Critical Drinker： How Politics Ruined Hollywood
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Summary
In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis Foster and Constantine Kishan are joined by film critic Will Jordan aka The Critical Drinker to discuss what's happening in the world of movies and TV, and why it's so important to have a conversation about it.
Transcript
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The writers in Hollywood now, you know, a lot of them will have gone to college for four or five years
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where they've been told incessantly, the world is inherently racist and sexist.
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It's just this big hierarchy of people getting oppressed by everyone else.
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And so that's going to reflect in their mindset and it's going to reflect in what they write
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and what they try to rationalize in their stories.
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishan.
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And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is a novelist, YouTuber and film critic Will Jordan aka The Critical Drinker. Welcome to Trigonometry.
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It's such a pleasure to have you. You've got a brilliant YouTube channel that's absolutely crushing it.
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We're really interested to talk to you about what's happening in the movie world and some of the ideologies and all of that stuff.
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but before we do, tell us who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been your journey
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through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I'm reasonably sure that I'm
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Will Jordan. I'm a writer and eventually I became a YouTuber. I guess I got into this whole thing
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because I'd always been interested in storytelling. I'd been fascinated by characters and how you can
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just, you know, you can create these fictional worlds that people can just lose themselves in.
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I think there's something really special and magical about that. And so it eventually led
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me to becoming an author myself and wrote nine, ten books now. So it became quite a successful
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thing for me. And yeah, I was really pleased with that. But several years ago, I guess I began to
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notice a change in the movies that we were seeing in cinemas. They were gradually losing that kind
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of magic and that ability to lose yourself in the story. And it was becoming more and more obvious
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to older characters that they were bringing back.
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You know, they were essentially just bringing back
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and kind of breaking them down and humiliating them.
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because I used to be a fan of a lot of these people.
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and so I decided I need to just try and I guess add my voice to that conversation about it and I
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thought well I can I can get back into YouTube because I used to do it way back when just messing
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around just little little channel with a few hundred subscribers so I started that up again
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and started talking about various movies and there was one day when I don't know what happened I
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think maybe I had a beer or two before I recorded it and I was like my voice is awfully slurred
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in this video. Well, you are Scottish, mate. Yeah, exactly. I mean, what can I do? It was 9am.
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Of course you're going to have a drink. And I just thought, you know what, I'm just going to go with
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this and have this kind of slurred, drunken voice that's really sarcastic. And wow, that video went
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out, went viral. Before I knew it, I had half a million, maybe a million views on that. And I went
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from a few hundred subscribers up to 5, 10, 20, 30,000.
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And then it's just been a rollercoaster from there.
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In vitae veritas, you know, there's truth in drinks.
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because I come from more of a theatre perspective,
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but I've seen the same thing happen with theatre.
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Basically anything known by Disney at this point.
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You know, obviously they took over the whole Star Wars brand.
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you would see characters like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker,
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And suddenly they're getting brought back and they're like deadbeat dads
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or they're just grumpy old men living on an island and just want to die and they've lost all hope.
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You know, it's a terrible thing to do to these characters because it's one thing to kill them off.
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It's another thing to destroy their legacy or the very essence of who they were.
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And I think that's when I really started to notice it.
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These heroes that we used to enjoy are just being denigrated and broken down
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to try and push the new heroes that they tried to replace them with,
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which are just usually cardboard cutouts with no real personalities.
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And, Will, look, there'll be people here going, hang on a second, right?
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Hollywood has always pushed certain narratives.
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The American dream that you can go and be and do anything that you want to be or to do,
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I think there's a difference there in terms of one how pervasive it is in the story because now
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it's so obvious and it's usually paired up with a lack of writing skill like the writers are
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usually stumbling over themselves so quickly to push this stuff in they neglect to even bother
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with a good story the other aspect like I just described there is the the trampling of of what
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came before and the you know exploiting the work of previous generations of writers and storytellers
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to try and elevate the stuff that you're producing now.
