TRIGGERnometry - Critical Drinker： How Politics Ruined Hollywood

00:00:00.160 The writers in Hollywood now, you know, a lot of them will have gone to college for four or five years

00:00:04.920 where they've been told incessantly, the world is inherently racist and sexist.

00:00:10.420 Everyone's awful. Everyone hates each other. 0.76

00:00:12.500 It's just this big hierarchy of people getting oppressed by everyone else.

00:00:16.000 And so that's going to reflect in their mindset and it's going to reflect in what they write

00:00:18.900 and what they try to rationalize in their stories.

00:00:21.860 And that's why you get what you end up with.

00:00:30.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishan.

00:00:35.140 And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:40.340 Our brilliant guest today is a novelist, YouTuber and film critic Will Jordan aka The Critical Drinker. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:46.820 Thank you for having me.

00:00:47.740 It's such a pleasure to have you. You've got a brilliant YouTube channel that's absolutely crushing it.

00:00:51.840 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.

00:00:57.920 but before we do, tell us who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been your journey

00:01:02.240 through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I'm reasonably sure that I'm

00:01:06.340 Will Jordan. I'm a writer and eventually I became a YouTuber. I guess I got into this whole thing

00:01:13.280 because I'd always been interested in storytelling. I'd been fascinated by characters and how you can

00:01:18.180 just, you know, you can create these fictional worlds that people can just lose themselves in.

00:01:22.480 I think there's something really special and magical about that. And so it eventually led

00:01:27.260 me to becoming an author myself and wrote nine, ten books now. So it became quite a successful

00:01:35.220 thing for me. And yeah, I was really pleased with that. But several years ago, I guess I began to

00:01:41.220 notice a change in the movies that we were seeing in cinemas. They were gradually losing that kind

00:01:49.240 of magic and that ability to lose yourself in the story. And it was becoming more and more obvious

00:01:55.920 that they were trying to inject the politics,

00:01:59.520 the beliefs, the ideologies of the writers

00:02:01.740 into the stories.

00:02:04.080 And you were losing then your characters,

00:02:07.580 your quality of your storytelling.

00:02:09.240 And particularly when they were doing it

00:02:10.500 to older characters that they were bringing back.

00:02:14.160 You know, they were essentially just bringing back

00:02:16.020 these old actors, these old characters

00:02:17.580 and kind of breaking them down and humiliating them.

00:02:20.880 And funnily enough, I didn't like that

00:02:22.440 because I used to be a fan of a lot of these people.

00:02:24.160 and so I decided I need to just try and I guess add my voice to that conversation about it and I

00:02:30.840 thought well I can I can get back into YouTube because I used to do it way back when just messing

00:02:36.260 around just little little channel with a few hundred subscribers so I started that up again

00:02:41.080 and started talking about various movies and there was one day when I don't know what happened I

00:02:48.180 think maybe I had a beer or two before I recorded it and I was like my voice is awfully slurred

00:02:52.680 in this video. Well, you are Scottish, mate. Yeah, exactly. I mean, what can I do? It was 9am.

00:02:59.380 Of course you're going to have a drink. And I just thought, you know what, I'm just going to go with

00:03:03.020 this and have this kind of slurred, drunken voice that's really sarcastic. And wow, that video went

00:03:10.880 out, went viral. Before I knew it, I had half a million, maybe a million views on that. And I went

00:03:18.280 from a few hundred subscribers up to 5, 10, 20, 30,000.

00:03:22.640 And then it's just been a rollercoaster from there.

00:03:25.540 So it's been kind of fun.

00:03:26.520 Mate, we need to get you back on the source. 0.60

00:03:28.360 Yeah, exactly.

00:03:29.320 Just slow your words.

00:03:30.720 Bam, a million subscribers, here we come.

00:03:33.140 What is it they say?

00:03:33.900 In vitae veritas, you know, there's truth in drinks.

00:03:36.500 Yeah, exactly.

00:03:36.980 I'll go with that.

00:03:38.260 But what we were talking about just there,

00:03:41.480 it rang so true with me

00:03:43.140 because I come from more of a theatre perspective,

00:03:45.920 but I've seen the same thing happen with theatre.

00:03:49.420 But let's talk about specific examples.

00:03:51.600 In particular, where have you noticed it?

00:03:54.080 In what films, what characters?

00:03:56.080 Basically anything known by Disney at this point.

