Give the North Korean dictator five red stars for the film The Interview

FIVE OUT OF FIVE RED STARS 영화 등급

By Shawn Thompson

Give Young Kimchi Uno five bright red stars and an Oscar, please.

Is that popcorn butter on his fingers?

The master of astute political moves in North Korea has done what commercial Hollywood can only dream of doing, make a complete satirical masterpiece, transforming a film comedy into satire without the film even being shown in theatres.

The 112-minute Sony film The Interview was originally a clever mixture of comedy and satire, in that order, made a little bit more legitimate by including the popular missile-prone dictator Young Kimchi Uno.

Young Kimchi Uno is the safest of safe targets. No matter how bad the aim of a satirist, he sucks the arrow unto himself. And apparently, of all the evils in the world, the only thing he can't tolerate is being mocked.

Accessorize with a sub and you will feel good

Sure, there was some reverse and unintended satire in the film which plays to the misconceptions of communist regimes, that the media in the West are really the concealed political operatives of the state. That should make the media cringe, not to mention the state.

But the logical response for North Korea to this kind of dirty video warfare -- which North Korea, naturally imagining that the United States is run like Korea, interprets as coming from the U.S. administration -- is to counterattack the United States with its own hostile and aggressive comedy about the U.S. president. That is how you play political ping-pong. You slap the little white ball back using the same device. North Korea could produce its own White House comedy about a tragic botching of the annual pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey and call it A Big White House Turkey.

For the most part, to rewind the whole affair to its almost now forgotten origins, the antics in the film The Interview of the Green Hornet (Seth Rogen) and the Wizard of Oz (James Franco) are humorous, designed mainly for laughs, not to ridicule and expose social and political problems.

"We thought maybe we could inject some slight relevance," Seth Rogen told Stephen Colbert on air. The dictator's "feelings" about being mocked and ridiculed weren't considered, he said, although sometimes those with all the power seem to have more than their share of hypersensitivity about their abuses and vices.

However, by seizing the political stage in the film and intervening before the film was released in theatres through a cyber-attack on the Sony corporation, North Korea has become a co-author of the film and transformed it into a full satirical film.

A large degree of credit in making the film rightly goes to the efforts of North Korea. Should there be any awards and honours for the film, the fair and democratic approach would be to share the awards with North Korea. Young Kimchi Uno should come by submarine to Hollywood to tip toe down the red carpet and accept the awards in person.

Because of the participation of North Korea, a fictional three-star film is now cranked up to a five-star semi-documentary.

And there’s no need to even see the film at all, except on film night in Camp 14 in North Korea.

More red five-star reviews are welcome. #redstarreview