Jong-un Should Employ Dale Peck to Review Anti-DPRK Blockbuster

Kim Jong-un is apparently upset about an a forthcoming Hollywood blockbuster which attempts to make an assassination attempt on him the stuff of comedy. The Times recently reported on the uproar in Pyongyang surrounding the film, The Interview, starring James Franco and Seth Rogen (“North Korea Warns U.S. Over Film Mocking Its Leader,” 6/25/14). The Times reported on the fact that this isn’t the first time the North Korean royal family have been the subject of parody. Team America: World Police took a shot at Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father. And if the North Koreans really want to stay at the top of their game of huffing and puffing they’d best be advised that the genesis of this kind of comedy actually emanates from two sources: There's The Great Dictator, with the famous scene where a Hitler look-a-like played by Charlie Chaplin bounces his globe around like a ball and the character of Oddjob (Harold Sakata) from Goldfinger, who actually bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Jong-un. But when talking about retaliation one wonders  if the North Koreans wouldn’t do well to drag some of America’s most acerbic critics out of the woodwork. Dale Peck, for instance, is more known for his literary than film criticism, but he's capable of eviscerating writers in the way that a good butcher can extract the innards from a cow or pig. Peck is like a pit bull.  He’d be a great attack dog to set on a pair of rowdy filmmakers. The North Koreans should start by setting him on Franco and Rogen, who also directed. When he is done with them he can go after Columbia Pictures which is releasing the film, Sony who own Columbia and American audiences who devour this kind of comedy.

The Independence Day Massacre

Independence is the human separation individuation process on a geopolitical scale. It’s the phylogenic manifestation of the human need for identity, with borders being like the ego which is limned by the epidermis. So in one sense it's not surprising that besides the Magna Carta of 1215, Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, the American Revolution of 1776, the French revolutions of l789 and 1848, the l905 and l917 revolutions in Russian, the non-violent revolution led by Gandhi which freed India from British in 1947, that revolution is constantly percolating on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is about an awakening by a woman in a household and it was truly revolutionary for the time as was Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening published in l899, but revolution is literally lurking around the corner. As if al-Qaeda wasn’t radical enough, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has challenged their predecessor and in a predictably  human state of affairs been repudiated by its forbears. Some people will remember the moment in the movie The Jazz Singer when an Orthodox Jewish cantor played by Lawrence Olivier repudiates his son Jess Robin aka Yussel Rabinovich (Neil Diamond) who wants to make it in the secular world. Independence Day is a celebration of national unity, but it comprises a paradox in that independence is a viral instinct that contains the seeds of its own destruction. It’s apt that back in l996 Independence Day was the title of for a disaster film, starring Will Smith, Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum.

Who May I Ask is Calling?

Panmunjom in l951

The Times ran a piece about life in the guardhouse at Panmunjom (“High Tension and a Cold Shoulder at Border of Two Koreas,” NYT, 6/26/14). One Lt. Cmdr. Daniel McShane is described as using a bullhorn and interpreter to pass a message on to “his North Korean counterpart.” North Korea may be a backward country but they do have telephones. But the Times piece describes how “For more than a year, that has been the way Commander McShane, an American naval officer attached to the United Nations Command here, has been forced to carry out out one of his main duties—conveying messages to the North Koreans.” The reason is that the North Koreans have stopped answering the phone. The Times quotes Commander McShane as saying,  “We try them four times a day. It rings, but no one answers.” It may seem rather primitive. A lover who is quarreling and wants to make a point to his significant other might partake of this kind of silent scorn and almost all veteran writers who came of age before the advent of the internet can recall editors not answering or failing to return phone calls. If truth be known most editors at publishing houses and literary journals, whose experience of demanding authors has created an adversarial view (which makes them think of writers as vermin), behave worse than the North Koreans. But anyone who has ever waited for a call that seems like it’s never going to come can identify with the plight of Lt. Comdr. McShane and his cohorts. You can almost picture the room in which the phone is ringing and  see the stony faces of those for whom the call is intended. You can even imagine them putting their fingers in their ears. However, everyone maintains that impossible dream that the girl will have changed her mind or that the editor will have read something  and decided you’re a genius. So maybe one day McShane will call and on the other end a sweet woman’s voice with a slight Asian accent will answer. “President Kim Jong-un’s office.” Thinking about his prospects for promotion and remembering the childhood experience of hitting a homer with bases loaded, McShane will ask “Is President Kim Jong-un in?” “And who may I ask is calling,” the sweet voice will ask. “Tell him Lt. Commander McShane from the United Nations Command Security Battalion Joint Security Area.” And in this Walter Mitty moment, McShane will imagine himself waiting for what seems like an interminable period of time before the sweet voice comes on and tells him. “Please hold for President Kim Jong-un.”