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or a sequel to something or a prequel to something,
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you were kind of going like this was successful,
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Whereas now you're starting to see, like you say,
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and you feel it's kind of affecting the quality of what's being made very much so yeah um it's one
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thing to um to produce sequels to to previously successful movies you know hollywood's been doing
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that for decades now fair enough it's another thing to start to say you know you know these
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guys that uh you used to enjoy so much these stories that you used to appreciate they were
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never that good what we're making now is better but it's not it's just a lie that you're expected
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to buy into and it's patronizing to the viewer that's the thing that really gets on my nerves
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i was watching i mean it's slightly different i was watching miss maser which i really enjoyed
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the first three seasons were great and then in the fourth season it went weird they they started
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preaching almost this kind of feminist message and you're going i don't give a shit just tell
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me the story there's ways to work ideas like that into the story subtly yeah so that you you can
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and let the audience make up their minds with stuff like that.
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Just show the characters encountering difficulties.
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But if you just are straight up telling the audience,
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this is what you must think, this is what you must believe,
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You're no longer losing yourself in a fictional world
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All you're seeing is the beliefs of the writer.
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that's that's what it becomes and that's when it's detrimental and why do you think this is
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happening well uh i mean there's a broad shift in our culture i think at the moment um you know we
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i guess people talk about woke politics and and social justice and stuff how it's become really
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prevalent um in the past several years i think in hollywood in america there was um there was
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obviously a broad general reaction to the election in 2016 that that drove a lot of people nuts and
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it was it was essentially a backlash then amongst the people of hollywood against that um so i think
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all of those things combined are what's causing this um the shift in in what we see in movies
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and storytelling um it's an attempt to make people feel and think a certain way yeah look i'm sure
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that had a huge impact but it feels to me and maybe you'll correct me that actually something
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has been changing for longer even than that and the reason I say this is like Francis and I were
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talking about this before we started where they used to quite often a movie used to have a fairly
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simplistic possibly but a moral message of some kind or a very aspirational quality to it like
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if you think about movies from when I was a kid whether you think they're good or not like
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It was all about triumph over some kind of foreign,
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hostile invasion, people coming together all over the world.
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whether that's Game of Thrones or House of Cards
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or anything like that, I started to see that actually
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what they were doing now is showing the opposite
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and going, look at all the deep dysfunction in human beings.
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Look at all the terrible ways that people operate.
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Look at the way people cheat and steal and murder
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And it's shown from a kind of different perspective.
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So instead of giving you an aspirational picture,
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it became more about going, look how bad everything is.
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Well, I think that ties into the mindset of a lot of the writers in Hollywood now.
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you know a lot of them will have gone to college for four or five years where they've been told
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incessantly the world is inherently racist and sexist everyone's awful everyone hates each other
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it's just this big hierarchy of people getting oppressed by everyone else and so that's going
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to reflect in their mindset and it's going to reflect in what they write and what they try to
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rationalize in their stories and that's why you get what you end up with and yeah it's it is so
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disheartening because like you say there used to be an aspirational message to so much of movie
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making you know whether it was characters like rocky who have to to you know rise to some big
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challenge to try and overcome it whether it's something like independence day like a big cheesy
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blockbuster movie but there's a positive message there about people putting aside their differences
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to to take on a bigger threat um unashamedly pro-american i suppose as well and that's again
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what you see now is there's this kind of nihilism and this kind of almost hatred of their own
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country. America was never that good anyway, and it was all founded on racism and slavery and all
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that stuff. It engenders this kind of negative mindset in the audience, I think, and they come
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away unsatisfied by it. I don't know if the writers in their way feel like, well, we're making the
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world a better place because we're educating people about the problems of the world.
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or put down its previous generation of characters.
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And it ends up just being a really great, fun movie.
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And people come out of that feeling good about themselves.