00:03:59.320 You know, obviously they took over the whole Star Wars brand.

00:04:01.880 They took over Marvel.

00:04:04.620 And particularly with Star Wars,

00:04:06.300 you would see characters like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker,

00:04:09.920 these classic heroes from 20, 30 years ago

00:04:12.720 that we all knew as kids that were awesome.

00:04:15.920 And suddenly they're getting brought back and they're like deadbeat dads

00:04:19.280 or they're just grumpy old men living on an island and just want to die and they've lost all hope. 0.98

00:04:25.380 You know, it's a terrible thing to do to these characters because it's one thing to kill them off.

00:04:31.380 It's another thing to destroy their legacy or the very essence of who they were.

00:04:35.700 And I think that's when I really started to notice it.

00:04:37.740 These heroes that we used to enjoy are just being denigrated and broken down

00:04:44.820 to try and push the new heroes that they tried to replace them with,

00:04:48.220 which are just usually cardboard cutouts with no real personalities.

00:04:52.360 That was the frustrating part for me.

00:04:54.480 And, Will, look, there'll be people here going, hang on a second, right?

00:04:57.900 Hollywood has always pushed certain narratives.

00:05:00.600 It has always pushed certain politics.

00:05:02.700 The American dream that you can go and be and do anything that you want to be or to do,

00:05:08.060 isn't that politics? Do you know what I mean?

00:05:09.840 I think there's a difference there in terms of one how pervasive it is in the story because now

00:05:15.260 it's so obvious and it's usually paired up with a lack of writing skill like the writers are

00:05:20.400 usually stumbling over themselves so quickly to push this stuff in they neglect to even bother

00:05:25.100 with a good story the other aspect like I just described there is the the trampling of of what

00:05:31.540 came before and the you know exploiting the work of previous generations of writers and storytellers

00:05:38.920 to try and elevate the stuff that you're producing now.

00:05:42.500 So I think those two strands combined

00:05:44.620 is just what makes it so distasteful now.

00:05:47.640 And it's quite a shift because in the past,

00:05:49.980 if you were doing a remake of something

00:05:52.200 or a sequel to something or a prequel to something,

00:05:55.100 you were kind of going like this was successful,

00:05:57.360 so we'll do more of that.

00:05:59.120 Whereas now you're starting to see, like you say,

00:06:01.700 where something that used to be a certain way

00:06:04.460 is now being presented as something else.

00:06:06.260 and you feel it's kind of affecting the quality of what's being made very much so yeah um it's one

00:06:12.400 thing to um to produce sequels to to previously successful movies you know hollywood's been doing

00:06:18.640 that for decades now fair enough it's another thing to start to say you know you know these

00:06:23.740 guys that uh you used to enjoy so much these stories that you used to appreciate they were

00:06:28.080 never that good what we're making now is better but it's not it's just a lie that you're expected

00:06:32.940 to buy into and it's patronizing to the viewer that's the thing that really gets on my nerves

00:06:37.800 i was watching i mean it's slightly different i was watching miss maser which i really enjoyed

00:06:42.380 the first three seasons were great and then in the fourth season it went weird they they started 0.94

00:06:47.760 preaching almost this kind of feminist message and you're going i don't give a shit just tell 1.00

00:06:53.900 me the story there's ways to work ideas like that into the story subtly yeah so that you you can 0.69

00:07:00.220 and almost present both sides of an argument

00:07:03.300 and let the audience make up their minds with stuff like that.

00:07:05.520 Just show the characters encountering difficulties.

00:07:08.720 That's one way to do it.

00:07:09.680 But if you just are straight up telling the audience,

00:07:11.840 this is what you must think, this is what you must believe,

00:07:14.720 that's just the hallmark of bad writing.

00:07:16.880 And it's what you see more and more now.

00:07:19.800 It's where you're then removed from the story.

00:07:22.400 You're no longer losing yourself in a fictional world

00:07:24.740 that you can believe in.

00:07:25.660 All you're seeing is the beliefs of the writer.

