Modern Wisdom - #591 - Critical Drinker - Why Does Modern Cinema Suck So Much?

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

Critical Drinker is a movie critic, an analyst of modern entertainment media and a YouTuber. Cinema is no longer just about entertainment, it's now a platform for social and cultural ideologies to be pushed through. If you don't like what Hollywood's execs tell you to like? Too bad, that's your prejudice showing, you bigot. Expect to learn why there are no more positive heroic role models in movies, the problem with Velma getting naked on a cartoon, why Rotten Tomatoes reviews are diverging more than ever before, why Matt Damon was always right, just how destroyed Rick & Morty is as a franchise and much more... Sponsors: Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Critical Drinker on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker  Follow Critical Drinker on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TheCriticalDri2  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Critical Drinker. He's a movie critic, an analyst of modern entertainment media, and a YouTuber. Cinema is no longer about entertainment. It's now a platform for social and cultural ideologies to be pushed through. If you don't like what Hollywood execs are telling you to like, too bad, that's your prejudice showing. You big it. Today, expect to learn why there are no positive heroic role models in movies anymore. The problem with Velma getting naked on a cartoon, why Rotten Tomatoes reviews a diverging more than ever before, why Matt Damon was always right, just how destroyed Rick and Morty

is as a franchise, and much more. Reflecting on this, I really would hate to be in the movie business at the moment, but one of the big signs of positivity, a glimmering light in this sort of heap of feces, is that according to Critical Drinker, because of the lead time between making stuff and when it gets published, in about three years or so, we should actually have a ton of good new movies and TV shows. So, hold on tight because good stuff is coming. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Critical Drinker. What is your background? Tell me how you end up getting interested in in critiquing movies. Oh gosh. Right, what's the short version here? Yeah, I mean, I guess from being a young kid,

like I was always just fascinated by movies and I was fascinated by the way that the stories worked. You know, the way that they would introduce us to the different characters, the way that they were structured, so that you know, you had that well-defined, like build up of action and then the sort of catastrophe that leads you to the lowest point and then the big resolution at the end to give you that dramatic high that finishes it off. I remember being at, even as a kid, I started to recognize that pattern in movies and it was something that kind of interested me.

And it led me into wanting to do storytelling of my own eventually. And so I got into writing novels, that sort of thing. And obviously YouTube came along and I was interested in the idea of starting to break that down and critique things a little bit. My early videos were shockingly amateurish but it was just fun. It was a fun experience to get used to it, get used to editing videos, all that sort of stuff. Yeah, obviously I took a break from that to actually focus on my writing career for a good long while, and then a few years ago it decided to come back and start doing it again and gosh, I just really got into character one time as the drunken critical drinker. I think it was after a few glasses of Jack and I noticed I was slurring my words and I just thought, what the hell, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna embrace it and lean into it.

And that video just went viral, man. Like within a few days it had like a million views and suddenly my channel exploded and that's what got me started on the path I'm on now, I suppose. So it worked out well. What was it, so video that kicked off? So what was it like? So that was a video that kicked off. I think it was about Captain Marvel. So that would have been about three years ago now. It was, yeah, I think because there was such a media circus around that movie, all of the talk about it.

Finally, we're getting a female superhero and all that nonsense. And I just thought, gosh, this is all a bit silly and it kind of really just conveniently forgets all the great characters that we'd had up until then and I thought I'll just do a sarcastic video saying I totally agree with this while showing you know all these awesome female characters through all the different decades and for whatever reason that just absolutely blew up so that was So that was my first taste of YouTube success, I suppose. I looked at an article earlier on that identified the divergence in rotten tomatoes, critics and audience scores and they have never been further apart on average

according to the data science that was done by this. So as an example, critics loved and audiences loved Star Wars the last Jedi, which was 49% divided, and audiences loved and critics loved Venom, which was 51% divided. In 2022, the gap between audience and critics scores on Rotten Tomatoes has become bigger than ever. Audiences have given the top 10 movies on average score more than 19 points higher than critics by far the biggest difference this century. The only two of this year's 10 movies where audiences and critics are even close was Top Gun Maverick and The Batman. What do you think that says about the

state of modern movies? I think they're not making people happy. I think people are watching them and they're coming away fundamentally unsatisfied and the critics that I guess they used to kind of trust because they would generally agree on movies because I think the actual quality of films was better but 10-20 years ago. Now they're diverging because they're beginning to realize that these critics that they used to trust, they're basically just paid to give positive reviews. And you know, it's in their interest to be positive because it allows them to keep getting access, to film premieres, to get in all those little lovely, goody baskets and stuff that studios send you if you're a professional critic.

And you know, that's what they go on. And so there's now this realization of, wow, these people are really full of crap and I can't trust their opinions on anything. And so yeah, I'm glad that it's finally happened. I'm glad people have organ up to like really how rotten that entire industry is. I think rotten dramatic is a good term for it. That is a situation though when critics are poorly reviewing films and the audience is reviewing a film well. So this isn't a case of the critics cosying up to some studio. What's going on there?

I think in those cases it may be a case of ideological persuasion in that generally when that happens in the movie world, surely not. Who would have thought I think generally when that happens, it's a case of a movie which doesn't align with the current ideology of Hollywood and audiences generally lap that up because man, most people are just, they're not left wing, they're not right wing, they're just in the middle and when they go to the movies, they just want to be entertained, that's all they want. And when they get a movie that gives them that, they generally love it. But then the critics, they don't love it because it's not spouting the ideology that they've been taught that they have to agree with and they have to promote any cost.

So yeah, that's generally when that happens. It's interesting, right, because movies for a long time were a good vehicle that could be used to put forward an important social movement narrative. It was a way of communicating to the masses in a entertaining and subtle way that this is something that you might have to think about. But it does seem more and more flagrant, more and more mask off, less subtle subtle and more almost like being graduated, like being whipped by the film. I, yeah, I don't get it. In a lot of cases, I don't get why people would want to watch them. You know, it's, what can I liken it to? Yeah, I mean, I suppose the classic example is something

like the last Jedi from Star Wars. If you go watch that, it's like, you know, I guess I just have to accept now that all white men are just awful at everything and they suck. And that's just that, myself included, you know, so I should just hang my head and shame for the rest of my life. Yeah, it's a strange, it's a strange sort of It's a strange sort of offering that they're given us now where we're going to actively hate you as an art form. We're going to make our business to make you feel awful about yourself. And if you dare to push back on that and reject the offering that we're giving you, then we just label you as a bigot or a reactionary or whatever stupid term we label people with these days.

There's no actually engagement with criticism anymore and it's a frustrating thing. But then again, I feel like more and more people are just seeing through that now. Like you say, the mask is off and it's becoming very obvious how biased and you know, tilting in one direction is, I think that TV show that came out recently Velma, I don't know if you've heard about that, but it's like this weird attempt to reboot the whole Scooby Doo thing that we watched when we were kids, you know, the kids cartoon.

