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The Interview Bombs In US, Kills In China, Threatens N. Korea
First time accepted submitter twitnutttt (2958183) writes "While it has been broadly panned in the U.S. as not very funny, The Interview is surprisingly getting good reviews in China. And the North Korean government's fears of the threat posed by this movie are apparently merited: "It is powerful because it depicts Kim Jong-un as a vain, buffoonish despot, alternating between threats and weeping that he's been misunderstood. The people around him have all the signs of fear you might expect with a despot — they second-guess his likes and dislikes. Maybe he — and they — were right to fear the film. North Korean defectors sometimes smuggle USB sticks with films and soaps into the closed-off country, and there is a view in the south that these are a particularly powerful means of undermining the regime in Pyongyang. If that's so, The Interview might be a good candidate for inclusion."
If you've seen the movie, and have your own reactions, please label any real spoilers out of courtesy.
It may be an unfunny movie, but reports are that in the limited number of theatres it has been relieased in, the shows are sold out.
That's hardly "bombing".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Are you dumb? This is how free publicity works. Expect many more seth rogen movies to follow.
When you can download or watch it for free. I have never gotten the people around here who say piracy doesn't hurt sales, of course I am going to seek the cheapest method possible to get it. I don't give a shit about DRM/IP/etc.. I am cheap and not some evangelical mission.
This ain't charlie chaplin folks, it's a guy who built a career on man-boy humor and dick jokes. The fact that North Korea is so offended by this only confirms how absurdly immature their fearless leader really can be. A chubby Jewish guy almost toppled the whole charade with toilet humor.
'The Interview,' Greeted By Sold-Out Shows, May Net Millions This Weekend
'The Interview' Opens to Singing, Sold-Out Crowds as Sony CEO Explains His Decision to Show Film
'The Interview' Draws Sell-Out Crowds After Sony Flips On Release Cancellation
New York showings of âThe Interviewâ(TM) sell out
Oh yeah, it's "bombing" in the US alright...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You want a good movie mocking a dictator?
Duck Soup. It's like a thousand times as good as the Interview.
Seth Rogan is a Tyler Perry for stoners.
I really admire the way he does not need to urinate or defecate. I'm gonna eat less like his people. The movie made me less hungry.
You sound like someone straight out of his target audience, the dumbed-down crowd who will laugh at any calumnious and poor attempt at comedy.
It is so bad I am not even going to bother watching it! I mean, Seth Rogan? Joe Flaco? That is bad from the gitgo.
#GOP is an inside job
I saw it due to a holiday event gone wrong when someone wanted to order it. It would have been much better if it had starred Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Don't pay for this, please.
Streaming.
I can't even be bothered to look for a download or torrent.
and acting was pretty bad although it was funny 1/3 of ht show. Basically it was border line Borat style shock comedy. The guy playing Kim Jong did the best acting vs the main stars.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Why do I keep seeing news agencies and the like reporting that The Interview is being "broadly panned" when it's not?
http://www.metacritic.com/movi...
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/...
The consensus seems to be that while it's a mediocre film it's good for a few laughs.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"It is powerful because it depicts Kim Jong-un as a vain, buffoonish despot, alternating between threats and weeping that he's been misunderstood. The people around him have all the signs of fear you might expect with a despot â" they second-guess his likes and dislikes. Maybe he â" and they â" were right to fear the film. North Korean defectors sometimes smuggle USB sticks with films and soaps into the closed-off country, and there is a view in the south that these are a particularly powerful means of undermining the regime in Pyongyang. If that's so, The Interview might be a good candidate for inclusion."
If nothing else, it's rather sad that Seth Rogen and James Franco are able to have a bigger impact on North Korea than sanctions and every diplomat and US president since the end of the Korean War.
This sounds like Nobel Peace Prize buzz to me. ;-)
Three out of four stars by Associated Press:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7935e58fe70b4b749b69b8e1841611ec/review-interview-deserves-be-seen
Alienating other countries is soooo funny guise. Why haven't we tortured them yet? It'll be cray-cray.
