‘THE INTERVIEW’ CREATED BY ROGUE PRODUCERS OF HOLLYWOOD WHO SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN HAILED.

…THEY ARE THE ‘CHARLIE HEBDO’ OR ‘THE NUTS’ OF THE FILM INDUSTRY IN AMERICA.          

By Mansor Puteh

‘The Interview’ was not shown in the cinemas in Malaysia and it will never happen.

In fact it was also not shown in the cinemas in many other countries; and only those in America and the west showed it.

The producers of this film must be put in the same league as the cartoonists at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine of Paris.

They who have proven that film producers and cartoonists too can be rogues in their business and nuts.

And what next, producers? ‘The Interview, Part II’? And later on ‘The Interview III’? 

But that does not mean Malaysians are not able to watch the film. They can. The counterfeit DVDs of this film have been made available to the general public almost anywhere in the country and are sold openly like the many other counterfeit films produced by Hollywood and other countries which have been shown in the cinemas here.

But so far no one in Malaysia has bothered to even talk about this film or be embroiled in the controversy surrounding it.

I managed to watch this film and found it wanting.

It all boils down to how low some producers in Hollywood are allow themselves to go. It is a cheap shot. It shows the bad side of America and of Hollywood.

The producers are ‘rogue producers’ like the rogues that they have in many other industries and groupings.

Yet, Hollywood and the American government did not seem to be able to look at this film and the producers as such.

The reason was probably because this film made fun of someone who the American government does not favor.

I thought the outcry over this film to be fair until I watched the whole film when I thought it was totally useless.

Those who had made this film must be totally nuts they who did not have anything better to do other to make fun of some people who they do not like and who do not care for the sensibilities of the others.

It is not bad if they use a character in their political arena such as George Bush and George W Bush or other personalities in America who could offer some American film producers a lot more ideas on how to come up with much worse films than ‘The Interview’. 

But they did not want to do that.

The producers and those who support the screening of this film must be nuts.  

They are the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ of the film industry in America or Hollywood who did not know how to satirize without being vulgar and also stupid.

Even if one does not favor Kim Jong-Il, one should have at least shown him in a different light.

They are some of the people in the film industry in America in Hollywood who can be considered to be rogue producers, must like the rogue traders and the others of similar strip in the other industries and groupings who had been chastised for being brazen and who had spoilt the good name of the industries they were in.

But Hollywood and the American government did not care because they could benefit from supporting ‘The Interview’ failing which they could be charged for being uncaring to ‘American values’ on the expression of speech and expression, etc…which are totally meaningless if films such as ‘The Interview’ could be allowed to go beyond the limits.

It is good that the Academy had not bothered to also hail this film in their last awards show.

Their members could have if they just wanted to be equally nasty and irresponsible. But they didn’t. The majority of the members of the Academy only chose not to highlight the cinematic achievements of the blacks in the industry to turn the last Academy Awards show a white-affair.

Fortunately, no black artiste had bothered to overreact and boycott the show; they came. But no one said anything negative about it, no black gloves.

And what can the producers of ‘The Interview’ do now that they are clear to go on doing more of what they had done in this film?

Surely, they can now start to think of doing ‘The Interview II’.

I can imagine the plot in this sequel showing the two white guys being arrested or detained as they were about to board the plane at Pyongyang International Airport and held in custody for many years with the American authorities pleading for them to be freed.

Finally the North Koreans agreed to free them, on condition that their producers agrees to produce ‘The Interview III’ which is really a rehash of the original ‘The Interview’, but instead of Kim Jong-Il, they have George W Bush or George Bush, Junior instead.

But the producers say that some other producers had already produced a film on him called ‘W’.

But ‘W’ is not in the same stripe as ‘The Interview’, the North Koreans say.

And what has happened to the hullabaloo surrounding the controversy on the so-called cyber attack by the North Korean agents based in Beijing, China on Sony Corporation which produced the film?

The American government said they would retaliate in the appropriation manner at the time of their choosing.

But so far the manner and time have not availed themselves to them yet with the controversy having died a silent death, with no one knows how much the film had made, and also how much Charlie Hebdo had made on their so-called ‘survivors edition’ of the magazine.

Surely not much; or they would have told everybody about it.

Maybe the French had ‘killed’ Charlie Hebdo and the producers of ‘The Interview’ too had killed off their careers in film.

After all the cartoonists in Charlie Hebdo and the producers of the film can never ever wrongly portray the Prophet and Kim Jong-Il or anyone anymore without them getting the backlash like what they had experienced themselves after getting a bit of cheap thrill to confuse their own people and governments.