Valle Ummm!

Cannibalism on Tanna by Charles E. Gordon Frazer

The Times quoted Federal District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe in his dismissal of the case against former Officer Gilberto Valle for cannibalism thusly “The evidentiary record is such that it is more likely than not the case that all of Valle’s Internet communications about kidnapping are fantasy role play…once the lies and the fantastical elements are stripped away, what is left are deeply disturbing misogynistic chats and emails written by an individual obsessed with imagining women he knows suffering horrific sex-related pain, terror and degradation (“Officer’s Conviction in Cannibalism Case Overturned,” NYT, 6/30/14). The cannibalism, as the Times described the prosecution case, involved communicating “with others about how he wanted to abduct women, butcher and cook them, and eat them.” Even though Valle has been exonerated, it seems unlikely he will ever be assigned to either the sex crimes unit of the department or reinstated to any unit at all, for that matter. But now that’s it’s determined that Valle was guilty of nothing more than having the kind of fantasies about unattainable love objects characteristic of hormone addled adolescents of both sexes, it won’t be surprising if he doesn’t receive a flood of interest in his recipes from prominent cook book agents and publishers. It’s long been noted that Brazilian hot waxing and surgical techniques like vaginoplasty are also very useful in stove top cooking. And provided Officer Valle is able to behave he might even find himself back in uniform as a guest judge on the Food Network’s Chopped.

Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys

Kumba is what you think about when you see Clint Eastwood’s movie version of Jersey Boys. Everyone but Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) who talks about T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” is from the neighborhood and that’s the problem. The disquisition rendered in intentionally old style Technicolor (which is to say intentionally lacking in the kind of production values audiences are used to today) renders a series of plastic stereotypes, a kind of working class commedia dell'arte. Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young) is clueless, Tom DeVito (Vincent Piazza), is the not too street wise criminal who mortgages the group’s future and Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) the winteriest of the Four Seasons just wants to go home. Frankie’s wife Mary Delgado (Renee Marino) couldn’t have been too happy with her portrait as a demanding alcoholic who forces her husband to pack his bags just as he’s about to make it. Apparently it’s all true, but it also plays as the stuff of a lousy afternoon soap or  reality show like The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Speaking of neighborhoods, the aging demographic of the cranky crowds attending Jersey Boys might remind you of another Italian neighborhood, Dante's Inferno. Marshall Brickman’s script sacrifices believability for verisimilitude. At one point Frankie and his pals try to steal a safe which is so heavy that their car rides on two wheels. It’s a scene that wouldn’t be worthy of a Little Rascals outtake. Sometimes the things that people actually say to each other are neither informative nor entertaining and furthermore Jersey Boys is not cinema verite. It’s a musical, but once the dreary backstory with its god forsaken lounges and hokey songs comes to an end, you get the pay off. “December, l963 (Oh, What a Night),” “Let’s Hang On,” “Candy Girl,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Dawn,” “Sherry,”"Who Loves You," “I’m Working My Way Back to You.” Who cares if the lives of The Four Seasons were embarrassing and deeply sad (one of FrankieValli’s daughters, Francine, a talented singer in her own right died of a drug overdose and his stepdaughter, Celia died the same year from a fall). “You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind...” Rod Serling says in his introduction to The Twilight Zone.  That's where those hits exist.