Now it's told from the point of view of Elma and it's all about like, every character has been race swapped, everyone's gay now, the only character that's been kept as a white guy is Fred who's now the butt of every single joke, he's an idiot, he can't do anything for himself, all that stuff, and it's like, it's like a parody of the kind of messages that they were putting out a few years ago. But it's so over the top and ridiculous that it's like every person from every side of the argument is hating on it. I think it's really funny. Well, I mean, if you were a well-meaning, moderate, left, liberal person, and this was the popular media that was supposed to represent your side, I would be so ridiculously embarrassed. It's worse to have your point of view or your side of the aisle be misrepresented by this like woke it's like a parasite that's just embodied what used to be quite a loved institution. Scooby-Doo is legendary right when we were kids Scooby-Doo was pretty-

I think it was just it was it was just innocent fun, you know, and I think that's that's what people took it as and now it's like God it from what I've heard because I only watched the first couple episodes and I was done. But even then, it's like, it's got 15-year-old girls in the shower room, you know, like, full on nude. It's got like, um, Velma, who's like, again, the same age in a strip club. It's like, what are you, what are you showing us? What are you doing with this? And it's like, I have to question the mindset

of the people who have written this and created it and the executives that signed off on it. This has got to be borderline. This is really distasteful stuff now. And it's like, this all came from a goofy kids TV show from the 1970s about a bunch of college students that went around solving mysteries. Why are you doing this?

Well, we've seen the same thing with she hulk, right? That was sort of pretty mask off in terms of how that got repurposed. And the worst one that I've seen recently was Dr. Strange too. I watched that on a plane before anybody on YouTube had had chance to do a summary explaining why I shouldn't watch it even on a plane. And I got side-swiped by, yeah, I watched a little bit of she-hulk and then bailed out, but I watched all of Dr. Strange 2 because I was literally trapped in a tin box flying at 35,000 feet.

Yeah, you watch pretty much anything when you're on a long whole flight, wouldn't you? Correct. But I mean, it's the same tenor with that, right? It's, I don't know, it just, it doesn't feel subtle anymore. There's no progression to the characters, especially if they're female or from a minority. And this is something that I really enjoyed talking to baggage claim about,

which is that it patronizes women because it basically makes them out to be incapable of ever dealing with any challenge They can't overcome anything. They are perfect as they are. There's a moment in Dr. Strange 2 where zombie Benedict Cumberbatch goes back in time to tell America Chavez the South American daughter of two women That she just needed to believe in herself all along. That is the running theme when it comes to these female characters and it's such an unhealthy

message to send to people. You know, even like taking our personal opinions out of the equation that it's like, you know, trying to make it a woman or just perfect everything, which, you know, we're all human, none of us are perfect. It's teaching people that you shouldn't need to strive to improve yourself, you shouldn't need to struggle. And when you come across challenges or adversity, the rest of the world just needs to accept that you're amazing the way you are. Imagine if people took that to heart and tried to take that lesson out into the world and apply it to their lives It would be disastrous for them. They would just get hit with like failure after failure you know

It used to be such a much more inspiring message that movies gave you about the power of self-improvement of rising to challenges and struggling and You know maybe failing and making mistakes, but learning from them and becoming better as a result. That was a great thing to teach people because that's how you progress in life, you know. So yeah, to try and do that, it's not only is it patronizing,

but it's really counterproductive for people. Especially given that a lot of the lessons that people learn about how to exist in the world come from popular media. Now, especially given that these are movies that ostensibly are supposed to help people who perhaps don't come from the perfect sort of background. Maybe they haven't had an amazing parental household,

giving them all of the worldly wisdom that they should do to be able to navigate through. Okay, so you are going to, in some regard, like as a movie studio, be a surrogate parent, almost or like a sage or a grand parent, in some regard to pass down. These are some kind of timeless truths that you can hold onto. And the timeless truth is, if you're a 15-year-old mixed race investigator coming out of high school with a talking dog for a friend, get naked in the shower and go to a strip club.

That seems to be the lesson. And yeah, like it's, again, to talk about messaging and movies, you know, as you said there, they used to be the acknowledgement that the older generation had wisdom to impart to the younger generation who were just coming up, you know, they can teach them the lessons that they learned in their lives and you know, give them something to prepare them for the challenges that they were going to face. That was a timeless kind of

universal concept because that's how people generally get by in life. You can learn things from your elders, but again, there seems to be this movement now in modern movies to do away with that and say that the older generation have nothing to teach you. There's nothing useful you can learn from them. You're just like I say, you're great the way you are, people just need to acknowledge your awesomeness. And particularly if that older mentor-type figure happens to be a man, yeah, there's no way he's not allowed to teach you anything. And you touched upon this with multiverse of madness,

like Doctor Strange 2. There was a bit in the TV show One Division, which is the one that just leads into Doctor Strange. And people were asking, well, how is he not there? Surely that's exactly the kind of situation he should be involved in because he's a magic guy. And Kevin Feige, the guy who runs Marvel, said, well, it would look bad if we had a white man coming in to show wonder how to use her powers. That's the mentality. He's not

allowed to do that because he's the wrong sex and he's the wrong ethnicity. That's the mentality. He's not alike to do that because he's the wrong sex and he's the wrong ethnicity That's the we're basically living with like this this weird new age like segregationism in in movies There's there's like a set of rules and laws that these movies have to adhere to now where it comes to their storytelling And this is just one of the rules Can't have a guy, especially a white guy, teaching a female character anything valuable. He has to be dumb and he has to be useless and she has to be better than him and everything.

Fair enough, but it's like trying to tell a story with one arm tied behind your back. You're crippling the writer's ability to tell a good story because you're putting so many rules on them to try and appease all the ridiculous demands of all the people on social media now who get offended by everything that you cripple your ability to tell a story. So, yeah. Yeah.

When it comes to getting awards, didn't I hear you talk about the fact that you're only eligible for certain awards if you have the right kind of representation both in front of the camera, behind the camera in terms of the studio and stuff. Yeah, the academy, like for the Oscars, straight up, published their guidelines, basically saying your movie isn't even eligible to be considered for an Oscar unless it's got X percentage of ethnic minorities, X percentage of women, X percentage of LGBT people, all of that stuff. That is now the defining factor as in whether or not your movie is even eligible for consideration for an award of any kind.

And again, I just have to ask, like, why? Like, how does that improve the quality of a film by just demanding that certain people have to be involved in it? You know? God forbid you would just hire people based on how good they were in other jobs. You know? And that's not going to get any better. Yeah. So I'm going back to the conversation, especially around men. Why do you think Hollywood hates men so much at the moment? I'm probably a guy named Harvey, like that was definitely part of it, who was obviously, you know, he got caught, I obviously did a lot of terrible things and rightly got, you know, imprisoned for it. But the result was this seismic, you know, shockwave

that went through Hollywood and it just became from that point. We can't have men in sort of positions of power. We can't have like traditional strong masculine men in lead roles anymore. And if you ever get a character like that, they almost always become the butt of a joke. It's always like, look at this guy thinking he's like Macho Man or whatever and then he fails at something. It's always the same.