I watched this movie with my roommate who never ever swears. We were laughing so hard!!! We watch a crap load of movies and this was more funny then the movie Annie, to which I watched twice.
This entire hack of Sony was done by Sony please. I got stank d**k! Yo!
Taken in the context of what is, namely a screwball slapstick mid budget Hollywood comedy: its about what I'd expect. It has a few gags that made me laugh and a few that made me wince. There was a plot line but it served mainly as a framework to from which to hang various bit gags, again some working and some not. It had nothing particularly exceptional about it in terms of performances or production values but nothing obviously severely deficient either. For anyone who had greater expectations for this film my question would be why?
So many people are panning this movie. Have you guys posting negative comments actually seen it, or are you just reacting to the press?
I mean, I get it -- there's bound to be some sort of automatic counter-culture response to defend against the massive amount of press talking about how controversial and important it is.
Yes, it's a little controversial to target an actual country and an actual leader so directly. But you know what, their message while embellished for comedic effect isn't really far off base. I think the world could use some more of this controversy, and there's nothing saying this type of thing needs to be in dry journalistic form.
As far as the movie itself goes --- it's a Seth Rogan bromance dick joke movie. It really doesn't bring anything new to the table. It's not his best movie, but it's by no means bad. It's fun and entertained me the whole way through.
It's a movie that includes Seth Rogen!
What did you expect? A new Schindler's List?!?
the movie has been sold out in limited theaters
the most pirated movie of christmas (this should be a slashdot money shot)
the movie is funny as hell.
I hope this article is meant to be satire
He's richer than you'll ever be.
but it isn't pretentious and trying to be something else. It's low-brow, but it's pretty good at it.
I don't see why only disliking stupid jokes is a liberal-only thing. It seems more like what is and is not funny is subjective.
While I'm almost embarrassingly rich thanks to a wealthy family, I've never understood the US obsession with wealth as an indicator of anything except... that a person has cash or other material assets. There are many ways to become rich, and almost none of them involve much productivity, let alone effort.
The North Korean regime's survival depends on keeping its people completely uninformed. Here's an article about how even a little bit of information about the outside world can destroy the carefully constructed myths that sustain North Korean society: http://articles.latimes.com/20...
"About two years ago, a North Korean who worked in the state fisheries division was on a boat in the Yellow Sea when his transistor radio picked up a South Korean situation comedy. The radio program featured two young women who were fighting over a parking space in their apartment complex.
A parking space? The North Korean was astonished by the idea that there was a place with so many cars that there would be a shortage of places to park them. Although he was in his late 30s and a director of his division, he had never met anyone who owned their own car.
The North Korean never forgot that radio show and ended up defecting to South Korea last year."
The article is old, but I don't think things have changed much in North Korea.
But not enough to justify a pair of full-price tickets. I will give it this; it was better than any Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey movie I've seen.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
invade North Korea, depose the North Korean government, and depose & disarm the North Korean military, and once they stabilized it, hand it over to South Korea
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
First Seth Rogen movie for you? I thought it was one of his better ones, though I still think it sucked. Still, despite all the schlock, it did make the important point that North Korea is a vile regime that condemns millions to near-starvation conditions while the elite live in astonishing luxury. It paints with a broad brush to be sure, but beneath it all there is a true chord playing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought the head explosion scene was pretty anticlimactic. If you're going to make this kind of movie, why tuck your balls away at the climax?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Embarrassingly rich guy writes comments about seth rogen on the internet. Seems legot. What's the matter bored with hookers and coke?
Or someone who is aware that that audience exists and is fairly large. I'm not part of it but I don't have to be to know it's size is significant.
Just did a line while having my dick sucked browsing slashdot. It's the only way to live.
is revered as a god, I can see an awful lot of North Koreans trying to sneak a look at this movie. it could potentially be a game changer for them to see how the world looks at their perfect leader. Might even topple the government. Probably not, but one can hope.
