Film

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The Interview

By the time this review gets to you, the once blacklisted The Interview has been available on the likes of YouTube, iTunes and Xbox while playing in a limited number of theaters. Did you ever really doubt you would get a chance to see it? Commerce always wins! Co-directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s film, like Team America: World Police 10 years ago, plays like one of those impossibly strange and undeniably funny Warner Brothers propaganda cartoons that were in circulation during World War II, the ones where the likes of Bugs Bunny would square off against Hitler. The major difference is that the newer satirists say “motherfucker” a lot. This is touchy stuff, but Rogen and his costar James Franco are up to the task of pissing all over North Korea, American media and the CIA. They don’t go after these institutions with contemplative, important, intellectual arguments. They attack with dick and shit jokes. As I would expect from a political satire starring Rogen and Franco, The Interview obsesses over things like whether or not Kim Jong-un actually has a butthole. Mind you, the film does address real world hot topics like nukes and people starving here and there but, mainly, it is really concerned about the whole “Kim Jong-un doesn’t have to pee or poo” thing. Franco plays Dave Skylark, the flamboyant host of an American tabloid interview show, notorious for such stories as Eminem admitting he’s gay and Rob Lowe revealing his baldness. When Skylark discovers that Kim Jong-un’s favorite TV shows are Big Bang Theory and his program, he conspires with his producer (Rogen) to procure an interview with the world leader that will establish their legitimacy as real news guys. Their plans to

just interview the guy get mildly complicated when the CIA gets wind and insists on the two killing the notoriously reclusive basketball fan. Like this year’s Godzilla before it, The Interview’s monster doesn’t show up until about an hour into its running time. Kim Jong-un, hilariously played by Randall Park, is a bashful Skylark fan who loves Katy Perry by Bob Grimm and margaritas. In what is surely a riff on the infamous Dennis Rodman-Kim Jong-un bgrimm@ bromance, Skylark and Kim take an instant newsreview.com liking to each other. They play basketball, blow up parts of the countryside with tanks 4 and party all night long. Of course, Kim has that bad side we all know about, so Park’s portrayal goes all Jekyll and Hyde when the Supreme Leader starts threatening to nuke the world if it doesn’t recognize his superior strength. It’s in these moments that Park’s performance becomes a tad more blustery. Rogen is pretty much Rogen here—that is to say, he’s one of filmdom’s most underrated comic actors, with impeccable timing and a steady stream of those corrective, snarky retorts. Franco goes all out childish in this one with an intentionally high-pitched, appropriately sophomoric performance. His running account of a tiger attack on Rogen’s character is one of the film’s great highlights. Lizzy Caplan offers up some good supporting work as a CIA director who “honeypots” the two into the assassination scheme. The final interview between Skylark and Jong-un is a comedic stew of tears, bullets, puppies, finger biting and sharting. Park gives us a Katy Perry-induced nervous breakdown for the ages, and he should get some sort of award for Best Acted Slow Motion Death Scene, because what he does in his final moments is beyond epic. Does the movie live up to all of the hype? I think it does, but I am prone to laughter when it comes to good jokes about buttholes and stink-dicks. It’s a totally silly, juvenile movie delivered by some very goofy, mischievous guys. A big “sorry” to all of you looking for The Interview to be some sort of patriotic manifesto intelligently taking a stand against the likes of North Korea. For that sort of movie you must look elsewhere. This film is about the political ramifications of a world leader sharting on live TV. Ω

"Too bad neither of us ever learned how to tell time!"

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excellent 3 Annie Confession time: I have always hated the musical Annie, and I really hated the original movie directed by John Huston. Growing up in New York, that damned play was shoved down my throat every day when it was playing on Broadway. So I had no hope for the new film version, especially after the first wave of reviews came out. I’m going against the grain a bit on this one. No, it’s not a great film, but it’s surprisingly fun and pleasant one. It still has that awful music in it, and no amount of autotuning and remixing can fix that dreck. What makes the movie fun is a goofy turn from Jamie Foxx as the billionaire who takes in orphan Annie (Quvenzhane Wallis). The two have a good rapport, and their fun work cancels out grating work from Cameron Diaz as Hannigan (played by Carol Burnett in the original film) and Rose Byrne’s terrible singing. I admit to laughing at this movie a lot more than I thought I would, and Wallis qualifies as my all time favorite Annie. It’s a good family film.

1The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies And with this, the Hobbit movies, mercifully, come to an end. No more stretching a one-hour story into three over-long films. No more Orlando Bloom making love to his stupid face with his own voice. The third, much unneeded chapter in Peter Jackson’s ill-begotten treatment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s wonderful novel is less an event than it is a final cash grab. If you should choose to see it, don’t waste your money on high frame rate, IMAX options because the result is a visual disaster. I stand by my guns; HFF technology is fine for the home theater but it sucks balls on the theater big screen. Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is reduced to a supporting role—in a film named after his character!—after the dragon Smaug is slain. Five armies, including dwarves, orcs, elves, men and who gives a shit, start battling over the riches Smaug gathered, with a glowing stone being the final prize. Thorin, a dwarf leader, gets “dragon sickness” and things get dumber from there. It all amounts to a big nothing, with all of the charms of Jackson’s first, masterful Lord of the Rings trilogy lost in a sea of too shiny special effects and terrible, terrible acting. A few years back, I was championing Jackson’s efforts to get this made. When Guillermo del Toro bowed out as director, I saw it as a blessing because Jackson took over. Boy, was I ever wrong.