Like Thor. Yeah, like Thor. Big Muscle Guy just becomes an absolute goofy clown because isn't it funny to laugh at them? How many times have you seen a man get kicked in the balls in a Disney movie? It's funny isn't it? It's really funny when that happens. Not so funny when it happens to you though. And again, you reverse the genders there. Like, if you showed a woman getting kicked in the crotch, suddenly it's not funny anymore. It would have been a thermal nuclear explosion on social media if that was ever shown

on a, in a mainstream movie, particularly if it was shown for laughs, it's not gonna happen, but it's okay when it happens to men. You know, it's just this weird double standard and I think it partly, you know, a big part of it is a result of like Harvey and all that crap. And a part of it is just a shift in the kind of culture and Hollywood that I think was perhaps happening anyway. Just trying to, this constant drive to redefine masculinity, which often means getting some skinny 14-year-old dude and putting them in a dress and like saying, this is masculine, ain't you know? Like, yeah, sure it is. Like, whatever. But yeah, that kind of dual, almost pincer movement of like cultural change within Hollywood and reaction to things that have been exposed within their own ranks. It's just been, you know, men, masculine, male

heroes are not a viable commodity in movies at the moment. You know. But that's why you get like something. I was just going to say that's why when you get the occasional movie that does dare to show them, they usually do really well because people have been starved of this stuff for years. What would be some examples of that like Top Gun? Probably, yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty good example. Yeah, it was like, it was a movie that's combined all of those things together like we were talking about,

the aging mentor, who would normally be a subject of mockery. A different director, a different writer, would have portrayed Maverick as completely over the hill and you know, getting outclassed by all these young people who are faster and better than him. No, this movie dared to say and it was probably partly because Tom Cruise and he's got an ego on him. Say, no, he's still good at what he does and you know what, he's got way more experienced than you. He's been there and done that and he can kick your ass if he wants to he's still able to do that and liquid it one point five billion dollars it was the biggest movie of the year by

far and all these Marvel properties that used to dominate and you know absolutely wipe the floor with everything else they were trailing far behind and it was I was very happy to see that it pleased me. I so I watched I've flown a lot over the last year so almost all of the movies that I've seen have been on planes and I really enjoyed top gun but I didn't think it was ridiculous I would have given it maybe a like a seven point probably an eight probably an eight on the tomato meter. I think I would have given it. So still good, but kind of shows that the bar isn't exactly set superbly high. No, that's you're yeah, you're exactly right. We are just living in a world where

the movies that we're getting are so terrible that anything that's just borderline okay is suddenly healed as a masterpiece. You know, that's it. Like, it's lowered expectations, and so this is what you get. You know, movies that are... Maybe it's a really smart strategy from the movie studios to just get everybody's expectations so low that they can low-ball us with something that's brilliant. I mean, I don't think so because, well, it's not like they can't produce good movies. They were doing it for decades. But then if you look back to like your favorite movies of all time, I'm willing to bet

that none of them are newer than about 20 years old. You know, they're probably all from the 2000s, the early 2000s, back through the 1980s, the 70s. I don't think there'll be anything from the past 10, 15 years. Because they've become lazy. They've become lazy. They have started relying on big tentpole movies, particularly remakes, particularly reboots of things, endless superhero movies, you know, that's the

been the money makers and it's just inspired this culture of laziness in them. What's going on with how many reboots and remakes are happening at the moment? Is it just that it's too much of a risk to try and start a new franchise? I think it's new franchise? I think it's on paper doing a reboot or a remake of something is it should be a winning strategy because you should in theory have instant access to that devoted fan base. We just want to see their favorite property brought back. And so financially it seems to make sense. The problem is that you can't often capture lightning in a bottle. You know, it's something like Ghostbusters. Classic movie, we all loved it back in the day. It worked because a bunch of really good creative talents all came together, had a great script, great director, everything just worked perfectly. They tried to do it for the second one, back in the 90s, yeah,

that wasn't very good. And then you got Ghostbusters 2016. Well, we all know how that turned out. We're going to reputate for modern audiences, capitalizing on the Ghostbusters name and look what happened. It was a flop.. It happens over and over again, but it's like they're always trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle from these past successes because well movies are expensive to make now particularly. If you're dropping $200 million on a film, then that's a lot of money to invest. You want a pretty solid guarantee that it's going to be successful and it used to be that that was a pretty good way of

doing it. You can market it as we're going to bring back this great franchise that we've got a huge fan base for everyone to be happy. Did you see that clip of Matt Damon on first we feast or Hot Wings where he's talking about why modern movies seem to be less adventurous? Have you seen this clip? Do you know what I'm talking about? I have, yeah, because he's crying while eating this stuff.

I don't know if this is like environment. Yeah, I don't know if this is like... It's the environment. Yeah, I don't know if this is almost like how you inject people with like, you know, truth serum and stuff. Like their mind is so fogged by the pain of the hot wings that like they're just gonna spit out straight on truths. I'm trying to remember what exactly he said during that scene. So he says that the death of DVD sales

has meant that movies, studios can't be as venturous anymore, that you basically got a second bite at the Apple of being able to make money. It might not win at the box office, but it can kind of be this ascending, underground victory. And he uses this example of someone that said, it's going to cost me 25 million for this, half of it goes to this. I need to double the spend on that, so I need a hundred million to make the money back. And the only way I'm going to do that is through DVD sales.

What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, that's very true. It was very much the long tale of sales that would come after the theatrical release. And yeah, there's been plenty of movies that, you know, they didn't make their budget when they were in movie theaters, but they ultimately became profitable years later just through DVD sales and all that stuff. So yeah, there's absolutely something to be said for that. Yeah, I guess it's just a different world, you know, with streaming, obviously that's

radically all-or-day equation. You know, the moment something gets released onto streaming, it's's radically all-day equation. You know, the moment something gets released onto streaming, it's gonna be on the high seas and that's gonna take a huge chunk of your revenue as well, that people just get it for free. And yeah, I guess there's just this general climate of risk of ocean, you know, what is the things that makes money at the moment?

The other thing I was going to say is the death of this mid-budget movie. They don't really exist anymore. There used to be a time when you would get your big blockbusters that was like $100 million budget. You would get your little indie movies that were done for practically nothing, but then you would get in between films that had 20, 30 million allocated to them. Not a huge amount, but then they don't have to make a huge amount in order to become profitable and they're a little bit creative and a little bit outside the box, which you can't afford to do with $200 million on the line. So I think that's been a big change as well. One thing that I definitely hadn't considered was that Harvey Weinstein might have been the gateway drug or the pebble at the top of the avalanche that caused downstream from this

for a bunch of other problems to occur. I understood that it is not particularly popular at the moment to uphold men, particularly white men as being competent in the media. I didn't realize that this would be this sort of pincer movement to pronged attack, both coming from the internal milieu that's happening inside of the studios in the production world generally, and then also being fed back up from what's happening in society as well. That's quite interesting. I think as well, we now are past the time when writers

in Hollywood actually lived lives. If you went back to the 70s and 80s in Hollywood, these writers, man, most of them had lived a life. They might have fought in Vietnam or something. They probably came from rough upbringings. They had to fight their way to get into Hollywood and probably just had interesting life experience that they could bring forward to their writing on screen.

