DMZ meets TMZ

If The Interview is satire, it’s “satire” of an eminently complacent sort. Inside its comic/satiric bubble, there’s almost no real-world sense: everything is fictional, including starvation, the CIA, nuclear threats, North Korea itself. Seth Rogen and James Franco look like a couple of schoolboy clowns, funny only in terms of their own very lucrative niche, but really doing little more than fart jokes on a big-bucks scale. The Kim Jong-un angle is essential to this picture’s prankish mentality, but it has ended up distracting attention from the film’s efforts at both mocking and mimicking American’s trash-addled mass media.

Maybe its main accomplishment is also its most dubious: even before audiences got the chance to see it, the clamor surrounding the film’s release managed to make nearly everyone who was even remotely involved look bad or ridiculous or self-deceiving, even if only for a moment.