3The Hunger Games: MockingjayPart One After a rousing second chapter, the Hunger Games franchise gets a little darker and introverted in its third installment. The results are perhaps a slight step back from the truly winning film that was Catching Fire, but you are still dealing with a good movie in this one. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), after being rescued following her complete annihilation of The Hunger Games, is being used as a propaganda tool to get at the evil Capitol government and its wily leader, President Snow (Donald Sutherland). As it turns out, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) survived the second movie, and is being used as a propaganda tool as well (He’s being held captive by the Capitol). A lot of this movie takes place underground and in the dark, with a few good action sequences. It should be said that this only covers half of the third book in the popular series, and everything builds up to quite the cliffhanger ending. Lawrence is good here, although a couple of scenes are a bit jarring, and not in a good way. She does get a chance to sing, and she sings quite well. Philip Seymour Hoffman completed his role before his death, and he’s typically great.

3The Imitation Game Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, who helped win the war against the Nazis when he and others invented a machine capable of breaking the Enigma code. Morten Tyldum’s film, while a tad cumbersome at times, does do a good job of illustrating the impossible odds Turing and his team were up against in trying to decipher the code. Keira Knightley (who had a nice 2014 with this and Begin Again), Matthew Goode and Charles Dance contribute to a strong supporting cast. Cumberbatch portrays Turing as a disagreeable, unlikeable social outcast who just happened to play a huge part in saving the free world thanks to his talent for solving puzzles. The film also delves into some of the more controversial times in Turing’s life, and sometimes the order of things gets a little confusing. Cumberbatch keeps the whole thing afloat with a typically strong performance.

1Into the Woods Here’s an adaptation that renders something that was totally fun into something totally dreary. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1987 Broadway hit was a slightly sick, plucky wink at the audience, an almost mocking look at the dark side of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As captured in the 1991 American Playhouse broadcast starring Bernadette Peters, it was a 150-minute romp with an adult sense of humor. It was hardly the stuff of Disney. Director Rob Marshall has cut his film version to just over two hours, yet it feels twice as long. On stage, the music of Into the Woods was perky, tightly choreographed, consistently funny and almost frantic. In the movie, most of the songs just fart along. The singers search for the emotive, warm, soulful qualities in Sondheim and Lapine’s musical. The problem with that is the original musical didn’t really emphasize those qualities. It was more of an intelligent, operatic goof, not a feel-good musical. Meryl Streep has some good moments as The Witch, but that’s about it when it comes to anything good to say about this endeavor. Johnny Depp shows up for a few minutes as The Wolf in a stupid outfit that makes him look more feline than canine. His “Hello, Little Girl,” a song that is supposed to be rife with innuendo, sounds more like an animal who just wants to eat some food. Marshall and Depp give the number a slow, crooning presentation, taking away its former jaunty, obnoxious edge. It’s just wrong.

4The Theory of Everything The marriage of Stephen and Jane Hawking takes center stage in director James Marsh’s sweet and powerful depiction of love in the face of adversity. The film showcases the talents of Eddie Redmayne (Les Miserables), who gives a remarkable performance as Hawking, renowned physicist and eventual Pink Floyd vocalist. Redmayne depicts a relatively healthy Hawking at first, a slightly awkward but brilliant Cambridge student smitten with classmate Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones of Like Crazy). Redmayne transforms as the film progresses, slowly but surely depicting the physical deterioration of Hawking as he suffers from ALS. Jones is equally powerful as Hawking’s first wife, a woman who refused to let him waste away after his diagnosis. The two marry knowing that the road ahead will be a rough one. Hawking’s initial prognosis had him living no more than two years, a prediction he has outlived by about 50 years. The movie is a love story first, with Hawking’s musings about black holes and the origins of the universe taking a back seat. Redmayne and Jones are utterly convincing as the couple. Marsh treats their courtship in a magical, glimmering sort of way involving awkward school dances, followed by a memorable wedding sequence. The film unabashedly celebrates their romance.

4Wild Reese Witherspoon, in her best role since Walk the Line, plays author Cheryl Strayed, who took it upon herself to do a solo trek on the Pacific Crest Trail after some tragedies in her life. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee (The Dallas Buyer’s Club), the film winds up not only being a fine showcase for Witherspoon, but a damn fine commercial for the PCT and those REI outdoor gear stores. The film opens on the not-so-pleasant sight of Strayed losing a toenail in bloody fashion to a wrong-sized boot, already days into her trek. It then flashes back a bit to the beginning of her hike, and takes a non-chronological approach to its plot. We see moments in Strayed’s life when she makes a lot of mistakes involving infidelity and drugs, interspersed with her experience walking the trail. While being an uplifting film about redemption and Strayed’s personal triumphs, the movie also works as an authentic and informative film about the art of hiking. From Strayed’s struggles with her super huge backpack, to her reliance on trail tanks for water, to her stopovers at community outposts along the trail, you get a sense of what you might experience on such an expedition. Hopefully, this and her small role in this year’s Inherent Vice are indicative of more adventurous choices in Witherspoon’s future.