LogFAQs > #971978660

26. Forty
This was a revolution ignited with nothing more than a camera and some questions. Questions that led a man, once revered as a god among mortals, to cry and shit his pants. This is probably the most divisive movie on the list, mainly due to the controversy that surrounded it when it came out. Im not really interested in getting into the geopolitical aspects of it, and I think its an overreaction to put too much stock in what is just a mostly harmless, silly comedy movie. I dont think the material is proportional to the backlash that it received at all. James Franco and Seth Rogen do their thing here, lobbing raunchy banter back and forth and being generally likable dudes. I can fully understand if the humor rubs people the wrong way, especially Francos sometimes irritating and obnoxious character. While I lean more towards finding them funny, the gags wear a little thin after a while. Juvenile stuff like the package in the ass, Kims butthole, and surprise boners are always good for a laugh from me, but it gets a little overdone by these guys. The random gore was kind of weird too and felt unnecessary. Ill have The Interview pretty low, not because of any controversy but simply because I was underwhelmed by it.

27. GavsEvans
With the number of buddy comedies that have been made over the years, new ones need to come up with bigger and bigger hooks to stand out from the crowd, and they dont come much bigger than assassinating the living real-life leader of a hostile foreign country. They didnt even change his name to something like Him Long Um to maintain plausible deniability while still being close enough that we all know who he really is. Naturally, North Korea knew too, and they were very unhappy about it. In fact, they were so unhappy about it that they hacked Sony and made threats against them. Enough cinema chains were spooked into pulling screenings that Sony initially cancelled the film, before backlash from Americans, including then-president Barack Obama, convinced them to un-cancel it.

I went into all that because the controversy surrounding this film is more interesting than the film itself, which is an otherwise unremarkable buddy comedy starring James Franco and Seth Rogen. The duo play late night talk show host Dave Skylark and his assistant Aaron who go to North Korea to interview Kim Jong Un for their show, and are roped into an assassination plot by the CIA in the process. Our heroes eventually succeed in a fashion, after some wacky hijinks and a conflict that temporarily causes them to drift apart.

I thought that the film didnt make the most of its premise, and a lot of the jokes and plot beats were ones that could have been in any comedy film. To contrast, Team America goes further with its satire, no doubt helped by the use of puppets instead of live actors. Even if Kim Jong Un was an alien cockroach, I doubt he survived the explosion. That said, I did like the scene where Kim Jong Un goes berserk after the deaths of his bodyguards and Dave starts to realise that his friendly demeanour was just an act. That was an unexpected but welcome bit of tension.

I wonder what happened to the last ricin strip? We didnt see it again after Aaron was interrupted while trying to take it off, so I was expecting the film to end with North Korea being further destabilised and descending into civil war after Sook was accidentally poisoned. That would have been meaner than the ending we got, but also funnier and more satirical as a commentary on the US interfering in a foreign country and leaving without cleaning up the mess theyd made.

29. Mythiot
I have a theory that Kim Jeong-un didnt threaten the U.S. because the movie insulted him, but because it wasnt nearly as memorable as the movie that insulted his father. Ive got to respect a movie that has the balls to be about plotting and carrying out the assassination of a real living dictator, no fictional stand-ins, the real guy. Unfortunately, the film really drags between Jeong-un trying to make James Franco his Dennis Rodman and when the titular interview is actually carried out. A few funny sequences beforehand and an explosive finale arent really enough to make up for this films weak spots.