TRIGGERnometry - Critical Drinker: How Politics Ruined Hollywood

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

The Critical Drinker, aka Will Jordan, is YouTube a movie critic. Check out his channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCriticalDrinker JOIN US for Triggernometry LIVE at the Edinburgh Fringe for 2 nights only on 6th and 7th August! We’ll be joined by very special guests Andrew Doyle and Leo Kearse. Get TICKETS here: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/triggernometry-live Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

the writers in Hollywood now. You know, a lot of them will have gone to college for four or five years where they've been told incessantly, the world is inherently racist and sexist. Everyone's awful. Everyone hates each other. It's just this big hierarchy of people getting oppressed by everyone else. And so that's going to reflect in their mindset and it's going to reflect in what they write and what they try to rationalize in their stories. And that's why you get what you end up with. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham. This is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest to date is a novelist, YouTuber and film critic Will Jordan, aka

The Critical Drinker. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure to have you. You've got a brilliant YouTube channel that's absolutely crushing it. 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. But before we do, tell us who are you? How are you where you are?

What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I'm reasonably sure that I'm Will Jordan. I'm a writer and eventually I became a YouTuber. I guess I got into this whole thing because I'd always been interested in storytelling. I'd been fascinated by characters and how you can just, you know, you can create these fictional worlds that people can just lose themselves in. I think there's something really special and magical about that. And so it eventually led me to becoming an author myself and, you know,

it wrote nine, ten books now. So it became quite a successful thing for me. And, yeah, I was really pleased with that. But, you know, several years ago, I guess I began to notice a change in the movies that we were seeing in cinemas. They were gradually losing that kind of magic and that ability to lose yourself in the story. And it was becoming more and more obvious that they were trying to inject the politics, the beliefs, the ideologies of the writers. into the stories. And you were losing then your characters, your quality of your storytelling. And particularly when they were doing it to older characters that they were bringing back. You know,

they were essentially just bringing back these old actors, these old characters and kind of breaking them down and humiliating them. And funnily enough, I didn't like that because I used to be a fan of a lot of these people. And so I decided I need to just try and, I guess, add my voice to that conversation about it. And I thought, well, I can get back into YouTube because I used to do it way back when, just messing around, just little, little channel with a few hundred subscribers. So I started that up again and started talking about various movies. And there was one day when I don't know what happened. I think maybe I had a beer or two before I recorded it. And I was like, my voice is awfully slurred in this video. And well, you are Scottish, Mike. Yeah, exactly. I mean,

what can I do? You know, it was 9 a.m. Of course you're going to have a drink. And I just thought, you know, I'm just going to go with this. And it'll have this kind of slurred drunken voice that's really sarcastic. And wow, that video went out, went viral. Before I knew it, I had half a million, maybe a million views on that. And I went from a few hundred subscribers up to 5, 10, 20, 30,000. And then it's just been a rollercoaster from there. So it's been kind of fun. We need to get you back on the source. Yeah, exactly.

Slow your words. Bam, a million subscribers, here we come. What is it? They say, Invite Veritas, you know, there's truth and drinks. Yeah, exactly. I'll go with that. Yeah. But what we were talking about just there,

it rang so true with me because I come from more of a theatre perspective, but I've seen the same thing happen with theatre. But let's talk about specific examples. What, in particular, where have you noticed it? And what films, what characters? Basically, anything known by Disney at this point. You know, obviously they took over the whole Star Wars brand, they took over Marvel, and particularly with Star Wars, you would see characters like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, these classic heroes

from 20, 30 years ago that we all knew as kids that were awesome. And suddenly they're getting brought back and they're like deadbeat dads, or they're just grumpy old men living on an island and just want to die and they've lost all hope. You know, it's a terrible thing to do. to these characters, because it's one thing to kill them off, it's another thing to destroy their legacy or the very essence of who they were. And I think that's when I really started to notice it. These heroes that we used to enjoy are just being denigrated and broken down to try and push the new heroes that they try to replace them with, which are just usually cardboard cutouts with no real personalities. That was the frustrating part for me.

And, well, look, there'll be people here going, hang on a second, right. Hollywood has always pushed certain narratives. It has always pushed certain politics. The American dream that you can go and be and do anything that you want to be or to do, isn't that politics? Do you know what I mean? I think there's a difference there in terms of, one, how pervasive it is in the story, because now it's so obvious and it's usually paired up with a lack of writing skill. Like the writers are usually stumbling over themselves so quickly to push this stuff in. They neglect to even bother with a good story. The other aspect, like I just described there, is the trampling of what came before and exploiting the work of previous generations of writers and storytellers to try and elevate the stuff

that you're producing now. So I think those two strands combined is just what makes it so distasteful now. And it's quite a shift because in the past, if you were doing a remake of something or a sequel to something or a prequel to something, you were kind of going like this was successful, so we'll do more of that, whereas now you're starting to see, like you say, where something that used to be a certain way is now being presented as something else. And you feel it's kind of affecting the quality of what's being made. Very much so, yeah. It's one thing to produce sequels to previously successful movies. You know, Hollywood's been doing that for decades now. Fair enough. It's another thing to start to say, you know, these guys that you used to enjoy so much,

these stories that you used to appreciate, they were never that good. What we're making now is better. But it's not. It's just a lie that you're expected to buy into. And it's patronising to the viewer. That's the thing that really gets on my nerves. I was watching, I mean, it's slightly different. I was watching Miss Mazel, which I really enjoyed, the first three seasons were great.