... either people that don't like slapstick comedy or people that don't like the political message of the movie.
Actually read the bad reviews. They're like reading bad Amazon reviews... "This 20 dollar jack is no where near as good as my 400 dollar jacket... 1 star!" Or "I can't recharge my computer with this USB cable... 1 star!"... They're fucking stupid.
They keep saying stuff like "the humor is crude"... really, you complete waste of human life? That is fucking shocking. It is a stupid screw ball comedy, fuckwit.
Anyway, you just need to filter the idiot reviewers from the ones that understand what genre they're reviewing. And my god there are a lot of fucking idiots working for the mainstream newspapers. I read these reviews and can see very clearly why these newspapers are having circulation issues. They are staffed almost entirely with morons.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...it's about what we've come to expect from Rogen and his pals. In parts hilarious, disgusting, inane, chaotic (well, most of it was that...), thought-provoking, puerile and brilliant. Not unlike reality.
I'd say Last King Of Scotland but that's hardly a comedy...
relevance to Slashdotters: Dana Scully is in a supporting role! :)
The movie "suffers from" low-key and subtle humour, much appreciated in a number of different countries and cultures but not so much in the USA. (Several of these countries also spell "humor" with two U's.)
Is it just me who found the title for this submission a little strange, especially considering the hackers threatened to bomb the theaters which'd show the movie? I initially misread it into thinking they actually did it somehow.
Yes up your butthole, or swallowed.
But data is being sneaker netted everywhere in NK, there are docos to show how they do it.
How do they get it in? Well, even the ones in the military smuggle stuff in, actually, they are the ones most often with the money and friends outside who can do it.
Eventually, it trickles down to the ultra poor, who might want that USB stick more desperately than food, it at least can be copied/traded for food.
There are a few cities that are one side china, one side NK. I am sure they have smuggled 3G devices in so people in NK can download from China. Put USBs on drones or baloons, or floated.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Do you reviewers understand!?
If buying a $40 3DBluray sure, but $5 movie, no.
Teens use their friends as guides, "Hey I saw this, you gota see it", or "X was so so sad, dont waste your money"
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Bombs, US, China, North Korea, Threat, USB stick...TFS has induced a state of panic within the DHS's freedom monitoring network, prepare to engage the internet kill switch!!!
If the entire movie had been played straight the way Marshall Mather's played his scene it could have been a classic satire not just of north Korea but also of the CIA, news media and pop culture.
As it was the movie is forgetable except it touches on some of the basic realities of the north Korean dictatorship and the psychological trap in which both dictator and supporters find themselves.
The Great Dictator
Der Fuehrer's Face
etc...
"It depicts Kim Jong-un as a vain, buffoonish despot, alternating between threats and weeping that he's been misunderstood..."
Yeah, I highly doubt he gives a shit about being misunderstood. The rest of it is spot on.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
When I was a kid, we read reviews, we had a free paper and we used it. Now you have so many options for free reviews that the hardest part is deciding which one you like the best, and kids don't read reviews any more?
Either you're off your nut, or kids are actually getting dumber.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I saw it earlier today via YouTube. It certainly wasn't great, and it can't be compared with classics like "The Great Dictator" or "Duck Soup", but I was surprised how much I liked it. It was much more entertaining than either the trailer or the reviews suggested. The story was reasonably engaging, there were some good gags, the actors weren't bad, and it even had a few points to make. I always count my yawns during a movie, and FWIW, it ended up getting my highest rating of zero yawns - go figure.
My major complaint with it was its near-continuous use of the "F" word. (Sorry to spoil that for those of you who were wondering.) If Seth Rogen and his buddies talk like in real life, maybe they were just being realistic relative to their particular juvenile reality. But the movie would have been better without that.