The writers that you get now, they would go on to some, you know. that you get now, they would go into some, you know. So that is, that sound is, I'm currently in Austin, Texas, and there's been a freeze storm overnight, which means that every tree has got water on it, which then freezes, and then the trees snap. So I may go outside of here and find out there's a tree that's fallen, but the roof seems to be okay at the moment, so we will continue to have that. Damn, we'll keep going. As long as you're alive, we'll keep going.

Yeah, so the writer's now, their career path is basically either mummy or daddy is already in the industry, and so I get get straight in or I go to some liberal arts college where I'm taught to hate white people and men and stuff for four years, then get into Hollywood, I say all the right things about down with the patriarchy and stuff and I just get hired and so I don't have any life experience, I've never faced adversity, I've never had to struggle for anything in my entire life and I don't know how to bring that forward into my characters. And so the things I know how to write about are you're awesome the way you are because you've already succeeded because I've succeeded from doing very little and that's how they that's how they rationalize life

and so again, you know, it all feeds into this culture, I guess, that we have now in Hollywood of narcissism, of selfishness, of, you know, I'm the most important thing in the world and I'm perfect. And you know, it's not about improving yourself anymore, it's not about taking on challenges. It's just about everyone else accepting you for what you are right now. I've also heard you talk about why it's unpopular for men to be seen as stoic anymore.

What's your insight there? Well, again, yeah. A stoic man is a toxic man in the minds of Hollywood writers, whereas I see it as like a necessary survival skill, really, throughout most of human history. You can't have everyone be high-strong emotional idiots who just go to pieces the moment like things start going wrong. There needs to be stoic people who can deal with problems logically and don't complain all the time about things. You know, people used to live hard lives. I guess that's the point I'm making. Previous generations would be shocked and appalled by how easy we have it now, but they used to

struggle and they used to have to put up with a lot of hardship and you developed stoicism as a result of that. That's what allowed you to deal with it, because you couldn't sit and complain all the time, because there was no one to complain to, you had to get on and do things. We don't live in that world now, and so that idea of stoicism, the stoic man who gets things done and who doesn't complain about it. That is seen as a toxic relic of a different time and I think particularly because of the the writers that you have you've either got women now in Hollywood who don't who are threatened by that or you have effeminate men who've never endured hardship who are envious of that. And so either side wants to destroy

it and get rid of it and mock it because they don't understand it. And so that's yeah, that's what you have now. You don't get stoic male characters. They have to be constantly joking. They have to be constantly like doing the goofy self-conscious ironic humor about themselves. They usually have to mess things up. I don't know about you. I just, that's not the kind of men that I've known in my entire life. They don't act like that. That's a caricature, Hollywood bullshit version of what a man is meant to act like. But that's what they've come up with. It's not accurate the way that women act either. Most of the women that I know, especially the ones that I respect and admire, can deal

with difficult things. They can go through hardship. Exactly. It's not a unique, yeah, it's not a uniquely male trait in the slightest and you know it's not that women would be expected to be you know super feminine and you know hyper-emotional but everything not at all. There's usually a little bit of gran, sort of variation between them for sure. But again their idea of like writing a strong female character and now it's just someone who's a total asshole who is like super aggressive, super domineering, wins every

argument, never gets challenged on anything, doesn't have any compassion or anything for for other people. Again, that's not really how I've known women to act. You use this really good example of the animated Mulan movie compared with the live action remake that they did. And in the original one, the girl that joins this fighting force is smaller and doesn't have experience and needs to work incredibly hard to overcome her physical limitations of being physically smaller than everybody else. And she has to use ingenuity and different tools and she has to be smarter and she has to work harder. And that invests you in the character. I care about her outcomes because an underdog story is one that you're always

going to resonate with. And then it comes to the live action version, which is a girl pretends to be a guy because there aren't enough soldiers. And then is simply better than everybody else because of some ineffable inherent embodied thing, like the super chi feng, estrogen chi or something. And because of the estrogen chi, it means that she can win beat people that have been doing it for much longer than her, that have worked harder than her. She doesn't have to go

through any difficulty or any challenge, apart from people not believing in her, primarily because of her gender, and then she can save the day. Like, that's not an empowering story. Any woman that thinks that that's an empowering story for your daughter to, doesn't have the same definition of empowerment that I do. Yeah, that's the perfect example, really, of the kind of ridiculous thinking that you have now in movie making when it comes to writing characters like that. Like you say, the original gave you a great message, not just for little girls, but for anyone, really. You might not always be the strongest, you might not be the fastest or whatever, but you can still prevail through working hard, through ingenuity, through creativity,

all of those things can help you overcome limitations. But yeah, the modern movie is basically saying you have no limitations, you're amazing. Just everyone else needs to accept her amazing you are. It's such a destructive message to give people because life is meant to be about improving yourself, it's meant to be about trying and failing and picking yourself up and doing better next time. That's the point of it. I learned a new word a couple of weeks ago called fanbating. Have you heard of this? Made a video about it, in fact. Did you really explain to people who don't know what fanbating is?

So in broad terms, fanbating is the idea of, we're going to create a new TV show or whatever. It's probably going to be an adaptation or a remake of something that you love. What we're going to do though is we're going to race and or gender swap most of the characters. characters we're gonna make a huge deal out of the fact that we're doing that and we're basically saying to the fans of this franchise hey we're changing everything that you love doesn't it make you mad don't you want it don't you want to lash out don't you want to criticize us, go and do it, do it. See what happens. And that's what happens.

You know, people rise to the bait, they get mad about it. Inevitably, some people will go too far and they will be genuine sexists or racists. They'll see things that are very inappropriate. And those people get those comments that they make, get caught, they get captured, they get spread out for everyone to see by the actual company that's doing this, the studio. And they'll say, look, this fan base is toxic. The only people that hate this product are racist and sexist. You don't want to be like that, do you? You don't want to be one of those people. You want to be a good person.

You want to support the thing that we're doing, don't you? Support it. Just go along with it. And that's it. That's what it is. It shames people into supporting something which is fundamentally shit. It's fan-baiting.

It baits people into doing the thing that they want so that they can, they can trump it as, well, we're just on the right side here. And everyone else who criticizes our product is on the wrong side. That's all it is. There is only so far that you can push people through guilt and shame to be able to do something. It's an interesting analogy with some of the issues that came up in the early 2010 when 50 shades had done really, really well as a novel and the Dark Romance genre generally was taken off,

everything was great, but there were some concerns that the kind of erotic and novels that women were buying were showing a very competent, very assertive, very dominant protagonist in the man. So what they do is they tried to replace those men on the front cover with much more kind, gentle, more agreeable, less dominant men. And guess what? They didn't sell well, right? The heart wants what the heart wants. What can I say?