And then in the fourth season, it went weird. They started preaching almost. this kind of feminist message and you're going, I don't give a shit, just tell me the story. There's ways to work ideas like that into the story subtly. So that you can almost

present both sides of an argument and let the audience make up their minds with stuff like that and just show the characters encountering difficulties. That's one way to do it. But if you just are straight up telling the audience, this is what you must think, this is what you must believe, that's just the hallmark of bad writing. And it's what you see more and more now.

It's where you're then removed from the story. You're no longer losing yourself in a fictional world that you can believe in. All you're seeing is the beliefs of the writer. That's what it becomes, and that's when it's detrimental. And why do you think this is happening a while? I mean, there's a broad shift in our culture, I think, at the moment. You know, we, I guess people talk about woke politics and social justice and stuff, how it's become really prevalent in the past several years.

I think in Hollywood, in America, there was obviously a broad general reaction to the election in 2016. That drove a lot of people nuts. And it was essentially a backlash then amongst the people of Hollywood against that. So I think all of those things combined are what's causing this shift in what we see in movies and storytelling. It's an attempt to make people feel and think a certain way. Yeah. I'm sure that had a huge impact. But it feels to me, and maybe you'll correct me, that actually something has been changing for longer even than that.

And the reason I say this is, like Francis and I were talking about this before we started, where they used to, quite often a movie used to have a fairly simplistic possibly, but a moral message of some kind. Or a very aspirational quality to it. Like if you think about movies from when I was a kid, whether you think they're good or not, like independence day or whatever. It was all about triumph over some kind of foreign hostile invasion, people coming together all over the world. It was all about uniting and working together to succeed in some way. Whereas more recently, even in like stuff that I think is incredibly well made, whether that's Game of Thrones or House of Cards or anything like that, I started to see that actually what they were doing now is showing the opposite and going,

look at all the deep dysfunction in human beings, look at all the, terrible ways that people operate. Look at the way people cheat and steal and murder and do all of those horrible things. And it's shown from a kind of different perspective. So instead of giving you an aspirational picture, it became more about going, look how bad everything is. Well, I think that ties into the mindset of a lot of the writers in Hollywood now. You know, a lot of them will have gone to college for four or five years where they've been told incessantly, the world is inherently racist and sexist. Everyone's awful.

Everyone hates each other. It's just this big hierarchy of people getting oppressed by everyone else. And so that's going to reflect in their mindset and it's going to reflect in what they write and what they try to rationalize in their stories. And that's why you get what you end up with. And yeah, it's...

It is so disheartening because, like you say, there used to be an aspirational message to so much of movie making. You know, whether it was characters like Rocky who have to, you know, rise to some big challenge to try and overcome it, whether it's something like Independence Day, like a big cheesy blockbuster movie, but there's a positive message there about people putting aside their differences to take on a bigger threat, unashamedly pro-American, I suppose,

as well. And that's again what you see now is there's this kind of nihilism and this kind of almost hatred of their own country. You know, America was never that good anyway, and it was all founded on racism and slavery and all that stuff. it just engenders this kind of negative mindset in the audience, I think, and they come away unsatisfied by it. I don't know if the writers in their way feel like, well, we're making the world a better place because we're educating people about the problems of the world. But there's a format for doing that, and if you just focus on that, you end up just leaving your audience feeling downbeat and unhappy. And I think that's why, you know, a movie like Top Gun

Maverick that came out. It's a sequel to a film from like, like, the 80s. You know, it should never even, in all, you know, in any rational world, it never even should have got made so long, you know, so many years later. But there it is. And it's, and it's a really good, fun movie. It's positive. It's upbeat. It doesn't try and denigrate the past or put down its previous generation of characters. It's respectful. And it ends up just being a really great fun movie and people come out of that feeling good about themselves. What's so bad about that? It's a lot.

We're allowed to feel happy occasionally. Not anymore, mate. Yeah. But you know, sorry, just on this very point, Francis, like, you mentioned, for example, slavery, right? There's a history of movies about slavery. I remember as a kid here at school going to see Amstead. And that is a movie about a horrible chapter in human history. But it also shows that people working together.

and people advocating for their rights and freedom of express, all of that stuff can actually achieve a result. It's saying, like, we're not doomed as human beings to the worst elements of our past. We're not doomed to our most base instincts. We're not doomed to be constantly stuck in this endless eternal battle between groups. Actually, when we work together, we can get to the point of our common humanity

actually triumphing over all that tribalism. Yeah. And now we're just doing the exact opposite. We're just going, here's another movie about how we're all evil. Yes. You know? Yeah. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing. I can add to that. Like, you pretty much articulate it perfectly. It's the mindset now of making movies. But surely that's got to be unsustainable. You'd think. But they keep doing it. I mean, my rationale has always been, eventually the money will run out.