In the old days, a movie would use just one or two F-words to guarantee an "R" rating, and with the mission accomplished, they'd move on. I seem to remember that one film even cut in an "R" rating notice in the middle of the film just after the first F-word. (Help me out Kids: which movie was that?) And of course, there's the famous South Park episode where the F-word was basically the whole point of the episode. But I don't see any point to it here. Less is more on that, Folks: after one or two F-bombs, it doesn't have any effect and just becomes annoying. (BTW: same goes here. :-) It's like those folks who constantly say "like" or "knowwhatamsayin?" Like, knowwhatamsayin?
40+ critics might think this movie is shit and it is a shit movie but god damn was it a funny movie. If you're looking for cinematic enlightenment then you're stupider than the movie you've criticized.
So true.
I've never understood this one, a blockbuster is a great movie while a bomb is a bad one. But a blockbuster is a bomb. WTF?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
You keep speaking of "liberals" as if they're a hivemind, much as some speak of "conservatives" as if they're a hivemind. You're just making hasty generalizations.
Looks like you've been duped into believing the left vs right/liberal vs conservative false dichotomy scam.
When retards make a comment like that on a public site, hosted in the US, viewed primarily by US citizens. You would think they could see the inherently contradictory nature of such a thing but no, they are convinced somehow that the US government clamps down on information like a repressive regime, yet somehow managed to miss this, and the millions of other, sites hosted in its borders.
Have you ever actually watched the Daily Show? They go after the president when the president does something ridiculous. Fox News is a pretty easy target because they're extremely hypocritical and they give air time to idiots like Palin. CNN is also a frequent target. Don't worry about Hillary. I'm sure Boehner will find something in the 8th congressional witch hunt that he didn't turn up in the first seven.
"Liberals" could mean just about anyone, but the very vocal SJW crowd are famous for being humorless, prudish buzzkills. What used to be the case for the right wing religious whackos is now true of the left wing SJWs: they lay awake at night worrying that someone, somewhere might be having a good time. No more representative of the mainstream left than the televangelists were of the mainstream right, but boy are they vocal. Heck, some of them are probably the same people, just with a new excuse for moral scolding and finger wagging.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
OMG can you imagine?... "bombs in the US" NSA smokes computers on misguided info...haaaah! Nice to think for yourself now a days. Who can you believe? Not the media-owned networks. (have you seen the forgotten?) Damn NBC / Universal Studios pluggin' crap
It's a Seth Rogen movie and on a scale of his movies it is in the upper half. All the people on imdb rating it with a 1 are unbelievable. If you don't like his movies don't watch them. If you rated it a 1 what did you rate "Synecdoche, New York"?
.. Are honey ducking you.
This movie was laugh out loud funny. Maybe it was because it was my first time with Franco in a comedy, or the ridiculousness of it.
Either way. I enjoyed it.
Plus it's got the mirror scene. I'll bet The Interview doesn't have that.
The only people who hate this movie are those who want to look like sophisticated critics and the overly sensitive. Every bad review I've read are borderline illiterate and moronic, and they are on legitimate websites. I'm sorry but this movie isn't serious, because it's a comedy. Yes there are sexist, anti-semetic, and homophobic jokes. The writers realize these aren't allowed in a normal public situation, that's the joke. We never hear about North Korea because we don't really have a solution to a nuclear capable totalitarian dictatorship. It's good to put the spotlight on them.
Really? I thought it was really funny. Most of my friends rented it on release day, and most of them thought it was at least kinda funny. No one thought it was bad.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
It's very Seth Rogen driven comedy, funny at moments but most part of it smells a little like US propaganda. It depicts a smart, maniac and manipulative Kim Jung Un. Funny enough, we know CIA it's capable of trying to murder a foreign leader.
Basically weaponized meme's designed to alter public perception.
AKA propaganda
The whole drama of the Sony hack and geting the press and the State department to even talk about the B movie.
It has Seth Rogan in it and it has the setting of an intellectual comedy film sort of like Frasier and people are surprise it "isn't very funny?" THEY'RE SURPRISED?! How is that surprising to anyone?