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But you know, sorry, just on this very point, Francis,
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like you mentioned for example slavery right there's a history of movies about slavery i
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remember as a kid here at school going to see amstead amistad and that is a movie about a
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horrible chapter in human history but it also shows that people working together and people
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uh advocating for their rights and and freedom of express all of that stuff can actually achieve
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results is saying like we're not doomed as human beings to the worst elements of our past we're
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not doomed to our most base instincts we're not doomed to to be constantly stuck in this
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endless eternal battle between groups actually when we work together we can get to the point
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of our common humanity actually triumphing over all that tribalism yeah and now we're just doing
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the exact opposite we're just going here's here's another movie about how we're all evil yes you
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know uh yeah yeah that's it yeah i mean i there's nothing i can add to that like you pretty much
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articulate it perfectly it's the yeah it's the mindset now of making movies but surely that's
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gotta that's gotta be unsustainable you'd think but they keep doing it i mean my my rationale has
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always been uh eventually the money will run out you know so many of these movies that they try to
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do uh they fail uh and they end up losing money for the studio um and you know as many um ideologically
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driven people as there are in hollywood there's even more guys who are just money men they just
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want to make cash and they don't care what it is that does that but if they see enough movies that
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are in the red there there has to come a point where they say enough of this crap we've got to
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stop this we have to start making movies that are actually popular that people like so you just you
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have to hope that eventually it's going to filter through i mean like i say there's there's occasional
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films that do crop up, like Top Gun, Maverick, that have done really well. And hopefully they
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serve as a little lesson for people that it can still work. These older style movies that are
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positive, upbeat, patriotic, whatever it might be, they can be a massive success if they're done
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right. We just have to hope that it'll happen eventually. You know, these are all excellent
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points because I remember going to watch 12 Years a Slave. And I remember saying to my ex-girlfriend
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as I walked out, I said, I think the only way you can enjoy that film
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it's just an hour and a half of some of the most horrific violence
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And you go, this is obviously accurate, all of these things,
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It doesn't leave you with any sense of anything
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I mean, obviously, different movies are designed to do different things.
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You watch it to get a picture of what happened.
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You're not walking out there looking for a feel-good moment.
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You're probably not going to have a blast watching that movie,
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And it's obviously a deeply moving and poignant film,
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But I think the problems come in when you're ostensibly trying to make some blockbuster,
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you know, fun, upbeat movie, and then you start working in this other stuff.
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Like, oh, by the way, do you know that, like, loads of people in America are racist or,
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It's just, it often comes across as just weird moments of you're trying to make something
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you wouldn't be racist at the top of your voice
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you know it's just completely terrible writing yeah and it's just it's clumsiness on the part
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of the writers whether they don't have the experience whether they are just like i say
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falling over themselves to get that point across and they don't care how clumsily they do it
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maybe that's how it is but uh yeah there were in the past i think there would be more of a
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nuance to these characters you know you might show them having uh positive qualities but also
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there's this darker side to them that comes across sometimes and it's it'd be an interesting
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way of saying well this is this is how it manifests in people sometimes they might not
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consciously be aware of it they might not always be a big cartoonish um you know racist who's just
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yelling at the top of his lungs but um it comes across subtly um but that can be the the difference
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in a character but yeah i just don't think writers these days have got that kind of subtlety to them
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Do you think part of the problem as well is what happened with Weinstein was obviously horrific and awful, but then Hollywood was almost forced to say, look, this is horrific and awful and we're going to produce these films that have an element of social justice to show that we've changed?
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Oh, very much so, yeah. They were terrified of that because, let's be honest, a lot of them were implicated in it as being complicit. So many of these stars that were preaching about how appalled they were by them. It's like there's hundreds of pictures of them standing next to them, getting their pictures taken, praising them to the hill.
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And the thing is, they all knew as well. It's not like they just randomly took a picture.
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Yeah, and then there's all these rumors that come out like this person knew, that person knew, but it would have ended their career if they were to speak out.
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And so, yeah, it's like you say, the backlash to that prompted this huge panic amongst them.
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And it's like, yeah, we have to prove how virtuous we are.
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And suddenly that's why you get, you know, diversity quotas to even be nominated for an Oscar.
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Yeah. To even be considered for an Oscar now, you have to have X number of women in front of or behind the camera, X number of ethnic minorities, X number of LGBT people.
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In Hollywood, I would have said they're the majority, aren't they?
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Well, you never know. But again, I'm not a big fan of this idea that the composition of your movie, in terms of the people working on it, should determine whether or not it's good.
