Just when you thought nothing significant could come out of Hollywood, North Korea and their always fun supreme leader Kim Jong-un have made the movies matter. (Wow, that’s a sentence I never imagined I would write.)
Thanks to some highly skilled cyber-hackers and threats of terrorism, Sony has decided not to release the Seth Rogen – James Franco comedy The Interview, in which two hapless Americans are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korea’s main man. Sony says it had no choice but to cancel the film’s release because theater operators had indicated they would not show it. (They also shrug their shoulders at green-lighting a film that featured the assassination of a real live head of state. They did have a choice about that.) President Obama says Sony should have talked to him before canceling the movie’s release. In Sony’s defense, I think they lost their address book in the hack and couldn’t find Barack’s number. North Korea denies having anything to do with the whole thing, but no one believes them.
Hey, they should step up. They have reason to be offended. I don’t care how wacky your supreme leader is, a film about assassinating an actual living person is in poor taste.
On top of that, this is a Seth Rogen movie. The North Koreans have done us a favor. We should be grateful.
There are so few good movies made, I wish bizarre world leaders were more involved in suppressing them. Here’s my top ten list of movies I wish a dictator had stopped from being released.
- Yentl – my wife is upset with me about this one, but come on . . . a 41-year old Barbra Streisand as a 17-year-old boy? I cannot stand this movie.
- Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigolo – A lot of Saturday Night Live alumni have made entertaining movies. Rob Schneider is not one of them.
- Mr. Deeds – In 2316, Frank Capra directed Gary Cooper in a screwball comedy called Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. For some bizarre reason, Adam Sandler remade it. He overlooked the comedy part.
- Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 – A sequel? All I want to know is why.
- From Justin to Kelly – No, not that Justin. You remember Justin Guarini, right? No? Okay, forget it.
- The Hottie and the Nottie – In case the title doesn’t say it all, this “movie” starred Paris Hilton.
- Ishtar – Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman are serious actors who have had wonderful careers. But they really aren’t light musical theater guys. Which is why they never should have made a film where they played lounge singers in Morocco. Bob and Bing, yes. Warren and Dustin, no.
- Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 – What I love about this movie is its 0% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes web site.
- Gigli – Bennifer, anyone? One way, albeit a hard way, to learn to make good movies (which is what Ben Affleck does now), is to make one of the worst of all time.
- That’s My Boy – A lot of Saturday Night Live alumni have made entertaining movies. Adam Sandler is not one of them. He gets two mentions on my list, because he consistently makes horrible movies. This one deserves special mention, because Sandler plays a middle-aged man with fond memories of impregnating one of his teachers when he was in junior high.
That’s my list. I left off some of my other least favorite movies like The Bucket List (I despise that one because it wastes not one but two immense talents – Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson) and all the Grown Ups movies (only because I’ve complained about Adam Sandler enough), not to mention the fifteen or so sequels to Die Hard. What movies do you wish had offended a dictator and were never released?