Dude, your money and your arousal are two things that you don't tend to give away without actually genuinely wanting to. And the fan-bate and things that you don't tend to give away without actually genuinely wanting to and the fan-begin thing so fascinating We saw this with what was that? Bros boy, what was it? Bros. Bros. Yeah, bros. Yes, which I never watched it, but I know.

Yeah, yeah, I know the director basically was like, you know, if you don't watch this, you're a bigot And it's like that's just mascot, like straight up. It's the equivalent of basically getting down on your knees and begging people to watch your show or your TV, or your movie, you know. It's pathetic and it's sad and it's just, it really exposed how bad that stuff was. So I understand your rationale saying that movie studios

are concerned about losing money, which means that they do something that they think is going to be both sociopolitically popular and they're rebooting and remaking existing franchises because that seems to be an easy way to go. But surely the type of turnout that we've been seeing at the cinema, especially post-pandemic, right, which is going to have had a bit of an impact. But also because movies don't seem that compelling. And if the director is lambasting me for being too much of a homophobic to go and watch a gay rom-com,

that's definitely going to put me off, no matter my predilection around that sort of a movie. Surely studios are eventually going to have to create things that people want to actually watch or studios are eventually going to have to create things that people want to actually watch or else they're going to go broke. Is there not hope in the future that the market is going to reform these production studios into making things that we actually want to see? Yeah, there absolutely is. The thing you have to keep in mind is that all of this stuff has a three-year lead time.

So like you're watching movies now that are coming out in movie theaters, they were commissioned in like 2019 because you know it takes a long time to make a film obviously like you know you've got scripted you got a cast people you've got a director thing you've got shoot the thing then do all your post-production then get it on its slate then get it marketed. So in a sense, what you're seeing in cinemas right now are ideas from like three years ago. And that's why we're still getting shit movies that do all this stuff, because probably Hollywood has now recognized the mistakes that they've made or they're starting to recognize it. And so they're starting to make those changes to their productions, but that's not going to come out for a couple more years, you know, it takes time.

And this is why you, you often hear from people saying it's going to get worse before it gets better because it probably will, you know, Warner Brothers is a great example of that. They have been losing money for years on their DC movies and stuff. They brought in a guy called Walter Hamada who was wanting to take it in the superwalk direction where you were going to do away with Superman, do away with Batman, they were going to get replaced by Supergirl and Batgirl. And it was going to be them and Wonder Woman, like it was going to be all female, I think they raced swap to a couple of them as well. You know, all of that woke stuff just distilled into one perfect triumvirate of nonsense.

He's been fired. He's gone now. They brought in a guy called David Zaslov. He looked at all this stuff that was coming up and he was like, fucking no, and canceled a whole bunch of it. canceled back girl when it was made. It was ready to go.

They spent $100 million on this thing. And he's like, no, it's so shit. It's not even gonna get shown ever. It's gonna, in a fall, nobody can ever see it ever. You know? In case it in the lead and drop it at the bottom of the Atlantic. Exactly. Yeah, like burn it and salt the ground and stuff.

But that's, you know, that was that change of direction because they could no longer afford to indulge this nonsense because they were running out of money. They had to bring in a guy who was hard-nosed, a businessman who just hopefully had an eye for making good quality films. And it's happened to them, it's going to happen to other studios as well. It just takes time. That lead time thing is so interesting and I didn't think about it at all. I also know how long it takes to make video games and that there is a, maybe a concern you're talking, maybe seven years between five and seven years to make a, you know, a pretty good game. I wonder whether computer games are going to go that way as well. I would

guess that the studios that make games are a little bit more in touch with what their core audience is after, but there was a new story partway through last year saying that the new GTA was going to feature lower rates of violence and it was going to restrict some of the things that you could do, which was going to be commended with more progressive understandings of social policy and a blah, blah, blah. They are going to get much more immediate feedback from their fans saying, fuck no, than you can from a cinema, I think. Yeah, it's like, no, your audience, guys, come on. You don't play a GTA game to be politically correct

I mean this like Yeah, they've spent 20 years alone people to like shoot up entire streets worth of people run folk over with cars You know murder prostitutes whatever all the like Whatever depraved stuff people can come up with you can probably do it in those games But that that was just part of the anarchic fun of them. And so to try and suddenly develop a social conscience now, it's like, woof, no, that's not why people play. That ship has sailed. Rocks, yeah, you can't, you can't suddenly rebrand yourself as a responsible company, like, you know,

restricting all this stuff. But yeah, I think the reaction was pretty severe. And I think with gaming, I'm trying to think what I can equate it to. There was some, there was like the battlefield games, you know, first-person shooters, and they tried to release one called Battlefield 5 a couple years ago, Sitcheren World War II, but it had women fighting on the front lines with cybernetic arms and stuff. Asian men fighting in the European battlefield against Germans. Just ridiculous, but it's like they put that in the trailer, they showed that stuff, and the reaction was apocalyptic. Like, fans absolutely, I'm lambasted, the game is ridiculous,

and it's sold terribly as a result. You know, so that these things can happen. The backlash works in some cases. What? So going beyond the interjection of race and gender and sexuality, it does also seem like there's a kind of a negative, very pessimistic tenor to a lot of movies as well, that they don't seem to put across a lot of genuine hope.

What do you think is going on there? Is that reflecting what our culture is like now? Is that impacting on culture? Is it just the fact that we're coming out of the back end of, I don't know, a period where people aren't feeling too happy? I think so. I think it ties into this idea of there's fewer just like heroic heroes, I suppose. And there's not the kind of patriotic movies that I think you use to get You know if you if you look back to the 2000s particularly, you know For rather obvious reasons, you know

America was fighting the war on terror and so there was a need and a desire for heroism for pro-American movies for You know for just patriotism and That doesn't really exist now. And again, I don't know if it reflects a kind of lack of confidence. I don't know if it reflects Hollywood's attitude to all things sort of American. I don't know if there's weird associations there where it's like they feel like it's dangerous to be too, you know, pro your own country. I'm not sure what the idea behind it is, but yeah, I get what you're saying in that there just doesn't seem to be that optimistic view of like the whole, I suppose, in movies. But they'll repurpose Fast and Furious 9 and Dumbledore secrets of Albus or whatever it's called to make it appropriate for a Chinese audience.

Yeah, it's interesting that, isn't it, when money's involved. Yeah, man, I mean, we've seen it in ridiculous ways, like they tried to market Black Panther, the Chinese who aren't very keen on the subject matter. And so they took Chadwick Boseman's face from the poster and put the Black Panther mask on him. So you couldn't see what was underneath. To make it, no, they straight up did that. They erased him from his own movie

to try and make it more acceptable to Chinese audiences. Excuse me. And I thought the days of Koutou into China were done because it seemed for a while, basically all Disney movies were getting banned there. They just couldn't get a release. And so you kind of thought, well, okay, maybe they'll just think, fuck it. If the Chinese won't accept us anyway, there's no point trying to pander to them. They just couldn't get a release and so you kind of thought, well, okay, maybe they'll just think fuck it. If the Chinese won't accept us anyway, there's no point trying to pander to them. Let's do something really crazy, like be pro-America.

