In which I pitch Seth Rogen

Think The Great Impersonation meets Gung Ho. 

As I watched the trailers for The Interview, repeatedly—like a lot of us I'm not likely to be watching TV unless it's at 11:00 to midnight Monday through Thursday and they were advertising it constantly, in connection, I fear, with the interviews of the stars by Stewart and Colbert which I assume are the quid for the quo—I was really bothered by a lot of things about the movie, though concern with the possibility that it might hurt the feelings of First Secretary Kim Jong-un of the Workers' Party of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was not among them.

Maybe that it would seriously frighten him. He undoubtedly believes the CIA has a program to assassinate him, whether it does or not, and I doubt he's very good at spotting satire when he sees it; and then as far as I could tell from the trailer you'd have to be extremely skilled at spotting satire; I couldn't see any myself.

The two or so gags were dead, spun out to ridiculous lengths as if they'd miraculously become funny through repetition, and strangled by paralyzed timing (either Franco is really devoid of comic talent or the writing was just so bad that he couldn't read it), culminating with a joke about sodomizing oneself with a rocket, not the most hilarious thing to come out the week of the Senate report on CIA torture.

Scott Foundas at Variety, who has actually seen the movie, put it well before the industry withdrew it:

North Korea can rest easy: America comes off looking at least as bad as the DPRK in “The Interview,” an alleged satire that’s about as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted. For all its pre-release hullabaloo — including two big thumbs down from Sony hackers the Guardians of Peace — this half-baked burlesque about a couple of cable-news bottom-feeders tasked with assassinating Korean dictator Kim Jong-un won’t bring global diplomacy to its knees, but should feel like a kind of terror attack to any audience with a limited tolerance for anal penetration jokes. Extreme devotees of stars James Franco and Seth Rogen (who also co-directed with Evan Goldberg) may give this Christmas offering a pass, but all others be advised: An evening of cinematic waterboarding awaits.

But the worst problem, speaking of the CIA, was trying to figure out what the target of the "satire" was, because I couldn't see any evidence that the filmmakers thought there was anything wrong with the plan of assassinating Kim Jong-un, just with the Agency's ineptness in carrying it out.

Mocking North Korea is always enjoyable, I don't mind doing it myself, but it's kind of shooting kimchee in a barrel, if you know what I mean. I need to see some mockery of the idea that the United States should rule the rest of the world, by violence or any other means. Or that it's appropriate for the CIA to be modeling itself on the old Bulgarian Committee for State Security.

(When I disagree with a certain family of attacks on the drone program in the US military, I should emphasize that I do not agree with the CIA use of drone aircraft, or military activity of any kind, or Congress's refusal—thanks, McCain and Feinstein—to honor Obama's and Brennan's request to put some limits on CIA military, and particularly droning, activity. As far as I'm concerned any time the CIA kills someone it is assassination, not only illegal in terms of Executive Order 12333 in spite of the casuistry of the Clinton administration but really, really counterproductive and immoral in a way killing ordered from inside the Pentagon with a putative respect for the law of war is not.)

I wouldn't have wanted the US government to attempt to censor the thing, and I kind of enjoy seeing the president call Sony out for pulling it (who's transparent now?), but I'm not sorry at all to see it die, or to see Sony humiliated. Especially if it's not really an operation by the North Korean government but (as our family 17-year-old is firmly persuaded) a labor action, the Guardians of Peace being not Kim Jong-un's minions but disgruntled Sony ex-employees.

There's a cool idea for a Seth Rogen vehicle: laid-off shlub IT workers from an abusive media giant get their revenge on the company, terrifying them into submission, through a flimsy anybody-should-have-spotted-this impersonation of the North Korean government, hilarious bad English and all. Come on, Seth, I'd definitely pay to see that one.

Update:

"Sony only delayed this. Sony has been fighting to get this picture distributed. It will be distributed," [Sony lawyer David] Boies said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "How it's going to be distributed, I don't think anybody knows quite yet. But it's going to be distributed." He then called on the federal government to help address the cyberattack"The government has got to lead. The F.B.I. has just been terrific in this," Boies said.