Skip to main content

Being Kim Jung Un

By



In the end, it looked like one big publicity stunt for what appears to be a very mediocre movie.  You almost wonder if Sony and Kim Jong Un were in on this together.  After all, the e-mail links were nothing more than a minor source of embarrassment, quickly forgotten in the big screen debut of The Interview.  Now that the cat is out of the bag, it is hard to see this movie rolling up big numbers at the box office, but who knows, there are those who enjoy Seth Rogen's peurile humor.

I don't know if young Kim is as big a movie fan as his father was, but I don't remember Kim Jong Il being particularly put out by Team America, which cast him as a puppet arch-villain bent on reducing the entire world to third world countries, which he would easily dominate.  The movie mocked Bush's war on terror more than it did Kim Sr, who had lured the Film Actors Guild (FAG) to Pyongyang to set up the necessary diversion for his nefarious scheme.  It was Team America to the rescue with more than a few distractions along the way, including this rather touching one.  Rogen and Franco don't hold a candle to Parker and Stone.

The Interview seems to owe more to the equally peurile The Dictator from two years back, which was nothing more than a short comic sketch you might have enjoyed on the old Ali G Show, but stretched out to 90 minutes was very short on laughs.  Since Sacha Baron Cohen didn't specify any particular leader, he didn't bring down the wrath of the Muslim world on him.

Young Kim claims he wasn't behind the cyber hit against Sony, and even went so far as to suggest the United States join him in finding the true culprit behind the act, but President Obama was having none of it.  North Korea briefly lost its Internet connection, as if it were a scolded child.  I'm sure North Korea has its outside agents who operate within the deep space of Internet to launch their cyber attacks.

All this would make a much more interesting and darkly comic movie.  Maybe something like Being Kim Jong Un, where people pay to get inside his head to see what it's like to be the Supreme Leader of  the repressed world of North Korea.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more