00:07:28.280 that's that's what it becomes and that's when it's detrimental and why do you think this is

00:07:33.740 happening well uh i mean there's a broad shift in our culture i think at the moment um you know we

00:07:41.180 i guess people talk about woke politics and and social justice and stuff how it's become really

00:07:46.240 prevalent um in the past several years i think in hollywood in america there was um there was

00:07:52.780 obviously a broad general reaction to the election in 2016 that that drove a lot of people nuts and

00:07:58.540 it was it was essentially a backlash then amongst the people of hollywood against that um so i think

00:08:05.080 all of those things combined are what's causing this um the shift in in what we see in movies

00:08:11.600 and storytelling um it's an attempt to make people feel and think a certain way yeah look i'm sure

00:08:17.640 that had a huge impact but it feels to me and maybe you'll correct me that actually something

00:08:23.440 has been changing for longer even than that and the reason I say this is like Francis and I were

00:08:29.660 talking about this before we started where they used to quite often a movie used to have a fairly

00:08:34.960 simplistic possibly but a moral message of some kind or a very aspirational quality to it like

00:08:42.160 if you think about movies from when I was a kid whether you think they're good or not like

00:08:46.720 Independence Day or whatever.

00:08:47.960 It was all about triumph over some kind of foreign, 1.00

00:08:50.840 hostile invasion, people coming together all over the world.

00:08:55.420 It was all about uniting and working together

00:08:57.800 to succeed in some way.

00:08:59.620 Whereas more recently, even in like stuff

00:09:02.260 that I think is incredibly well made,

00:09:03.820 whether that's Game of Thrones or House of Cards

00:09:06.220 or anything like that, I started to see that actually

00:09:09.040 what they were doing now is showing the opposite

00:09:11.980 and going, look at all the deep dysfunction in human beings.

00:09:16.960 Look at all the terrible ways that people operate.

00:09:19.800 Look at the way people cheat and steal and murder

00:09:24.260 and do all of those horrible things.

00:09:25.960 And it's shown from a kind of different perspective.

00:09:28.820 So instead of giving you an aspirational picture,

00:09:31.320 it became more about going, look how bad everything is.

00:09:34.900 Well, I think that ties into the mindset of a lot of the writers in Hollywood now.

00:09:39.740 you know a lot of them will have gone to college for four or five years where they've been told

00:09:43.800 incessantly the world is inherently racist and sexist everyone's awful everyone hates each other

00:09:50.440 it's just this big hierarchy of people getting oppressed by everyone else and so that's going

00:09:54.480 to reflect in their mindset and it's going to reflect in what they write and what they try to

00:09:58.040 rationalize in their stories and that's why you get what you end up with and yeah it's it is so

00:10:05.180 disheartening because like you say there used to be an aspirational message to so much of movie

00:10:09.980 making you know whether it was characters like rocky who have to to you know rise to some big

00:10:15.440 challenge to try and overcome it whether it's something like independence day like a big cheesy

00:10:19.720 blockbuster movie but there's a positive message there about people putting aside their differences

00:10:23.660 to to take on a bigger threat um unashamedly pro-american i suppose as well and that's again

00:10:29.980 what you see now is there's this kind of nihilism and this kind of almost hatred of their own

00:10:37.920 country. America was never that good anyway, and it was all founded on racism and slavery and all

00:10:43.720 that stuff. It engenders this kind of negative mindset in the audience, I think, and they come

00:10:51.260 away unsatisfied by it. I don't know if the writers in their way feel like, well, we're making the

00:10:55.520 world a better place because we're educating people about the problems of the world.

00:10:59.980 But there's a format for doing that.

00:11:01.660 And if you just focus on that,

00:11:05.220 you end up just leaving your audience

00:11:06.640 feeling downbeat and unhappy.

00:11:09.040 And I think that's why, you know,

00:11:10.620 a movie like Top Gun Maverick that came out,

00:11:13.340 it's a sequel to a film from like the 80s.

00:11:16.140 You know, it should never even in all,

00:11:19.580 you know, in any rational world,

00:11:21.320 it never even should have got made so long,

00:11:23.860 you know, so many years later.

00:11:27.080 But there it is.

00:11:28.080 And it's a really good, fun movie.

00:11:30.900 It's positive.

00:11:32.020 It's upbeat.

00:11:32.760 It doesn't try and denigrate the past

00:11:35.680 or put down its previous generation of characters.

00:11:38.500 It's respectful.

00:11:40.760 And it ends up just being a really great, fun movie.

00:11:43.280 And people come out of that feeling good about themselves.

00:11:46.220 What's so bad about that?

00:11:49.180 We're allowed to feel happy occasionally.

00:11:51.820 Not anymore, mate.

00:11:52.700 Yeah.