You know, it's almost like we're an American company and like our whole, like what Disney's entire... Outlook on life was like a fondness for all things Americana. You know, he was a patriotic guy, he loved America. Be nice if they could live up to that. But nah, they seem to have struck some kind of deal. I think now that Bob Eiger is now back in charge, they seem to have smooth things out with the Chinese government.

And I've heard, I could be wrong, but these are the rumors that all the Marvel cast, all the Marvel actors are now being sent on little training programs to teach them what's acceptable to say about China so that they don't say anything and offensive, you know, they don't mention Taiwan or anything like that. So no one does a John Cena again? Yeah, exactly. And it's just John at the front, you walk in and you've got Chris Hemsworth and you've got Robert Downey Jr. And then stood at the front and a teacher's outfit,

you've just got John Cena. John end up like me. John Cena. Yeah. Is entrance music? That's what I'm about. I, but that speech that he had to give, I'd feel, fair play for him, you know, to be able to speak Mandarin,

but to have to basically grovel and plead forgiveness because he dared to suggest that Taiwan was a country. My God, it was one of the most humiliating things I think I've ever seen. And I just think, imagine if that happened back in the 80s or 90s. You know what I mean? Like that would never have happened. But now this is the world that we live in. So, I mean, it's hilarious. And I've spoken about it a ton, and it is embarrassing and cringeworthy,

evidently just straight up capitalismism in its worst form. However, if there was the risk of the entire studio that you were with and all of your cast members and all of the people that you'd worked with and every single person basically having 50% or 30% or something of their revenue hanging on whether or not you're prepared to say something in

Mandarin for 90 seconds, the pressure is absolutely astronomical. I still think it's a super cringe-worthy thing to do, but the situation in which you wake up that morning and get the message from your manager or the studio saying, hi, mate, you shouldn't have said that about Taiwan, we need you to fix this. There is a lot of pressure. I think in that specific instance, because the movie was made with the idea that it was going to get released in China, and so it would have been budgeted for that, and so on. Okay, there's not much you can do. If you've screwed up, you're going to have to try and fix it whatever way.

But you have to ask yourself, if you're actually planning your movie in the first place, what's your better strategy here? Is it, you know, we, we, for go any kind of American patriotism, and we kind of like incorporate weird sort of pseudo-communist messaging into our movie to make it acceptable to China, so we get like an extra 20% revenue, or do we go super patriotic for America and for like pro-western culture and get like an extra 30 or 40% because people actually love what we've done over here. I know which way I'd rather go, you know, I mean like I know which would be my preference but us to me. Game of Thrones finished. The main series finished and pretty much everybody was

disappointed with it, which is a shame because your availability bias is always going to cause you to remember the most recent part of it. You know, if it had a shit season five and then come back and smashed everything after that, then we might have more fond memories of it. come back and smashed everything after that, then we might have more fond memories of it. How many seasons of House of the Dragon do you think it's going to take for people to feel fondly again about the Game of Thrones franchise? Because I certainly know as a huge

Game of Thrones fan that after the first season of House of the Dragon being really, really enjoyable, I thought it was really cool. It has dampened at least probably 50% of my bad feelings toward that entire sort of organization. What's your thoughts? I think we're almost there actually. Yeah, I think season one of House of the Dragon was really good. It surprised a lot of people. It surprised me. I predicted it was going to be pretty shit.

But it turned out to be really good, really smart, really well done. I think a good season 2 will cement it, and I think people will be back invested in the world of Game of Thrones. It's not like people aren't going to suddenly think that season 8 was great, all of a sudden it, and that's still a terrible thing, but they will at least be invested in the world of West Ross again. So I think as long as they don't screw up season two, they're laughing. And yeah, I must admit, it's a great comeback story. Nobody expected this. I agree, man. It's the steaming pile of turd that was season eight can't be extinguished this

late. That's already been burned to a crisp, and like you say, salted the earth afterward. But yeah, I mean, that's good. I listened, I've actually just finished, I think it's called a world of ice and fire. Oh, whatever, whatever the prequel book is that this series of house of the dragon is based on. So I got super into it and I was like, well, I'm going to get the book and listen to it. One bad thing has been that I now know everything that happens in season 2, 3 and 4, because obviously I'm not a book, but I'm also super excited because season 2 is way more exciting than season 1, which is pretty cool.

Another thing, which I thought was a real surprise victory. Another airplane watch was bullet train Yeah, I like that. I thought was absolutely phenomenal Just a good good fun action comedy, you know Didn't take yourself too seriously. I didn't demand too much and I've you know I've said this many times on my channel There's a lot to be said for a simple concept well-executed, and I think bullet train just does that perfectly. Nice easy movie to watch.

Does have some smart moments in it with how things are set up in the early parts of the movie and then they get to pay off later on. I thought the characters were really good fun. I loved Tangerine. Yeah, everyone loves Tangerine in that movie. It had that kind of snatched slash lock stock slash. Yes, very much. Yeah. Style to it. Yeah, very much did. It was kind of, yeah, I want more movies like that. I want Guy Ritchie to start making good movies again. But yeah, I think it was just, yeah, a well-executed movie. Didn't demand too much from anyone and enjoyed it. It was nice. It had no messaging in it either, so that was nice. Steady, and also, I mean, it's racially representative. There was a big black guy

that liked Thomas the Tank Engine. There was a bunch of Asian people in there. There was a bunch of... I have no... I kid you not. I have now started to perceive the world in terms of Thomas the Tank Engine. Yeah, I'll look at someone, someone who's been a total asshole. It's like, you're a diesel. Yeah. Okay, I don't think I know, my Thomas the Tank Engine lore isn't sufficiently deep for me to actually be able to use that effectively, but maybe a secret philosophy that I need to work out. So something that I was disappointed by, again, from a plane journey, was Jurassic World Dominion.

What went wrong with that? Everything. I mean, all of these Jurassic World movies are terrible as far as I'm concerned. They're all dumb. They're all derivative. They're just recycling the same ideas that we had in the very first movie in 1993. I remember being a little kid and going to see Jurassic Park and thought it was amazing and it still is amazing. But yeah, it's just a peak example of our lack of ideas or Hollywood's lack of creativity. We're just going to recycle the same stuff over and over again. So yeah, the whole concept of like the dinosaurs and stuff is played out.

Bringing back the original cast was just a desperation move because they knew no one was going to care about this movie. But the moment you say, well, you know, Alan Grant and Ellie and Ian Malcolm, they're all going to be together again on screen. You know, there's a little bit of interest there, but they were so underused, it was really clear that the script had no idea what to do with them. They're just wandering around looking confused most of the time.

