Reel Entropy

The Interview is at the center of a developing international story with multiple players and several layers of morality. The hackers and terrorists are 100 percent in the wrong, but they’re the only ones whose ethical standing is clear. The film, about the assassination of a standing world leader, is obviously in poor taste, and Sony and the theater chains who dropped it because of terrorist threats are in the strange ethical territory that kind of threat induces. There’s a good movie to be made about the release of this movie.

There’s a lot of poop jokes and butt stuff. Outside of a marked obsession with Katy Perry and the phrase “honey dick,” the comedy is exactly what people expect from a Seth Rogen movie. Photos courtesy Columbia Pictures.

For those that don’t know, Sony, the parent company of distributor Columbia Pictures, suffered a large-scale hack that released five movies, four of which weren’t in theaters yet, as well as several emails that contained potentially damaging secrets. In the leadup to The Interview’s release, theater chains received threats of a “9/11 style attack” against any house screening the film. Major theater chains backed off and Sony pulled the film, but reversed their decision due to public outcry just two days before the Dec. 25 release. The film was released in 300-someodd theaters belonging to a handful of chains that value freedom, that are willing to take a stand against terror, that are too small to turn down the monumental economic opportunity the film quickly became. Cynically speaking, this whole thing may just be an elaborate marketing tactic.

Boxofficemojo seems to have taken Christmas off because they’re just not as dangerous as me, so the actual numbers will have to wait, but this movie could easily be looking at records in per-theater averages.

The film follows celebrity talkshow host Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer, Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen). A Columbia Journalism School graduate, Rapoport’s classmates laugh at him and call him names because they think he’s sold out. This motivates him to set up an interview with the reclusive Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), supreme leader of North Korea, who is coincidentally a big fan of Skylark’s show. Soon after news breaks of their score, the CIA (Lizzy Caplan) enters to ask the duo to assassinate Kim.

I wouldn’t start a nuclear war over it, but The Interview is a funny movie.

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12:19 a.m. After a particularly long set of previews that seem to be actively trying to delay the inevitable, The Hobbit’s 10 minute parade of logos begins. The Battle of Five Armies picks up right where Desolation of Smaug left off — just before it was going to actually show the desolation of Smaug. The dragon (Benedict Cumberbatch), in his weak-ass wyvern rendering meant to draw in the Game of Thrones crowd, delays for another few moments of CGI aerobatics before finally settling in for his attack run.

Apparently, Rule 34 applies here. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Motion Pictures.

12:23 a.m. Having been given ample warning of the dragon’s coming because he circled the city several times like an idiot, the Master of Laketown (Stephen Fry), also known as the third coming of Jar-Jar Binks, makes off with all the gold. Our hero, Bard (Luke Evans), left imprisoned during the cliffhanger, conjures a gigantic rope out of his prison cell, the kind of thing that makes you stop and wonder why it only takes up one slot in your inventory, and, in the kind of showy display of tying and throwing accuracy and rope materialization that Tolkien never, ever would have written, wrangles the master from behind bars and uses him to break free, a moment of poetic justice not just within the plot, but for viewers, as it seems they are momentarily free of the porky, forced comic relief.

1:40 a.m. After several minutes of strafing, Smaug lands to have a personal interaction with Bard, who has climbed the bell tower to take the dragon down, out of respect for Bard’s irresistible Main Character Powers. Smaug taunts the archer, mocking him for the bow which, as Smaug can see from halfway across the ruined city, is broken. However, his plot-driven telescopic vision fails him when Bard turns the broken pieces, the bell tower itself and his own inexplicably present son into a makeshift weapon of even greater power and accuracy than the original bow. In yet another indulgent, kitschy display of McGiverism that would have Tolkien spinning in his grave, Bard slays the proud dragon with the improvised weapon.

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Christian Bale stars as an extremely stabby version of Moses. Bale called the character schizophrenic and barbaric. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

Exodus: Gods and Kings looked like an awful, boring re-telling of Moses’ story that gives in to the same vices all biblical adaptations are subject to, and for the most part that’s exactly what it is.

One of the oldest stories in human history, the basic plot remains intact. Moses (Christian Bale), an adopted Egyptian prince, learns that he actually hails from the Hebrew people whom the Egyptians enslave. When this comes to light, Moses is banished into the wilderness, where he does quite well for himself, eventually settling down with Zipporah (María Valverde). But, while climbing a forbidden mountain after some sheep, Moses gets knocked out by a falling rock and hallucinates that a burning bush that a small, annoying child claiming to be God (Isaac Andrews) standing next to a burning bush tells him to … well, it’s implied that he tells Moses to return to Egypt and free the Hebrews and everybody knows that’s what he’s there to say, but he’s actually a deliberately obtuse little puke whose instructions are more reminiscent of a stupid person being cryptic to disguise the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

On this hallucination’s non-instruction, Moses abandons his family and rallies the Hebrew slaves into a dramatic looking but apparently ineffective siege of Memphis, because for some reason they can get horses, pitch, bows and arrows, the space to train with them and the room to use them effectively, but they can’t just walk out of the place. The mirage brat God mocks his military efforts, then causes a series of completely explainable natural disasters that Ramesses II (Joel Edgerton) eventually interprets as proof that the Hebrew God is forcing him to let the slaves go.

Exodus: Gods and Kings, along with Noah earlier this year, are the first movies to really treat the Bible like a work of fiction that is changeable and adaptable to a filmmaker’s vision. It’s bold and I like it, but it carries much bigger risks than regular adaptations. Mess with the plot details of Twilight or Eragon, you alienate a fanbase in the midst an audience that largely doesn’t know the story. Mess with the plot details of the Old Testament, that fanbase is more than half of the global population and the audience they’re in the midst of also knows the story quite well. Every detail must be deliberate, either slavishly faithful or intentionally changed.

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That’s Steve Carrell. Seriously. Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

It’s looking like all the major awards this year are going to be between Foxcatcher and Birdman, and Birdman should win every single one, but Foxcatcher is still pretty OK.

The third biopic of director Bennett Miller’s career, after following writer Truman Capote and general manager Billy Beane, follows Olympic gold wrestlers and brothers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo) after billionaire philanthropist John Eleuthère du Pont (Steve Carell) sponsors their training for the upcoming world championships and next Olympics. The characters are set up in a battle of mentors, with du Pont and Dave Schultz battling for Mark Schultz’ soul.

Miller is a masterful filmmaker who has demonstrated time and time again the ability to find the human element behind the real-life events that he recreates in film, though the reproductions do need to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Foxcatcher is much more Capote than Moneyball, driven by acting and constructed mostly of long shots in which not much happens.

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