Over what? A Seth Rogen Comedy. Oh those whacky North Koreans!
While it’s hard to imagine Seth Rogen and James Franco being the proximate cause of World War III, the stars of Pineapple Express have prompted the latest round of blustery threats from North Korea.
Pyongyang has promised “merciless” retaliation if their latest comedy, The Interview is released as scheduled in October.
To be sure, the plot hits a little close to home – especially for a secretive and paranoid regime: a talk show host and his producer (Franco and Rogen, respectively) score an interview with Kim Jong Un (played by Randall Park) and are subsequently recruited by the CIA to assassinate the North Korean leader.
The country’s official KCNA news service called the actors “gangster filmmakers” and said that if the U.S. government allowed the release of the movie, Pyongyang would consider it an “act of war.”
A Foreign Ministry official quoted by KCNA berated the movie as “reckless U.S. provocative insanity,” that had spawned “a gust of hatred and rage” among the people of North Korea.
“The act of making and screening such a movie that portrays an attack on our top leadership … is a most wanton act of terror and act of war, and is absolutely intolerable,” the official said.
“If the U.S. administration allows and defends the showing of the film, a merciless counter-measure will be taken,” the spokesman said.
The controversy has been brewing since the trailer was released earlier this month. Rogen recently acknowledged it in a tweet:
I rarely worry about people like Kim Jong Un; Similar to the local VFW Silver Star earning top-secret mission Navy SEAL / USMC Force Recon hero, they are nothing but talk.
But I do fear that one day his media blackout of NK will crack. When the entire population rallies for war because Kimmy drew a line in the sand and the US crosses that line, he will have no choice but to do something.
I was thinking the same thing. If they are pissed over this they must have been ready to launch the nukes over Team America. Maybe the pushed the launch button but it didn’t work?
They will burn the embassy and kill the ambassador and Osama will simply say “see I told you a movie can cause mass chaos; you guys were just too racist to believe me”
Realistically; how small of a weenie do you have to have to actually react to stuff like this??
While we scoff at the idea that they’d actually take action over it, I will point out:
Their society has on concept of the freedom of speech, so I’m sure they all believe that it’s government-sponsored. They can’t wrap their minds around that this is an independent production.
The cult of personality he has - this probably pisses them all off.
They can now use it as an excuse for actions they may want to take (nuclear weapons test comes to mind).