Dear Kim: Nuke The West Coast, Please

Regarding ‘Interview’ is silly, daring" (Friday Star), a review of the controversial movie about an attempt to assassinate the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, I have one question: Were we watching the same movie? 

 

This movie is portrayed as an edgy comedy, but it is nothing of the kind.  It wallows in racism, graphic violence, dismemberment, sexual slavery and sexual mutilation.  It is offensive not just to North Koreans in particular ways, but to oriental peoples in every way.  Asians might have forgiven the producers for the jokes about the size of their eyes or as slapstick targets worthy of being machine-gunned by the score for laughs, and they might have overlooked the reference to Koreans eating dogs or the funny way orientals talk, but I'm pretty sure that portraying Korean children in drag is not just beyond edgy, but beyond the pale. 

 

And lest you think the movie merely racist and violent, it is also the most homophobic and misogynistic mainstream movie of recent memory, and perhaps ever produced.  There are few homosexual clichés this movie does not embrace, and women are portrayed as objects good for laughs, sexual abuse, and little else.

 

This is a cruel, divisive and dreadful movie, and the fact that anybody finds anything redeeming in it makes me embarrassed not just for American cinema, but America.  Hopefully, Sony's minor embarrassment in recent days at the hands of some suspected North Korean Hackers will be as nothing compared to that of the general public, now that this dreck has been released. 

It's not every day that freedom-loving Americans will find themselves on the same side of an issue with Kim Jong Un, but in the case of The Interview, we should be.

 

Pete Smith

Houston, TX