Movie Review: The Interview 2014

I recently watched the controversial late 2014 movie released by Sony pictures titled The Interview. It's a hilarious movie featuring 2 top comedian actors that had an opportunity to interview the leader of North Korea - Kim Jong Un.

I got interested in the movie given that it was a high budget movie by Sony and was a source of disagreement between the government of North Korea and the USA. It was also reported to have attracted hacking attacks on Sony itself, something the US govt blames on the North Korean govtand has delayed the showing of the movie in cinemas across the USA. News reports have it that Sony Corp had been warned from showing the movie else they would suffer consequences but after a bit of delay, they went ahead to relase it mostly on online streaming media platforms as well as at select movie cinemas in the USA who had agreed to show it afer having being turned down by other cinemas for fear of attacks.

Well, the interview is not yet officially released globally but only mostly to viewers within the USA and it's available at websites like YouTube movies, Google Play but not on Amazon digital movies. As at the time of writing this, no cinema in Nigeria is showing it yet but I've been able to watch it thanks to the power of the internet.

New US movie releases like the Interview take some time before they reach countries in Africa like Nigeria through DVDs or cinema releases but it doesn't mean that Nigerian residents can't access it using other options such as making use of a US IP address plus US paypal account or by making use of uTorrent - A peer to peer sharing program.

Visitors from Nigeria who try to watch the interview may not have access to US websites already airing it since non-US ip addresses are normally blocked from showing it but some Nigerians make use of dedicated US ip accounts and a fast internet service to solve that problem. Others would rather just simply download it from file sharing platforms but that method is regarded as piracy and can also attract computer viruses.

Anyway, I recently watched the movie and I have to say it's an exciting one that features 2 comedians and friends who run a TV show with one being the producer Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen) and the other as the interviewer Dave Skylark (James Franco) and the name of their show was called Skylark Tonight - a celebrity tv show that mostly focuses on issues that are not really serious news such as celebrities, people, scandals, gossip and so on. They were a bit different from other news companies such that while others were reporting about the threat posed by North Korea's rising nuclear arms, they were busy reporting issues that are more social in nature. On his first interview with Eminem, the celebrity mistakenly spilled the beans that he was gay and that even became a bigger hit for their company even though Eminem's publicist unsuccessfully tried to stop the show after that. Was Eminem really gay? Well, it's just a movie and so his declaration doesn't really count that much in the real world.

Aaron was celebrating his successful 1000th show after the Eminem hit together with friends and his crew at a party organized for him but as he later went outside probably to take some air, he ran into an old colleague of his from college whom he hadn't seen since graduation and they both greeted each other. They both congratulated each other on their success as media producers but his friend didn't seem to care as much and after Aaron inquired, he responded that his job was more about serious news reporting and not just junk or entertaining news as Aaron was currently involved in. Aaron became a bit depressed and felt he wasn't fulfilling his dream of being a successful producer and found some sense in what his college mate had said and he also related his feelings to Dave who told him to cheer up since they actually had over 1 million fans.

Well, after the consolation by Dave, Aaron still nursed an ambition to be seen as a successful TV producer that his friends and college mates would look up to him and after he read a report shown to him by Dave that the North Korean leader listed them as one of their fans, they sort to do an interview with him by all means and they hoped that this would give them the big break they've been looking for.

This is what the Interview Movie is really all about - Interviewing the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a time that other TV producers were not able to have access to him.