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what should speak for itself as the end product and so when you start getting into that mindset of
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um you know a movie can only be considered worthy if it's got x number of different boxes ticked
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in terms of the people working on it you're not necessarily going to get the best people
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you're just you're ticking boxes like i say and that's just that's a really bad way of working
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it's like they're trying to really artificially tackle a problem that should be much more um
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organically changed you know the whole culture I guess of Hollywood needs to shift to just let
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more people in to work on these films and give them a chance to succeed on their own merits not
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force them into positions they might not be ready for it's an interesting point and I think it comes
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back to what you said earlier which is we've kind of got to a position where like we all think that
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our job is to educate other people and and what what they mean by that is to force them to think
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in a different way yeah right and there's there's an extraordinary level of arrogance that's implied
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within that which is you have the knowledge that other people must accept as fact and act
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accordingly and i think that's kind of where the diversity quota stuff comes from because it's like
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there's a right way to think and it must be enforced it can't just be introduced but do you
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think this is going to change over time we talked about top government but like i know the daily
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wire starting now my big fear with the daily wire movies was like they're going to make like there's
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a left-wing hollywood and they're going to make a right-wing hollywood and then we've just got two
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extraordinarily politicized movie making things and the people who actually just want to watch a
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good movie aren't going to do that but from what i've been hearing actually the daily wire is
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making things that are uh the non-documentary stuff that's just a good movie or that's their
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trump that's what they're trying to do so do you think the pushback's already started or do you
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think we're some way off i think it has started yeah and um you know companies like the daily
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wire it's good that they're doing what they're doing they are um i don't know if they're really
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going to become a legitimate rival to hollywood because they're ultimately just one company they
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can only produce so many films and they've only got so much of a budget um yeah i've seen one
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two of the things that they've produced um that the run hide fight was one that i watched which
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was which was all right you know it wasn't an amazing movie but it's kind of a step in the
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right direction. And yeah, I had hoped that what we would see is just more of a realization within
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Hollywood themselves of we can't keep sustaining this, we can't keep bankrolling this kind of
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lunacy. And they would gradually shift more towards the center ground. And there was signs
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of it for a while. Like I know that the guy who took over running Disney, Bob Chapek, he's very
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much just a money man. He doesn't care about ideology. And he even made that his mission
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statement. He said, Disney's now a for-profit company. We're not here to push ideology and
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we're not here to get involved in politics. When he tried to do that, there was a massive backlash
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against him basically saying, well, you must be racist then or whatever. And staff were walking
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out. So I don't know how successful that's ultimately going to be. But I guess it's
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indicative of a bit of a shift where people are realizing that what we've been trying to do over
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the past five or 10 years, it's slowly alienating people. You know, look at the Oscars. That used
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to be a huge event. People would tune in to watch that. Now it's like their ratings are like a third
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of what they once were. The only thing that got people talking about this year was Will Smith.
00:23:35.240
I was going to say, now they literally have to beat each other to get our attention.
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I said this, I made a video about this. I bet you people are going to start starting fights at the
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oscars now just to try and get headlines you know but i do find it worrying as someone who loves
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film and someone who loves cinema just look at movie stars really how many great or new movie
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stars have been produced recently yeah they haven't you're relying on tom cruise who's a
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brilliant movie star one of the greatest of all time but how old is tom cruise now he's 59 yeah
