. I can't think of a performance as bad/irritating as this one by a major Hollywood star, if, indeed, you consider Franco to be a major Hollywood star.
One final word should be said about the violence. This really is a gory movie and the gore seems very out of place in a comedy. The gore didn't offend me. I suppose it might be said to be in the style of Monty Python. Yet it was of a kind I haven't seen in a movie since, perhaps the last Rambo movie. There it fit with Rambo's nihilistic tone. Here it seems wrong. If the film is meant to be a condemnation of North Korea, it actually becomes a horrible indictment of American culture: arrogant, pompous, vulgar, swivel eyed, bombastic, violent, and pretty immoral. In the end, 'The Interview' seems to say more about the problems of America than it addresses any of the real problems of North Korea. Not only is that a terrible shame but it's a film that America would do well to quickly forget. It's a travesty to a sometimes great nation.
[As I type this, The Interview has a 9.8 rating the IMDB. 'The Great Dictator' has an 8.5. It will be interesting to see how long 'The Interview's lead lasts and how far it will fall. If I had to rate it, I'd probably give it a 6 out of 10 mainly for Park and the second hour, but I'd then downrate it to a 5 because I really disliked James Franco's performance.]
Friday, 19 December 2014
Wednesday, 3 December 2014
Things That Aren't Funny: Sepp Blatter
There are scoundrels in the world we love to hate. Generally men, they tend to have big personalities which magnify their faults to a degree that they become walking lampoons of something larger. A perfect example of this is found in North Korea where Kim Jong-Un condenses so many bad traits into one ugly ungainly package that he might find a second career in films playing unbelievable totalitarian dictators. He can barely walk, it seems, because his addiction to cheese has weakened his ankles. If we thought his father was a living parody of what dictators look like, Kim Jong-Un is taking things to a level undreamed of by the writers of Team America: World Police.
Sometimes these 'larger than life' characters are generally passive. From Boris Johnson to Silvio Berlusconi, they are people who we (or at least some of us) enjoy as a form of light entertainment because the consequences of their actions are not immediately apparent. Most people would say that Alan Sugar is a bit of a tit, unless they had the misfortune of ever trying to get an Amstrad PC to work in the early 1990s. Even Kim Jong-Un has a comedic value because reporting in North Korea is so strict that we don't have a real or vivid sense of his evil. Would we laugh if we'd seen pictures of children starving in the North Korean gulags?
These comedy figures no longer seem quite as funny once you understand the consequences of their actions. It was less easy to take Gadhaffi as a farting buffoon given Lockerbie and the state-sanctioned murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Sadam Hussain was never quite the comedy villain, though everything about him lent itself to mockery. His evils were simply too well known to be disguised by a funny moustache and silly beret. Even now, perhaps the greatest comedy villain of all time, Adolph Hitler, is still too toxic to be described in that way. Chaplin pulled it off in 'The Great Dictator' but that's a rarity, which only works because of Chaplin's greatness and because it was made in 1940, long before the scale of Hitler's evil had become apparent. It does not work because of the inherent comedy value of Hitler. When an ad for a teapot that looked like Hitler famously made the news a few years ago, it was funny not because of the inherent comedy value of Hitler but because of how inappropriate it was to be making a teapot that looked like Hitler. A fart can be funny but a fart in funeral service is inappropriately funny and there is a clear difference between the two.
Which brings me to one of my favourite pantomime villains of our day: Sepp Blatter. If you wanted to write a villain for the next James Bond movie and took a piece of Hugo Drax, a pinch of Auric Goldfinger, and just a dash of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, then you would probably come out with a villain who looks and sounds very much like Sepp Blatter. If you're not that bothered about International Football, it's very easy to look at him and laugh. He has a silly little voice and an arching cranium containing a void so large you imagine it echoes to nothing but the sound of 'me, me, me'. So much about him is worthy of a good belly laugh. It's the way he brushes those very fine strands of hair back as if to say: 'I'm not bald until these last threads of my youth are gone'. It's his ability to spin anything to his favour. The corrupt bidding for the Qatar World Cup is turned into an example of the corruption of the English FA, who were the only country dumb/naive/honest enough to hand over the documents of their bidding process. It's laughable and so very very funny but only really because I personally don't like International Football. I never liked the International break interrupting the exciting league season and I don't see the point of International Friendlies. If you really cared about football, you should probably not find Blatter so amusing.
Yet even my laughter comes to a stop once you realise that men like these really do make decisions that affect real people. Sepp Blatter has overseen the process that had led to the World Cup going to a country where poor immigrant labourers are risking death in order to earn 45p per hour. I need to remember that Sepp Blatter is one of life's scumbags and I shouldn't laugh at him too much. He doesn't deserve our laughter.
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