I saw "The Interview," and it was terrible

I drove all the way to Hartford to see "The Interview" on the day after Christmas (I should make Marcus pay me for the cost of the gas).

Before you wonder all gossipy "who’s Marcus?" I am referring to Marcus Theaters, which didn’t show the film. That’s my usual theater haunt. I guess they didn’t show the film because they were worried that North Korean terrorists would show up at screenings in Waukesha, or something. They decided to deprive me of my right to see an American movie because that movie ticked off an insane dictator. Thanks, Marcus (I wanted to see "American Sniper" this week, too, but it turns out they aren’t playing that either because it’s on limited release right now).

As it turns out, "The Interview" was a terrible movie. Let me repeat: The movie was absolutely terrible. Kim Jong-un would have done better to let it die its own torturous death under the weight of bad reviews and word-of-mouth (Sony should have released this movie all at once as planned because word-of-mouth is still going to be brutal).

The only thing giving this movie any chance of making money at all is Kim Jong-un's hacking antics. And I say this as a person who, although my sense of humor tends toward the Woody Allen variety, does find some slapstick, juvenile bathroom humor comedies funny. "The Hangover" is pretty hysterical when that guy wakes up with the tattoo.

This movie, from beginning to end, was unfunny.

Except in one way. Kim Jong-un, real-life dictator, ended up acting psychologically exactly like Kim Jong-un, movie dictator (other than the fact he hacked a private company’s email system instead of reaching for the nukes). However, the basic psychology is all there: Respond to criticisms of abuse of power by asserting ever more absurd manifestations of power (even calling the president a horrible racial slur, no less). That was the real life Kim, by the way, who did that.

We responded by shutting down the entire Internet system of North Korea. Come to think of it, that’s even funnier than the movie was (you think we didn’t do that? C’mon!!)

But, hey, all principles aren’t wrapped in glory. This is the bottom line: No rogue dictator or shadowy hacker is going to stop me from exercising my American right to go see an awful movie.

You have to stand up for something in this messed up world. It’s easy to stand up for high art (think about the movie, "Monuments Men," for example, and its waxing on about the need to protect culture from tyrants like Hitler who would censor it).

In the book the "Monuments Men" was based on, the author poetically penned: "If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and the trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we… must summon to our defense all our intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims. It is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds …"

It’s another thing altogether to stand up for the right to see James Franco making butt jokes. After all, people died for that right. When this is the visible evidence of the activity of free minds – Franco talking about excrement – you have to wonder about the state of culture.

Still, I don’t regret going. Because this wasn’t really about a bad movie. It was about the fact that foreign threats should not be allowed to impede on free expression in a supposedly free country. Even dumb free expression. Or offensive free expression. We live in a democracy. North Koreans don’t. Here, we get to make terrible movies that insult dictators. North Koreans don’t. Here we get to go to them. North Koreans don’t (well, actually we have to drive a long way to go to them, but …)

Therein lies the difference. (Although, we don’t respond so favorably when moviemakers make flicks with assassination themes involving our own presidents.) Sure, the movie was streamed online. I’m not going to pay $6 to watch a movie on my computer that I wanted to see in the theater. So I drove, mind you, all the way to Hartford. (Have you ever been to Hartford? The best restaurant is an arcade/restaurant/bar called the Mineshaft). The Hartford movie theater is run by a West Bend family, Bill and Nancy Schubert.

This movie was not just terrible. I can say without exaggeration it was the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life. And I am sure you, if you see it, will agree, unless you like endless jokes about excrement and people’s butts (the real story about this movie’s offensiveness revolves around its endlessly homophobic gay jokes, not its, as it turns out, fairly accurate satirical depiction of a crazed dictator).

Although, a universally awful movie, I’m proud to say I was one of the few Wisconsinites to have seen it. In a theater. The overarching message of this movie was, frankly, probably more threatening to Kim than the jokes about his bowel movements. The message was that Kim is a fraud, his dictatorship is bad for his people, and Democracy can win out if the people rise against him and realize what he’s really doing (there’s even a fake grocery store-Potemkin village in the movie). In that way, this movie, to Kim, must have seemed as threatening as a single man stopping a tank in Tiananmen Square. Thus, if I had to, I would have driven to northern Wisconsin to see it.