So yeah man, it was just a desperation move to try and milk a bit more money out of the Jurassic Park franchise. There was not an ounce of creativity behind it and just monumentally done. Even now I think about it to like the stupid locust plague and everything, I just think that that didn't get an ounce of development. It was just a random idea that someone threw in awful. Yes, it does seem really lazy. I mean, I have driven an ATV, a four-wheel ATV, through the valley, that the first ever helicopter shot coming into... I've driven an ATV through that valley in Hawaii, and it was sick, and it was me on my own, traveling on my own, and a ton of Chinese tourists, and I was screaming that theme tune to myself, And I was looking at it. And so I have very

fun memories of the Jurassic Park franchise. You get to go through, um, what was the genetically engineered dinosaur from the first new one? The Indomini- Oh, yes. Indomini- Oh, yes. So you know, it's got the scratch marks on the inside of the wall, right, tried to get out. You can drive you a little ATV through the door, that's open, and you go through. And I'm like, this is really cool. And I do have fun memories of that first one,

but it's gone very quickly downhill. They're kind of force-fed this random, extra mother of the daughter, that the daughter is not her daughter, it's a clone of her back into the film, even though nobody mentioned her for the entirety of the first thing. And of course, she was secretly the one who developed everything, all the technology behind Jurassic Park is just no one thought to mention her back in the day. And it's like, yeah, classic

retcon example. It's like, how dumb do you't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that.

I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that.

I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. I learned this from you. To this day, I could look at pictures of Henry Cavill with that fake lip and it makes me laugh. But okay, the short version is they had done the original version of Justice League Zack Snyder was directing it. The studio were unhappy because his previous movies hadn't done well. They wanted to lighten the tone, they wanted to make it funnier, all that stuff.

He couldn't do it, and then he was forced to drop out the project because of a family tragedy. So they brought in Josh Weedon to lighten the tone, and he was basically told, fix this movie, turn it into the Avengers. And so that was gonna require extensive reshoots. You know, they were gonna have to bring her back. All the actors shoot like, you know, loads of new footage

to try and fix this movie and make it fun and upbeat and all that. So they brought back Ben Affleck, who was in the middle of a divorce and he was alcoholic at the time. He hadn't trained in months and so he was about 30 pounds heavier, looked like a completely different person, so he was brought back in. He literally his face changes from scene to scene, like it's weird. And they also brought back Henry Cavill, who was in the middle of shooting Mission Impossible Fallout, and he'd grown a sweet, sweet, Tash for that one, which was great. But I think it was Paramount who did it. They

wouldn't give him permission to shave off his mustache so they could wear a fake one. So they could do these reshoots. So the only option was get him in, Superman costume with his mustache and everything, and then we'll just digitally remove it later. But again, because everything was done to these insanely tight timescales,

they didn't have time to do it properly And so you've just got this ridiculous mismatched mouth with like lips that don't line up and It's one of the saddest things I think I've ever seen, but it's also hilarious I can't wait until the day when I have a job where I've got to contractually obliged to moustache I feel like that's why I didn't know he'd made it. I just love because he could so easily have worn a fake moustache and it would look 100% convincing. Actors do it all the time. But I honestly feel like the studio just wanted to be Dix and said,

no, you know, I'm not shaving off. I'm not shaving off. Stick the middle finger up to DCU. Absolutely. Yeah, it's Warner Brothers. Nah, you're gonna have to spend millions of dollars removing that. And I always laugh a bit. Just a bit. Up a lip.

And I always laugh thinking, like, there's CGI artists that signed up for this movie thinking, we're gonna be rendering crazy, like alien battles and landscapes and explosions and stuff. And instead, they're told, nah, you've got to work on Henry Cavill's lips. Oh, you're on the Henry Cavill's lip department. Yeah.

Just congratulations on working on your first DC universe movie. You're going to take on a very, very important role here. You and Henry Cavill's upper lip are going to become intimately familiar with each other. And I need you to remove it frame by frame. Thank you. I mean, maybe maybe they did a really shit job. And so like, you know, they did it on purpose almost. It's like we've been given the worst role in the entire movie.

We're just going to absolutely screw it up. I don't know. But yeah, it's, it's a great piece of cinema. Lower. Yes. I also learned another piece of cinema law from you that Nick Cage was going to be Superman Briefly was he was yeah, not so briefly for like three years. I think he was attached to it Yeah, this was a piece of legendary Failure on Hollywood's part. They wanted to do another Superman movie. They wanted to cast a new edgy, you know, cool actor and Nick Cage was like super cool at the time. It's hard to believe now, but he was. And so yeah, he was attached to the project. It was going to have Tim Burton directing it.

Unfortunately, Tim Burton came in and decided he wanted to change the entire script. It dragged on for years and eventually the studio interfered too much to Burton Walked Away, Nick Cage Walked Away, the whole project failed. And I think they spent about 30 million dollars on a film that they didn't shoot a single frame of footage on. Incredible waste of money. But there it is. Yeah, so we could, what was even better is like, if this movie had gone into production, the plan was that they were going to have a tie in with the Joel Schumacher Batman movies at the time, which was the George Clooney one.

So you were going to have Nick Cage, George Clooney, you know, fighting crime together, and potentially even leading into a Justice League movie. And I just think that would have been fantastic. Goofy, that would have been a good competitor for whatever the non-snider cut thing was that they ended up doing. I honestly, when I think about how safe and boring in bland movies are now, especially superhero ones,

I think something like that would be so shit, but so amazing at the same time. Yes, yes. I don't know, man. I mean, the DCU generally is just, I've never got into it. I've never, ever, ever felt as compelled. And I mean, you know, like, marbles, whatever, what is it now? Generation 4 for Marvel? Fee the Feece 5, they're into now, yeah. Feece 5, I mean that was bad. Endgame really was kind of the end game of all of this stuff that was good about that. But I mean that period that we had, we were so spoiled

when you actually look back at that, yeah there was some kind of misses. But for the most part, that was a really great series of superhero movies, big budget, quite classic storylines, compelling protagonists, good enemies. There's humour in there, but it's not stupid, there's role models in there, but they're not patronizing. It was great, and then, yeah, it feels like we blew our load very soon. It was like the premature parade for the early 2010s and now we're left in this sort of wasteland looking for scraps on the floor. Yeah, I think it may be that superhero movies are now moving into the parody phase, which is generally the last phase of a genre before it dies off. And I'm fine with that. We've had 20 years of this stuff now,

kind of ready for something else to, you know, take the center stage in Hollywood. But yeah, whatever Marvel became, you know, however much they were probably victims of their own success and they've eventually gone off the rails. We'll see if they maybe pick up in phase five, but they at least flew before the crash and burns, like where is it feels like DC never got off the ground, and it's frustrating because they had without doubt the best characters. Before all of this, before Marvel took off, who the hell had ever heard of Iron Man or the Guardians of the Galaxy? Outside of like comic book industry outside of like people who

were really into that stuff, who would ever heard any of those characters who would have heard of you know like Captain America or anything but everyone had heard of Superman, everyone heard of Batman, everyone heard of Wonder Woman, DC had those characters, they had them ready to go, they could have been a genuine alternative to Marvel. Just something on the same level, if not even bigger, if they'd been properly managed. But they left it too late, they tried to play catch-up, they rushed everything, they screwed it up, turned up, time after time, and were constantly trying to fix their mistakes without understanding what the mistakes were.