00:11:53.320 But you know, sorry, just on this very point, Francis,

00:11:55.840 like you mentioned for example slavery right there's a history of movies about slavery i

00:12:01.440 remember as a kid here at school going to see amstead amistad and that is a movie about a

00:12:07.020 horrible chapter in human history but it also shows that people working together and people

00:12:12.700 uh advocating for their rights and and freedom of express all of that stuff can actually achieve

00:12:19.140 results is saying like we're not doomed as human beings to the worst elements of our past we're

00:12:24.840 not doomed to our most base instincts we're not doomed to to be constantly stuck in this

00:12:30.500 endless eternal battle between groups actually when we work together we can get to the point

00:12:37.240 of our common humanity actually triumphing over all that tribalism yeah and now we're just doing

00:12:42.760 the exact opposite we're just going here's here's another movie about how we're all evil yes you

00:12:48.900 know uh yeah yeah that's it yeah i mean i there's nothing i can add to that like you pretty much

00:12:54.320 articulate it perfectly it's the yeah it's the mindset now of making movies but surely that's

00:12:59.900 gotta that's gotta be unsustainable you'd think but they keep doing it i mean my my rationale has

00:13:05.900 always been uh eventually the money will run out you know so many of these movies that they try to

00:13:10.900 do uh they fail uh and they end up losing money for the studio um and you know as many um ideologically

00:13:18.880 driven people as there are in hollywood there's even more guys who are just money men they just

00:13:24.440 want to make cash and they don't care what it is that does that but if they see enough movies that 0.97

00:13:29.520 are in the red there there has to come a point where they say enough of this crap we've got to

00:13:34.700 stop this we have to start making movies that are actually popular that people like so you just you

00:13:40.060 have to hope that eventually it's going to filter through i mean like i say there's there's occasional

00:13:43.320 films that do crop up, like Top Gun, Maverick, that have done really well. And hopefully they

00:13:49.700 serve as a little lesson for people that it can still work. These older style movies that are

00:13:57.240 positive, upbeat, patriotic, whatever it might be, they can be a massive success if they're done

00:14:02.760 right. We just have to hope that it'll happen eventually. You know, these are all excellent

00:14:07.900 points because I remember going to watch 12 Years a Slave. And I remember saying to my ex-girlfriend

00:14:11.700 as I walked out, I said, I think the only way you can enjoy that film

00:14:14.720 is if you are actually racist.

00:14:17.840 That's the only way, because apart from that,

00:14:20.960 it's just an hour and a half of some of the most horrific violence 0.98

00:14:24.280 against black people. 0.99

00:14:25.420 And you go, this is obviously accurate, all of these things, 0.99

00:14:30.220 but you go, this, it's just awful.

00:14:33.280 It doesn't leave you with any sense of anything

00:14:39.300 apart from just deep horror.

00:14:41.580 Yeah.

00:14:42.180 I mean, obviously, different movies are designed to do different things.

00:14:45.180 Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.

00:14:45.720 I mean, Hotel Rwanda is the same, right?

00:14:47.240 You watch it to get a picture of what happened.

00:14:49.240 You're not walking out there looking for a feel-good moment.

00:14:52.460 Exactly.

00:14:53.000 You can watch Schindler's List.

00:14:54.680 You're probably not going to have a blast watching that movie,

00:14:57.020 but it's an important movie.

00:14:57.640 It depends on your political opinion.

00:14:58.640 Well, maybe, yeah.

00:14:59.420 But it's an important movie.

00:15:00.980 Yeah, of course.

00:15:01.460 And it's obviously a deeply moving and poignant film,

00:15:04.780 but not necessarily an enjoyable film.

00:15:07.980 So I think different films can do that.

00:15:09.640 But I think the problems come in when you're ostensibly trying to make some blockbuster,

00:15:16.000 you know, fun, upbeat movie, and then you start working in this other stuff.

00:15:19.920 Like, oh, by the way, do you know that, like, loads of people in America are racist or,

00:15:23.860 you know, whatever it might be.

00:15:25.900 It's just, it often comes across as just weird moments of you're trying to make something

00:15:31.220 into something it's not.

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00:17:14.740 The interesting thing as well is that

00:17:17.320 they make these racist characters so clunky.

00:17:20.900 Yeah.

00:17:21.380 Where you just go, if you were a racist,

00:17:23.940 you wouldn't be racist at the top of your voice

00:17:27.600 in a public place where everyone can hear.