00:24:07.120
can you keep relying on him to do all these new films and get people into the cinema yeah that
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age of the movie star has ended and i've talked about this on my channel um what you have now is
00:24:18.240
people who get interested in characters you know oh there's a new batman movie some some other
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douche is going to be playing batman now or there's a new superman film or whatever it is you
00:24:28.460
know they're interested in the the character rather than the actor playing them now and so
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what you what you're losing is that kind of magic of of stardom which just doesn't exist anymore
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um there was there used to be a time when oh shit there's a new tom cruise movie of course we
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you know we need to go see that because i'm sure it'll be good um you know he's like really the
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last one there's nobody is going to get totally fired up that's uh there's a new chris pratt film
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um or that there's a new dwayne johnson film like those are just you know those guys have their their
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careers, obviously, and they make a lot of money, but they're not stars in the same sense that you
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used to get 20, 30 years ago. And why is that, Will? Probably because the studios have become
00:25:15.940
so powerful that it's more of an assembly line of movies than it is actual projects that people
00:25:23.360
are passionate about. It's probably going to become like that with directors as well. You
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used to have guys like Steven Spielberg who would just, you know, they could pick and choose the
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projects they want you to do, they could get things commissioned on the strength of their name
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because they were so powerful within Hollywood. Now you've just got guest directors that get
00:25:40.440
brought in to do things and particularly within these big budget Marvel movies, they don't even
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really direct their own movies. They are brought in to do scenes like this where people are sitting
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in a room talking to each other. Then when it comes to the action scenes or the CGI, someone
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else does that they do all that and that's about 90 of the movie so now you've got directors who
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are just like the actors now they are just gigging they are happy to get the work that they can um
00:26:07.600
but they are not big names anymore that people are excited about that's the difference and it's
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it's worrying when you look at the industry when you look at a lot of the films that make the money
00:26:18.300
are marvel films and look i quite enjoy a marvel film but it just shows that there's a complete
00:26:23.900
dearth of ideas out there. Where the only way to get people to go and watch a movie is to have
00:26:29.780
Spider-Man or all the rest of them. What they talked about, and it was very telling, it was
00:26:35.260
like one of those Disney internal memos, was the franchise ecosystem. And I thought that was just
00:26:41.800
the perfect word to describe what they do now. Because you get a new movie or a new TV show
00:26:47.160
by Disney, whether it's Star Wars or Marvel, whatever,
00:26:54.540
but it will usually have a couple of new characters
00:27:00.640
and then that will in turn create more spin-offs
00:27:03.060
and it's just this ever-expanding tree of more stuff.
00:27:14.940
and he showed me all of the upcoming projects for Marvel and Disney over the next 12 months.
00:27:20.980
And I just hung my head and just died a little bit inside because there's so much. It's so
00:27:28.140
overwhelming now. And that's all it is. It's all just about producing more content. Whether it's
00:27:36.600
movies, whether it's TV shows, they're obviously now getting into the realms of streaming services
00:27:41.480
where you just need that constant pipeline of new content
00:27:53.660
I don't think we're quite the same as the Americans
00:27:56.340
because we don't quite have that streaming focus that they do.
00:28:12.900
But then how many big movies are we producing now?
00:28:18.420
They come out once every like five years or so at this point.
00:28:24.820
I am baffled by what they're going to do with Bond now.
00:28:29.380
You know, they blew him up at the end of the last movie
00:28:41.780
Yeah, he'll just be like reassembled from all his bits.
00:28:45.760
But the other worrying thing as well is that the independent cinema.
00:28:51.760
Back in the 90s, when I really got into movies,
00:28:57.320
Okay, they were then bought by companies, people like Miramax.
00:29:00.760
They were creating brilliant independent movies.
00:29:05.980
like these new rebel voices like the tarantinos etc it doesn't exist no i mean my hope was going
00:29:13.100
to be when we had the lockdowns the pandemic and everything um and you know there was no revenue
00:29:18.540
coming in for for movies and my assumption was okay the era of the the mega blockbuster might
00:29:25.500
be over for now you know studios are just not going to be able to put two three hundred million
00:29:30.460
dollars into each movie because there's not necessarily going to be the return on it people
00:29:34.700
are wary about going to the cinemas. And so what you might see is that middle ground that you used
00:29:41.380
to have of movies on a budget, I don't know, 50, 60 million, relatively small in Hollywood terms,
00:29:49.020
but big enough that they can still look good. They can still have big set pieces, whatever
00:29:52.700
they want to do. And they can afford to then be a little bit more daring. They can take more risks
00:30:01.680
with them. They could take a chance on a new director who's got some crazy idea because they're
00:30:06.880
not sinking that huge amount of money into it. But it doesn't seem to have happened. We seem to
00:30:11.980
have gotten right back to business as usual. You know, and you look at the movies coming out this
00:30:15.820
year, you've got what the new Jurassic Park movie. I mean, that was apparently diabolical.