I think the DC on film over the past 10 years, that's gonna go down as one of the biggest wastes of talent and time and money and potential in all of cinema history. What about this fallout from Justin Reuland recently? So for the people that don't know, one of the two writers, creators, from Rick and Morty has been popped

for some pretty incriminating text messages to both women and girls. It seems like he's got an alcohol problem, and this has been going on for quite a long time, and it seems to be pretty widespread. He's kind of part of this. I've been calling it the second Me Too or the Internet Me Too with Andrew Callahan from Channel 5, Chris

Delia with the Chris Delia problem documentary that just came out just in Reuland. You've got this sort of new wave of guys that have kind of been popped by this. It seems like Rick and Morty had already started to lose some of its core fan base in any case. Some people felt it was falling off the wagon. I feel like this might be a final nail in the car. Yeah, man. I agree. I watched the first few seasons and I wasn't transpired.

It was super clever, witty, edgy, you know, just great fun, great, great sort of sci-fi comedy. I think it, as it developed, it became more mainstream and so it started to preach the message, which is, you know, obviously I've talked about a lot on my channel and it started to turn people off because it's like, it just became a sell out really. And with Royland, yeah, man, not only have you lost 50% of your writing team, but you've also lost literally the voice for Rick and Morty. So I don't really understand how the show is meant to continue without him. You know, it's just, I forgot, I fucking forgot that he voices the Psych yeah, you're Rick and Morty how can we how can we have Rick and Morty without Rick and Morty?

Like well, you're not gonna be able to Two and a half men your way through by just swapping out one of the protagonists with this one. He is the protagonist one of the protagonists with this one. He is the protagonist. That's it, yeah. I mean, you probably get a voice actor who can approximate his voice, but like people are going to know it's not the same. And yeah, man, I just think this is the final nail in the coffin for Rick and Morty. I think it's just done. What is showing? What is coming out that you are most excited about over the next couple of years? So absolutely nothing. I hate all of modern cinema and I want it to die.

Yeah. That's actually... No, I mean, I joke. I'm probably doomed too. I'll be interested to watch that because I very much enjoyed the first one. And yeah, I think that's hopefully gonna be good you know I've read the book and loved it like as a teenager so it's nice to see a good adaptation on screen so something like that god I'm trying to think of anything else

really that's exciting me nothing from Marvel I care about oh shit have you seen Severance? No people have been recommended that to me though. So I was going to go on episode in. I'm only one episode in for the people that haven't heard about this. I don't even know what it is at the moment. It's I guess like a sort of science fiction, need drama. It's about people that go to work at a particular place,

and they can't take their memories from inside of work outside or from outside inside. And they have to sign this contract. And I'm only one episode in. I was pretty enthralled by it to start with because there's a lot of questions. Why if these people agreed to this job? All of the jobs that seem really kind of pointless. You don't really understand what's going on. So there's just a lot of questions. So that's definitely that and the last of us two things that I've been pretty impressed by recently. But looking forward, the future sadly,

I fear might be as bleak as you're saying. I don't know of anything really. Apart from watching Harry Potter, Hogwarts, legacy playthrough videos on YouTube, of anything really. Apart from watching Harry Potter, Hogwarts, Legacy, Play Through videos on YouTube, there isn't much that I've been ridiculously excited by. I mean, I'll be happy to watch Copra Kai season 6 because I think that's going to be the final season. House of the Dragon season 2, I'll be interested in the next Stranger of Things because that's a show that really redeemed itself as well, that really came back from the brink. So probably TV

is going to be the more exciting thing for me, I guess. Yeah, yeah, it's, that's been what's salvaged a lot of, I mean, look at my watch time, like if I go and you go on the Netflix, I'm not going on to movies, if I'm struggling, you know when you deepen the Netflix whole desperately, trying to find something, I'm going into either documentaries or series, I'm just never going into movies because I very, very rarely find a movie that just makes me feel satisfied, it gives a payoff

at the end, but yeah, I have hope, despite the incredibly despondent way to look to the future, I do have hope with this, whatever you want to say, like the drinker's lagging hypothesis or the production lagging hypothesis that you've come up with, which is in three years' time. One thing I do want to know actually is you said that parity is the final stage of a cycle of a genre. Is this a well-understood journey? Yeah, I think it's generally seen as I can't remember who wrote it originally, but it's the genre theory that I think there's four stages to it. So the first stage is like the early,

kind of prototype stage of a genre, like the ones that become breakthrough movies and clue people into the idea that it can be a viable thing. Then you've got the maturity stage where it kind of reaches its golden age, like where ideas start to mature, they get really good at producing the movies. Then you've got the deconstruction phase where they start to explore different ideas. They're always looking for new angles on this genre. And then last of all, you've got the parody phase. So it's kind of like we pioneer it, we perfect it, we tinker with it and take it apart, and then we just have a laugh at it and mock it, and then we're done a laugh at it and mock it and then we're done.

That's that's the four stages of Iron Man into the most of the MCU from the 2010s into end game into Thor Loventhunder. Yeah, I would say that would probably be your, yeah, your best way of looking at it. You can kind of apply to the Western genre. That's what you use your good example. Your early ones would be your John Wayne movies. Then you get your classic ones with him. Then you get your clip of Clint Eastwood spaghetti western ones which is like the deconstructed hero and then you get your parody ones like blazing

saddles and stuff like that and then it's just done. So yeah, we're at the parody phase now. I feel like we're superhero movies. Like whether it's intentional or not, like most Marvel movies are just parodies now of what they once were and so I'm more than happy for that genre to wind up now and just we can move on to something else because getting really tired of reviewing superhero movies. I imagine you can be taking it out back and putting a bolt in its head might be a good idea. Look, drink it dude. I really appreciate you. Where should people go if they want to check out more of your stuff, your YouTube's absolutely fascinating, so everyone should

go and look at that. Yeah, so obviously I'm producing new YouTube videos on both my channels, like every couple of days, I do live streams every Thursday night on open bar. You can find me on Twitter as well, and I've also got a bunch of stuff that I'm working on at the moment. I've got a whole bunch of novels that I've written called The Ryan Drake series and I've got a comic that's recently come out and it's through Indie Go Go that you can order that so that's called a new kind of war. So those are all the things I'm working on right now and also a short movie that I'm producing so that's been fun as well. Busy guy. Yeah, I decided for you.

Thank you. Alright man, thank you for your time today. Cheers. you