Then I guess you never saw Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind? Too bad, it's awsome. I'm no Jim Carrey fan, but he is far above Seth.
Given that atheism doesn't give any exclusive right of life and death to man, under what reasoning do you want atheism banned.
And what book would be banned? All non-religious texts?
If you're not allowed to pan it until you've seen it (remember Gigli?), then it will never pan because everyone hating it will have had to see it, and anyone not seeing it isn't allowed to hate it.
Or you "pirate" it and then you're a criminal and unworthy because you're an anarchist anti-corporatist, therefore hate it because it's Sony.
For a Seth Rogen movie, it wasn't bad. Certainly no worse than most of the other movies he's done. I thought it was funny personally.
You want a good movie mocking a dictator?
Duck Soup. It's like a thousand times as good as the Interview.
I thought "Team America" was pretty amusing.
I highly doubt that the movie is being heralded as unfunny or even a failed movie in the US. The movie was also released online which means that people did not need to go to the limited number of theaters it was released in to go see it. Just about everyone I know, myself included, have watched the movie and found it to be hilarious. We all watched it online.
TFA itself admits that
In their comments, some people acknowledged having not seen the film, but wanted to show their support
According to Reuters:
Most viewers [in China and South Korea] said they watched the low-brow spoof because of the devastating cyberattack on the Hollywood studio that produced it, Sony Pictures, but they were not impressed.
Even in South Korea, technically at war with the North, viewers panned the movie.
"A lot of it is unrealistic and the people who play North Koreans are so bad at speaking Korean," said a viewer on Naver, an online portal. "In the scene where Kim Jong Un gets mad...I couldn't quite understand what he was saying."
[]
"It doesn't matter whether the film is any good, it's become something everyone has to see," said one user on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo.
[]
Sony's international executives have previously said the movie was "desperately unfunny" and would have flopped overseas, according to e-mails leaked by the hackers.
China is North Korea's only major ally, but Kim Jong Un is not a popular figure in the country, being widely lampooned on social media as "Fatty Kim."
Many viewers said the film was not very good
So Chinese viewers don't like Kim but neither do they like another formulaic and "desperately unfunny" bromedy that is so culturally blind that it misses all the great comedy material there is in North Korean reality, because the filmmakers know nothing but clichés about North Korea. The jokes are all on a ching-chong-chinaman level. I can see how East Asians wouldn't appreciate that.
The Interview Bombs In US, Kills In China, Threatens N. Korea
Yeah, but what do the French think of it?
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
The North Korean people have a choice between an incompetent dictator or the USA that killed 25% of the North Korean population for no apparent reason.
*eyeroll* please...
Liberal SJW and conservative SJW differ only in who listens. Liberal SJW is dominated by feminist,POC and GLBT types. Conservatives are the greater joykill because they are dominated by regressive thinking like somehow we would be better off in a Ayn Rand fantasyland of no moochers because somehow the world has unlimited resources and no consequences for extraction of everything. I'll take the progressive liberal SJW over the conservative one any day.
I've never seen a Seth Rogan movie before. I probably won't ever see one again. It was better than I expected, but that's not saying much. It had its funny points, but it was still a crap movie. The good thing is, I only paid 6 bucks, I watched it in the comfort of my own home, and my food was a whole lot cheaper and better than the theater crap.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
According to Hollywood accounting, every film ever produced loses money...
I saw it!
Movie was juvenile, but I actually found it pretty hilarious. Not high-brow funny, and a little stunted sometimes, but I laughed. I'm not sure I need to see the movie again (ok ok, it was pretty low-brow yuks, for sure) but it was a good enough time (I didn't pay to see it, so....)
SPOILERTH:
it could have had a much better ending, with Kim Jong-un faking his death and moving to a different country, or abdicating and becoming a disco dancing star, or something happier than getting blown up, but that's just my 2 cents.
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