Foreign Affairs: Movie Division

There is a lot of foreign news that, like the 1948 movie A Foreign Affair, is kinda funny.

The Sony Affair
Sony made this comedy about Seth Rogan trying to assassinate Kim Jong Un. It was one of several recent movies where North Korea is one of the few safe enemies left. For example, there was Die Another Day (2002), Red Dawn (2012), and Pyongyang, a Steve Carell drama that was killed due to the Sony affair.

Then Sony got successfully hacked by North Korea because movie industry cyber-security is notoriously lax. They had several movies pirated, but movies are being constantly pirated by Asian hackers. Most damaging was the release of embarrassingly catty emails Sony executives wrote about their actors.

Sony's reaction was swift. They and all Hollywood kowtowed.

Sony Exec.

Sony pulled the Rogan movie, losing the $40 million production costs plus over $20 million in marketing. New Regency cancelled the Carell movie. Paramount refused to allow theaters to replace the Rogan film with Team America: World Police (2004) because of its Korean storyline. Meanwhile, Hollywood plutocrats are suggesting that hacking Sony was an act of war deserving a military response.

A better response would be for Sony to invest a little money in securing their valuable property and teaching their executives this simple rule:

Never put in an email anything you wouldn't want to see on the lunch room bulletin board.