00:17:29.940 you know it's just completely terrible writing yeah and it's just it's clumsiness on the part

00:17:36.140 of the writers whether they don't have the experience whether they are just like i say

00:17:41.700 falling over themselves to get that point across and they don't care how clumsily they do it

00:17:46.200 maybe that's how it is but uh yeah there were in the past i think there would be more of a

00:17:52.340 nuance to these characters you know you might show them having uh positive qualities but also

00:17:59.020 there's this darker side to them that comes across sometimes and it's it'd be an interesting

00:18:04.360 way of saying well this is this is how it manifests in people sometimes they might not

00:18:08.780 consciously be aware of it they might not always be a big cartoonish um you know racist who's just

00:18:15.800 yelling at the top of his lungs but um it comes across subtly um but that can be the the difference

00:18:21.100 in a character but yeah i just don't think writers these days have got that kind of subtlety to them

00:18:25.020 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?

00:18:42.580 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.

00:19:03.800 And the thing is, they all knew as well. It's not like they just randomly took a picture.

00:19:07.680 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.

00:19:14.380 And so, yeah, it's like you say, the backlash to that prompted this huge panic amongst them.

00:19:22.660 And it's like, yeah, we have to prove how virtuous we are.

00:19:26.040 And suddenly that's why you get, you know, diversity quotas to even be nominated for an Oscar.

00:19:32.380 Really?

00:19:32.740 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.

00:19:45.800 In Hollywood, I would have said they're the majority, aren't they?

00:19:48.620 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.

00:19:58.860 what should speak for itself as the end product and so when you start getting into that mindset of

00:20:04.640 um you know a movie can only be considered worthy if it's got x number of different boxes ticked

00:20:12.200 in terms of the people working on it you're not necessarily going to get the best people

00:20:15.940 you're just you're ticking boxes like i say and that's just that's a really bad way of working

00:20:21.000 it's like they're trying to really artificially tackle a problem that should be much more um

00:20:26.420 organically changed you know the whole culture I guess of Hollywood needs to shift to just let

00:20:33.960 more people in to work on these films and give them a chance to succeed on their own merits not

00:20:38.080 force them into positions they might not be ready for it's an interesting point and I think it comes

00:20:43.860 back to what you said earlier which is we've kind of got to a position where like we all think that

00:20:49.540 our job is to educate other people and and what what they mean by that is to force them to think

00:20:55.880 in a different way yeah right and there's there's an extraordinary level of arrogance that's implied

00:21:01.080 within that which is you have the knowledge that other people must accept as fact and act

00:21:08.720 accordingly and i think that's kind of where the diversity quota stuff comes from because it's like

00:21:13.160 there's a right way to think and it must be enforced it can't just be introduced but do you

00:21:19.520 think this is going to change over time we talked about top government but like i know the daily

00:21:23.980 wire starting now my big fear with the daily wire movies was like they're going to make like there's

00:21:29.740 a left-wing hollywood and they're going to make a right-wing hollywood and then we've just got two

00:21:33.960 extraordinarily politicized movie making things and the people who actually just want to watch a

00:21:40.800 good movie aren't going to do that but from what i've been hearing actually the daily wire is

00:21:44.640 making things that are uh the non-documentary stuff that's just a good movie or that's their

00:21:49.360 trump that's what they're trying to do so do you think the pushback's already started or do you

00:21:53.200 think we're some way off i think it has started yeah and um you know companies like the daily

00:21:58.420 wire it's good that they're doing what they're doing they are um i don't know if they're really

00:22:03.300 going to become a legitimate rival to hollywood because they're ultimately just one company they

00:22:08.020 can only produce so many films and they've only got so much of a budget um yeah i've seen one

00:22:13.180 two of the things that they've produced um that the run hide fight was one that i watched which

00:22:18.460 was which was all right you know it wasn't an amazing movie but it's kind of a step in the

00:22:22.120 right direction. And yeah, I had hoped that what we would see is just more of a realization within

00:22:30.360 Hollywood themselves of we can't keep sustaining this, we can't keep bankrolling this kind of

00:22:36.420 lunacy. And they would gradually shift more towards the center ground. And there was signs

00:22:42.200 of it for a while. Like I know that the guy who took over running Disney, Bob Chapek, he's very

00:22:48.940 much just a money man. He doesn't care about ideology. And he even made that his mission

