In lieu of the fact that there are no substantial Asian American film actors or politicians or athletes (outside of Tiger Woods), or at least ones whose political opinions might matter to the average filmgoer — or if there are, no one seems to have bothered to ask them — I’ve gone ahead and written my own reasons why The Interview is already a stupid movie. I’ve had these ideas ever since I saw the poster several months ago, but thought to finally write them given the Sony hacks.

1. They use Hangul, the Korean written language, in the poster. But it isn’t there because they think Koreans will actually read it — in the mind of these guys, there aren’t any Koreans in the United States. Either that, or Koreans are genetically humorless and would never understand why it’s funny to have the words “We Will Start a War” painted on bombs. The Hangul characters are merely a stand-in for a generic Asianess, or North Korean-ness, regardless of the fact that South Korea does, indeed, use Hangul. As one commentator (link below) points out, several film projects in the past started with China as the baddies, but switched to North Korea at the last second because, well, there simply isn’t a market there. But splashing Hangul on a poster, with the assumption no one can read it, is like making a movie about Hitler and littering with quotes in French and Spanish simply because of the similarity of their alphabets. Granted, it’s hard to make a movie poster that will be funny in two languages, but this Shepard Fairey pastiche, using Hangul merely as a decorative device that is encoded to read “Bad North Koreans” (just as the hammer and sickle signified bad communists in the past) just states what Koreans (not to mention Asians) already feel about the mainstream media: we have been deleted, we don’t exist. (Koreans are, by the way, fiercely proud of their written language, invented in the 15th century under the guidance of King Sejong. That, and kimchi.)

2. North Korea is a live situation. North Korea isn’t a country blanketed by the mists of time, nor is it an Orientalist fabrication or (as in past, much funnier political comedies, like The Mouse that Roared) an amalgam of several countries, but a complex, frighteningly opaque political entity that — most especially to Koreans — feels something like a wound that won’t heal. Half the population of the Korean peninsula is starving; North Koreans are incurring genetic changes due to the near-constant state of famine, and many of these North Koreans have close relatives in the South. The movie is a cheap shot about killing the leader of a country that most Americans only know about through other media (films, video games, occasionally the news). Most Americans can’t even name the years of the Korean War, nor even know that 36,000 Americans died there (and something like 2.5 million Korean civilians). There still hasn’t been a substantial movie, soul-searching on the level of say Apocalypse Now or Platoon, about the Korean War (unless MASH, which I really liked, counts). (There are a lot of conventional war movies that take place in Korea up to about the early 60s, then MASH, then nothing.) I don’t mind harsh satires about evil people; I just don’t see the joke in one about two bumbling Americans killing him because he can’t speak English without an accent (guaranteed, though I haven’t seen the film, Kim Jong-Un speaks with a terrible accent).

3. It stars James Franco. This might not seem like a big deal, but I can’t help that that smug grin he wears (or which he wore during most of the terrible Academy Awards) when he thinks he is engaging in some great meta-artistic project — some high concept video, for example, where his insider status as a star somehow provides us plebs with insight into Three’s Company or, even more perversely, some pseudo-intellectual take on someone a bit highbrow who he claims has impacted his work, such as the poet Hart Crane — infects this project as well. While I doubt he will be performing fellatio in this film (that, actually, would be genius), I can’t help but sense his utter tone-deafness to the nuances of pop art in the film poster. But there is a more obvious point to be made, which is that he’s a terrible actor — usually pretty good, if overdetermined, in technique, but no good at working with scene partners. He sucks the air out of nearly every scene he’s in with people (for instance, for my money, while he was great eye candy in Milk, he was way out of league on the same screen as Sean Penn, who was simply generous and helped Franco look good). Maybe that’s why people liked him in that movie where he is entirely alone and cuts off his forearm. But he has never really been truly funny as far as I know (he was just very handsome and likable in Freaks N Geeks, kind of a Fonz for the Dawson’s Creek age, but let the others get the laughs). He’s no Robert De Niro. If I thought there were a chance for humor in this movie as there was (though not tons of it) in Team America, I’d be far more lenient.

Well, just thoughts that have been circulating in my head for a while. I’m surprised no one’s mentioned any of this in the press.

Here are some related pages:

“Why Do Filmmakers Keep Trolling North Korea?”

The Poster For Seth Rogen And James Franco’s New Comedy Is Filled With Anti-American Propaganda

Hangul (Wikipedia)

So, in the end, I’m totally in favor of the Sony hacks — it’s like a Christmas gift for me. And the fact that their executives are being revealed as racist and misogynistic — all great. I’m hoping that it’s some spin-off of Anonymous or LulzSec rather than North Korea doing the hacks. I just don’t understand why, in a time of inspired political comedy (like on the Daily Show, etc.) this is taken as interesting. I wasn’t much of a Borat fan, either, maybe I’m too sensitive to ethnic stereotyping of that nature much as I love to speak in funny accents.