00:30:20.820
Yeah, I can't wait to see that. I'm so pleased to be here in London because I don't have to see it
00:30:26.000
for a couple of days but yeah I mean like they're huge budgets again back to what we were doing
00:30:32.160
before and what about taking cinemas especially post-covid like I used to love going to the
00:30:38.440
cinema and it used to be a real treat for me when you'd sit down you know everything goes dark and
00:30:44.080
you're just there just to watch a film it was but I haven't returned to the cinema and I think it's
00:30:48.920
just simply that I got out of the habit of doing that what how have the cinemas been affected
00:30:53.920
I mean I don't I can't speak for each of them but um I know when I've gone to see um movies this
00:31:00.360
year they're not as busy as they were back um in 2019 for example or 2018 should I say um and
00:31:07.860
whether it is that um people are just watching at home now whether they have gotten out of that
00:31:14.560
habit like you have um they're just streaming it um or whether some people are still wary about
00:31:19.480
going back to things like that just for health reasons. I don't know. But, you know, the money
00:31:24.960
that seems to be coming in from films still suggests that people are going, they are making
00:31:30.520
money. So maybe they're, yeah, maybe I've just been unlucky with the screenings that I've gone to.
00:31:36.120
But I do think there'll be a proportion of people that won't go back, at least not like they did
00:31:40.740
before. Yeah, there's always going to be that proportion, which is a real shame because there's
00:31:44.820
something beautifully communal about going to the cinema. I love it and I love the lack of
00:31:52.180
distractions because you'll know yourself if you're watching a film at home you've got your
00:31:56.540
phone there you've got other people in the house maybe you may be getting things delivered or the
00:32:01.200
postman comes around or whatever there's a million distractions for you and so you're never quite
00:32:07.140
engaged with the film you're watching in the way you are in the cinema like you say the lights go
00:32:12.400
down the phones go off and people can just lose themselves in the movie for a couple of hours
00:32:18.960
and yeah there's there's a great um feeling there where if something funny happens everyone's
00:32:25.000
laughing along with it you know something shocking happens you hear a little gasp or whatever it's
00:32:29.740
it's cool it's it's a fun um way of experiencing it it's a bit like the theater i suppose
00:32:34.680
this is our modern version of it yeah well i i think i'm not making this up i remember reading
00:32:40.180
something about how even if you watch a movie you didn't particularly like just the two hours
00:32:45.240
or three hours in a dark room watching one thing with other people it creates what they call an
00:32:50.080
afterglow like that that feeling when you first walk out of the cinema yeah of like having been
00:32:54.880
in a different world which is one of the reasons you know where we started this conversation where
00:32:59.140
you're constantly being dragged out of that other world by like oh here's a bit of social justice
00:33:04.300
for you you know do you feel bad about yourself yeah yeah yeah uh look at this girl boss doing
00:33:11.180
this or that or whatever um but i was gonna if i'm in francis you mentioned tarantino
00:33:15.240
and i was thinking you know i i think tarantino can be gratuitous sometimes i mean that is his
00:33:22.940
this is his trademark but i also wouldn't want to live in a world where tarantino hadn't made
00:33:27.820
many other films that he ended up making but there is no fucking way in in the world that
00:33:32.740
he'd be able to a new tarantino would ever get a shot now would they no i think the environment's
00:33:39.080
changed um movies are just so much safer now they're so much more corporatized um for for the
00:33:45.780
reasons i've already described you know one they're they're usually run by much bigger companies that
00:33:50.460
uh they have to protect their image their bottom line all that sort of thing and they've usually
00:33:54.420
sunk so much money into it that they have to play it safe you know most of the time they have to
00:33:58.000
play to to general audiences now whereas tarantino's movies obviously you're not going to want your
00:34:03.600
your kids going to watch that you know but they're fantastic films and so yeah he was very much a
00:34:09.440
product of his time and it feels like that time has passed and there's not a way to bring up
00:34:14.080
guys like him anymore um there there's you know there's a few directors who've got a distinct
00:34:20.400
visual style like one of the ones i talked about recently was uh the northman um great movie and
00:34:26.600
was the same guy who did the lighthouse and the names totally escaped me because i'm sitting here
00:34:31.000
with you guys right now but um he's a really good director and he's got that unique visual style
00:34:36.440
where it's it's a little bit um abstract and it's a little bit art housey but it can be tied into
00:34:41.640
that that big budget movie um style as well so um guys like him are really interesting but yeah
00:34:47.960
they're the few and far between now there's just not people like that getting created like really
00:34:52.120
different interesting creative directors not in not in mainstream movies at least and it's also
00:34:59.480
counterproductive as well because take the example of a film like dirty dancing which was made on a
00:35:05.600
shoestring which had unknowns which told a story about you know girl meets boy and it was in the
00:35:12.080
cat skills i think in the 40s and on paper you go well how is it this isn't going to make money
00:35:17.240
but it's one of the highest grossing movies of all times and probably one of the most profitable
00:35:21.440
as well. Yeah. Just a unique combination of really good actors. You know, when you've got
00:35:27.480
Patrick Swayze, peak Patrick Swayze-ness, you know, a great sort of 80s soundtrack.