00:22:53.000 statement. He said, Disney's now a for-profit company. We're not here to push ideology and

00:22:58.620 we're not here to get involved in politics. When he tried to do that, there was a massive backlash

00:23:04.060 against him basically saying, well, you must be racist then or whatever. And staff were walking

00:23:08.880 out. So I don't know how successful that's ultimately going to be. But I guess it's

00:23:15.020 indicative of a bit of a shift where people are realizing that what we've been trying to do over

00:23:20.640 the past five or 10 years, it's slowly alienating people. You know, look at the Oscars. That used

00:23:26.620 to be a huge event. People would tune in to watch that. Now it's like their ratings are like a third

00:23:31.080 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. 0.98

00:23:39.580 I said this, I made a video about this. I bet you people are going to start starting fights at the

00:23:43.300 oscars now just to try and get headlines you know but i do find it worrying as someone who loves

00:23:49.880 film and someone who loves cinema just look at movie stars really how many great or new movie

00:23:56.260 stars have been produced recently yeah they haven't you're relying on tom cruise who's a

00:24:02.340 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

00:24:12.200 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

00:24:23.820 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

00:24:34.380 what you what you're losing is that kind of magic of of stardom which just doesn't exist anymore

00:24:42.440 um there was there used to be a time when oh shit there's a new tom cruise movie of course we 0.57

00:24:47.220 you know we need to go see that because i'm sure it'll be good um you know he's like really the

00:24:51.660 last one there's nobody is going to get totally fired up that's uh there's a new chris pratt film

00:24:57.500 um or that there's a new dwayne johnson film like those are just you know those guys have their their

00:25:03.740 careers, obviously, and they make a lot of money, but they're not stars in the same sense that you

00:25:10.180 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

00:25:27.580 used to have guys like Steven Spielberg who would just, you know, they could pick and choose the

00:25:31.880 projects they want you to do, they could get things commissioned on the strength of their name

00:25:35.560 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

00:25:46.940 really direct their own movies. They are brought in to do scenes like this where people are sitting

00:25:51.780 in a room talking to each other. Then when it comes to the action scenes or the CGI, someone

00:25:56.460 else does that they do all that and that's about 90 of the movie so now you've got directors who

00:26:02.240 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

00:26:13.420 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,

00:26:52.100 that will have an old character in it,

00:26:54.540 but it will usually have a couple of new characters

00:26:56.660 and then they get their own spin-off movie

00:26:59.160 or spin-off TV show

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.

00:27:09.640 And yeah, one of my other content creators,

00:27:13.060 we were on a stream a week or two ago

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

00:27:45.720 so that people can binge it.

00:27:47.680 And what about the British film industry?

00:27:49.600 Is it significantly different

00:27:51.480 or are we making all the same mistakes here?

00:27:53.660 I don't think we're quite the same as the Americans 0.74

00:27:56.340 because we don't quite have that streaming focus that they do.

00:28:01.340 And we don't have these mega huge companies

00:28:04.640 running things in the same way that they do.

00:28:07.300 So Britain, I think, is more restrained

00:28:10.720 when it comes to that kind of thing.

00:28:12.900 But then how many big movies are we producing now?

00:28:16.720 I mean, we've got the Bond films.

00:28:18.420 They come out once every like five years or so at this point.

00:28:21.620 I mean, Bond will be a woman before long.

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

00:28:31.580 and then they end with this little,

00:28:33.440 James Bond will return.

00:28:35.320 Like, how?

00:28:37.400 In what form?

00:28:38.500 As a ghost?

00:28:39.860 He's got a new identity, mate.

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,

00:28:55.720 you had all these independent houses.

00:28:57.320 Okay, they were then bought by companies, people like Miramax.

00:29:00.760 They were creating brilliant independent movies.

00:29:04.300 That doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.

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 0.97

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 0.60

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.

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00:37:43.100 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 0.93

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.66

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

00:44:35.040 to agree to making like a three-part movie

00:44:37.240 unless there's been a hugely successful book

00:44:40.000 like The Lord of the Rings, right?

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.

00:44:47.460 Yes.

00:44:48.000 Yeah, makes sense.

00:44:49.540 All right, well, that's it.

00:44:50.320 Thank you very much.

00:44:51.360 No problem.

00:44:51.820 Thank you.

00:45:01.660 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - July 14, 2022

Critical Drinker： How Politics Ruined Hollywood

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