DUM AND DUMMER: As a rule, I hate to wake up on the wrong side of history from George Clooney. But this time, I’m taking my chances. In the showdown between Sony Pictures and North Korea’s Supreme Exalted Despot Kim Jong-un over The Interview, I’m siding with the guy who needs a new barber. I know, I know: If even one of Seth Rogen’s dude-bra comedies is suppressed, then who among us is truly free? And of course, there is the ever-so-urgent question of precedence. If we let North Korea get away with this, how many other bad movies will be squelched when Hollywood flinches in the face of a terrorist threat, real or imagined? Based on the self-cannibalizing bilge coming out of Hollywood these days, I’m rooting for the bad guys. If Barack Obama was one-tenth the dictator The Right claims, he would have already imposed a fatwā banning the production of any new movies strip-mining the doo-doo-ca-ca sensibilities of 14-year-old males for yucks and bucks. Look, I wet my pants at the Blazing Saddles fart scene as much as anyone, but is it truly our cinematic fate to endure endless films about middle-aged white guys going to Las Vegas and behaving badly?
Guilty or innocent, clearly North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is in desperate need of an image consultant. Ever since he had one of his uncles whacked after his father’s funeral three years ago, people have gotten the wrong idea. Kim Jong-un’s been pushing the bad-boy button pretty much nonstop ever since, and today, North Korea has about 120,000 political prisoners. The General Assembly of the United Nations voted 110-to-20 to refer his regime to the International Criminal Court, but China and Russia — whom Kim Jong-un has been playing against each other — nixed that idea.
In this context, Jong-un makes the perfect fall guy, whether or not he has any affiliation with Guardians of Peace, the hackmeisters who so thoroughly embarrassed Sony. UCSB cyber-hack guru Giovanni Vigna has his doubts that any nation state brought down Sony. Vigna told The Independent’s Matt Kettmann any three dudes with the skill, the time, and the wanna could have done the job with the sort of equipment one could buy at Costco or RadioShack. Given that Sony inserted malware in 22 million music CDs several years ago to make it harder for “pirates” to copy music, there might be any number of motivated suspects out there.