00:35:34.660
And yeah, just one of those like lightning in a bottle things where it just everything somehow
00:35:40.720
worked with it. I think there was a lot of tension on set, but then it showed in how they interacted
00:35:46.500
with each other. And it just, yeah, a film like that was just one of those happy coincidences
00:35:51.460
where it just everything happened to work. Yeah, I suppose even, you know, a lot of the
00:35:59.160
people who worked on it at the time wouldn't have predicted that it was going to be this
00:36:02.380
mega hit, they just wouldn't have known. But yeah, sometimes films get lucky like that.
00:36:10.780
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dot co dot uk forward slash trigger to find out and we'll look we've we've been talking
00:37:50.220
for about an hour now 40 minutes or whatever it is and we've we've been a little bit negative
00:37:55.120
just a little bit just a little bit very unlike yeah exactly yeah are there any you know green
00:38:01.440
shoots. So is there any hope out there? Maybe could the new Top Gun movie, maybe could that
00:38:07.200
spark something? I think so, yeah. When a movie makes, I mean, it must be getting close to 800
00:38:13.680
million now. 800 mil? Yeah. The last time I checked, it was like 770 million worldwide.
00:38:20.880
So it'll reach 800, probably 900. It'd be cool if it reached a billion, but it's probably going to
00:38:25.200
get pushed out by other blockbusters this summer. But when a film like that does that well, people
00:38:30.960
take notice and I think they definitely take notice of when films fail in a high profile way
00:38:36.860
and so yeah I guess we just have to hope that we see more of this and with my channel with with
00:38:44.500
the reviews that I do if I spot movies nowadays that are genuinely good and enjoyable hell I'll
00:38:49.080
promote them as much as I can you know I'll recommend them to people so what have been some
00:38:53.860
of obviously people should go and check out your channel but for anyone watching this what have
00:38:58.440
been some of the movies that you've actually thought have managed to pierce this sort of
00:39:02.440
politicized social justice bubble well that was one the northman was another one i don't know if
00:39:07.300
that made a massive amount of money but it was one that i very much enjoyed um everything everywhere
00:39:12.600
all at once was a was a great movie um just again it was a story about um i think chinese immigrants
00:39:20.300
and and an older woman getting to see how her life might have played out if it should take in
00:39:25.000
different paths and so on but it was funny and inventive and and just a great all-around movie
00:39:29.480
um the what's the other one that spider-man movie the most recent one no way home we were all blown
00:39:38.100
away by it because it had no real politics in it it had no um social justice stuff you didn't have
00:39:45.340
a female character that was magically better than everyone else anything like that what they did was
00:39:49.860
they took all these older actors who'd played the same character, brought them all together
00:39:55.160
into a nice, compelling story, let everyone have their moment on screen, and they were
00:40:01.180
pretty respectful to previous generations of actors that had played the role. And it
00:40:06.040
just all came together really nice. So, you know, things like that, we were really surprised.
00:40:10.840
Like, who knew they could make a comic book movie that was still enjoyable, you know?
