The Interview

Last night, me, the wife, and a couple of our friends did our patriotic duty:  We watched Seth Rogan and James Franco in The Interview.

It was actually better than I thought’d be.  I knew it’d be crude, crass, and over-the-top, but, man, was it crude, crass and over-the-top.  For once Seth played the more restrained and respectable characters.  James Franco was so completely insane and out of left field that I have a new-found respect for him as a capital-A second-syllable-stressed Ac-tor.  And the man who played Kim Jong Un was surprisingly sympathetic, bringing both a childlike innocence and a maniacal malignancy to an unsuspectingly complex character.  You find it baffling to feel so much sympathy for a monster, and by the end of the flick, I did.

I never laughed so hard so many times in a movie in a long time, probably not since the original Hangover movie or I Love You Man or some such chucklefest.  The rapid-fire repartee with all the comfortable weirdness between Rogen and Franco made me comment that these two must have spent an incredible amount of time together in altered states of consciousness.  In fact, and I’ll probably regret this, it reminded me of those good ol’ days back in the late-80s and early-90s, where me and my small circle of friends abused our bodies to unbelievable levels and had our own hilarious – at least to ourselves – catalog of in-jokes and put-downs.  Not least of all, the slapstick elements alone made the flick worth seeing.  The Interview is an instance where the movie is much, much, much funnier than the trailer.  Because they can’t legally show the funniest stuff on national teevee.

Now Go See It!

It’s your patriotic duty as a citizen of the Free World!