Thumbs Up for "The Interview"

By David Henderson

Warning: Multiple spoilers ahead. I won't even try to avoid them.

Over the holiday, I rented the Seth Rogen movie "The Interview" on On Demand. I liked it. I didn't love it and I could have done without most of the bathroom humor, but there were some serious messages in it. I can see, obviously, why the totalitarian leader of North Korean, Kim Jong-Un, would not like it. But I can also see why various U.S. neoconservatives and advocates of an interventionist foreign policy would not like it. For both sets of reasons, I liked it.

Begin with what I liked about how it portrayed North Korea and Kim Jong-Un. Kim Jong-Un is, plain and simple, evil.

In multiple scenes, there is luxury in the midst of poverty. Everyday North Koreans are notoriously poor and underfed. Kim Jong-Un lives a life of luxury. In one scene, one of the two Americans sent over to assassinate Kim (I'll call him that for short rather than repeating his name every time) wanders outside the palace and finds that the apparently abundantly stocked supermarket is completely phony.

Throughout, one gets a sense of how afraid people are to contradict Kim. They could lose their lives. Contrast that with here: Any aide to Obama who contradicts him could well lose job but would not lose his life and would not even lose his livelihood.

Now what I liked about what it portrayed about the U.S. government.

First, the CIA comes off as an incompetent heavy. Its goal is to have two amateurs assassinate Kim. That makes zero sense. Which doesn't mean that it's implausible. Think about the multiple amateurish attempts the CIA made on Fidel Castro's life.

Read the rest here.