00:40:15.640
Well, there you go. Will, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. We're going to do
00:40:19.780
a couple of questions for our locals uh but before we do that we always finish our interviews with
00:40:25.980
the same question which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be
00:40:30.340
you know i always wondered why are so many people allergic to nuts these days i think we should be
00:40:36.800
talking about that it was unheard of when i was a kid now it's like everyone seems to have some
00:40:41.300
kind of nut allergy i don't understand it we used to let them die yeah which is how it should be
00:40:46.460
really like look if you can't eat your peanut you i mean you didn't make it you know what i mean
00:40:50.740
it was like you know little jimmy just got really ill every time he had a peanut butter
00:40:54.620
sandwich or something yeah and that was fine it was the system that worked you know what i mean
00:40:59.480
someone had to come in and mess with it it's separating the wheat from the chaff ultimately
00:41:02.940
so agreed mate you're not actually allergic to no no i just don't like that's a different thing
00:41:07.860
that's okay yeah you cannot like things yeah right nice to have ended it on a super right
00:41:12.040
wing note. There's nothing right wing about saying you deserve to die if you can't handle
00:41:16.480
a peanut. It's just practical reality. You're just not keeping up with the tribe. You're
00:41:21.240
slowing everybody else down. Yeah, but it's been an absolute pleasure. Will, if people
00:41:25.720
want to find you online, where is the best place to do that? You can find me on YouTube
00:41:29.820
under The Critical Drinker and you can find me on Twitter by the same handle. Fantastic
00:41:35.540
stuff. Thanks so much for coming on and thank you for watching.
00:41:42.040
this is a question that i would ask you it's a brilliant question it's from andy kid and he
00:41:53.020
wants to know your top five films and why oh i always hate these questions actually well at
00:41:58.560
least there's five so it's not like um too difficult but uh top five um one of them would
00:42:04.060
be saving private ryan just like probably a definitive war movie for me just absolutely
00:42:08.040
fantastic um what else uh i always had real fondness for uh falling down that michael douglas
00:42:15.080
movie fantastic man who i based my image on yeah great man i need that flat top hairstyle yeah um
00:42:22.520
big trouble in little china just because it's absolute peak john carpenter uh lovely and cheesy
00:42:29.320
and just really good fun so love that one um back to the future love it um i could happily watch all
00:42:37.640
all three of them and just have a great time but yeah the first one is just fantastic just real
00:42:41.740
magical movie um and the last one probably lord of the rings um the fellowship of the ring i think
00:42:47.780
is is my favorite again a movie you can just absolutely lose yourself in so those would be
00:42:52.860
my picks i think but you asked me next week it would probably be different ones yeah yeah it's
00:42:57.120
hard to pick isn't it yeah uh and uh somebody called uh i'm sure it's not actually the home
00:43:02.260
secretary priti patel but somebody called priti patel on our locals i'm pretty sure my immigration
00:43:07.140
papers are in order yeah you're getting deported back to scotland yeah or rwanda whichever you
00:43:12.240
prefer um she says uh why are prequels and sequels so often disappointing in comparison to the
00:43:17.920
original i i think a lot of the time because the original wasn't written with a sequel in mind
00:43:23.840
and so what they have to do then is try and pick up the threads of whatever story they had
00:43:28.000
and then construct a new narrative around that so that's why you sometimes um have a disappointing
00:43:33.340
sequel and also a lot of the time you just end up rehashing the same basic ideas just bigger
00:43:38.200
and again it's not going to have that same magic the next time around um you know the example that
00:43:43.920
i've used before is is something like predator yeah one of those 80s action movies but it worked
00:43:49.220
great because it was this mystery about what was killing all these people you know and how does it
00:43:54.280
work how can it go invisible all that stuff all that things all those things have been answered
00:43:58.160
by the end of the first movie so you try and do another one all you're doing is just doing the
00:44:02.440
same thing again but you're losing the mystery of it so I think that's part of the problem and
00:44:07.280
then prequels kind of the same issue in that you know where it's ultimately going to end and so if
00:44:14.900
it's if it comes to characters and so on and they're put in danger you know they're not going
00:44:19.440
to die because they're going to be alive in the next movie so you know you've got a little bit
00:44:22.960
of a problem there as well yeah a lot of the time it's just trying to construct narratives that
00:44:27.440
weren't really meant to be there originally that's that's why they're often disappointing
00:44:31.660
And I suppose it's probably quite hard to get a studio
00:44:41.480
Like you're not going to get someone to sign up
00:44:43.040
to three episodes, let's say, of like a completely new thing.