So I finally sat down over the break and watched The Interview, the Seth Rogen/James Franco movie that blew up into this weird international incident a couple weeks back. Rented it through the Xbox app on the 360 sitting under the TV, paid my $5.99, and watched the thing that supposedly got a country's government mad enough to (allegedly, according to the FBI) hack Sony Pictures and leak a mountain of embarrassing internal emails.
Verdict: it's fine. It's a Seth Rogen movie. There are some genuinely funny bits — the whole "they'll never let you cross with a rocket launcher" gag got an actual laugh out of me — and then long stretches where it's just kind of coasting on Franco mugging at the camera. I don't say that to be a contrarian killjoy. I just think it's worth saying out loud that the movie itself is a pretty ordinary stoner comedy that happened to get caught up in something much bigger than it. Nobody watching this cold, with no context, walks away thinking "this was worth an international incident."
And that's the part that's been sitting with me since Christmas. Sony pulled the theatrical release, then un-pulled it, then dumped it online through Google Play, YouTube, and Xbox Video, plus a few hundred independent theaters, all inside about 48 hours of deciding to do it. By the 28th they were saying it had cleared $15 million between digital and the indie theater runs. That's a genuinely strange way for a movie to make its money, and I don't think anyone in that boardroom in September expected this outcome. Nobody sits down to greenlight a Franco-Rogen comedy thinking it'll end up being the reason your CEO is answering questions about state-sponsored hacking on the evening news.
The whole Sony situation still doesn't sit right with me, honestly. We had months of leaked emails (a lot of them just people at a company being petty about each other, which, fair, that happens everywhere, mine included probably), then a threat that spooked theater chains into pulling the movie entirely, then a walk-back once Obama commented on it publicly, then this rushed digital release that somehow worked out fine. It's a strange arc and none of the individual steps felt inevitable at the time. I remember refreshing news sites in mid-December assuming the movie just wasn't coming out at all.
Small complaint while I'm at it: the Xbox Video app on the 360 is not a great way to watch anything. The interface is sluggish, my rental buffered twice in the first ten minutes even on a connection that streams Netflix fine, and the whole thing has that slightly-too-compressed look that makes bright scenes go blotchy. I get that this wasn't built for a surprise firehose of rental demand, but if you're going to charge theatrical-adjacent prices for a home rental, the playback experience should not remind me of watching a YouTube video from 2009.
Anyway. CES kicked off in Vegas yesterday and my feed is already wall to wall with curved TV press releases and blog posts about smart-home hubs nobody asked for, so I'll leave that to everyone else covering it this week. Plenty of people with better sources than me are going to be typing up every keynote line by line. I'd rather write about the movie I actually watched than paraphrase a press release I read secondhand.
One more thing that's bugging me: I keep seeing takes that frame the whole episode as some kind of victory for free expression, like Sony "stood up" to the hackers by releasing it after all. I get the sentiment, but let's not pretend the studio had some principled awakening. They pulled it when theater chains got scared, and un-pulled it once the backlash to pulling it got louder than the original threat. That's not a stand, that's a company reading the room twice in one week. I don't blame them for it, businesses do that, but I'm not going to call it brave.
Going to go back to ignoring the news for a bit now. New year, same pile of unread tabs.