You know, so many of these movies that they try to do. they fail and they end up losing money for the studio. And as many ideologically driven people as there are in Hollywood, there's even more guys who are just money men. They just want to make cash. And they don't care what it is that does that, but if they see enough movies that are in the red, there has to come a point where they say, enough of this crap,

we've got to stop this, we have to start making movies that are actually popular that people like. so you just you have to hope that eventually it's going to filter through I mean like I say there's there's occasional films that um that do crop up like like top gun maverick that's um that have done really well and hopefully they serve as a little um you know lesson for people that it can still work these older style movies that are positive upbeat patriotic whatever it might be they can be a massive success if they're done right um we just have to hope that it'll happen eventually you know these are always some points

because I remember going to watch 12 years of slave and I remember saying to my ex-girlfriend as I walked out, I said, I think the only way you can enjoy that film is if you are actually racist. That's the only way, because apart from that, it's just an hour and a half of some of the most horrific violence against black people. And you go, this is obviously accurate,

all of these things, but you go, this, it's just awful. It doesn't leave you with any sense of, you know, of anything, apart from just deep horror. Yeah. I mean, obviously different movies are designed to do different things. Yeah, there's not wrong with that. I mean, Hotel Rwanda is the same, right? You watch it to get a picture of what happened. You're not walking out, they're looking for a feel-good moment. Exactly. You can, you know, you can watch Schindler's List. You're probably not going to have a blast watching that movie, but it's an important... It depends on your political opinion.

Well, maybe, yeah. But it's an important movie. Yeah, of course. And it's obviously a deeply moving and poignant film, but not necessarily an enjoyable film. But, you know, so I think different films can do that. But I think the problems come in when you're ostensibly trying to make some blockbuster, you know, fun, upbeat movie. And then you start working in this other stuff. Like, oh, by the way, you know, loads of people in America are racist or, you know, whatever it might be. It's just, it often comes across as just weird moments of you're trying to make something into something it's not.

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We'll see you there. The interesting thing as well is that they make these racist characters so clunky. Yeah. Where they, you just go, if you were a racist, you wouldn't be racist at the top of your voice

in a public place where everyone can hear. You know, it's just completely terrible writing. Yeah. And it's just, it's clumsiness on the part of the writers. whether they don't have the experience, whether they are just, like I say, falling over themselves to get that point across and they don't care how clumsily they do it,

maybe that's how it is. But, yeah, in the past, I think there would be more of a nuance to these characters. You know, you might show them having positive qualities, but also there's this darker side to them that comes across sometimes. And it would be an interesting way of saying, well, this is how it manifests,

people sometimes, they might not consciously be aware of it. They might not always be a big cartoonish, you know, racist who's just yelling at the top of his lungs, but it comes across subtly. But that can be the difference in a character. But yeah, I just don't think writers these days have got that kind of subtlety to them. 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. 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. You know, so many of these stars that were, you know, preaching about how appalled they were by them. It's like there's hundreds of pictures of them, like standing next to them, getting their pictures taken, praising them to the hill. And the thing is, they all knew as well. It's not like they just randomly took the picture. 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. And so, yeah, it's, like you say, the backlash to that prompted this huge panic amongst them. And it's like, yeah, we have to prove how virtuous we are. And suddenly that's why you get, you know, diversity quotas to even be nominated for an Oscar.

Really? Yeah. You, you, to even be. considered for an Oscar now, you have to have, you know, X number of women in front over behind the camera, X number of ethnic minorities, X number of LGBT people. In Hollywood, I would have think they're the majority, aren't they? 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. What should speak for itself is the end product. And so when you start getting into that mindset of, you know, a movie can only be considered worthy if it's got X number of different boxes ticked

in terms of the people working on it, you're not necessarily going to get the best people. You're just ticking boxes, like I say. And that's just, that's a really bad way of working. It's like they're trying to really artificially tackle a problem that should be much more organically changed. You know, the whole culture, I guess, of Hollywood needs to shift to just let more people in. to work on these films and give them a chance to succeed on their own merits, not force them into positions they might not be ready for. It's an interesting point.

And I think it comes back to what you said earlier, which is we've kind of got to a position where, like, we all think that our job is to educate other people. And what they mean by that is to force them to think in a different way. Yeah. Right. And there's an extraordinary level of arrogance that's implied within that, which is you have the knowledge.

the other people must accept as fact and act accordingly. And I think that's kind of where the diversity quota stuff comes from because it's like there's a right way to think and it must be enforced. It can't just be introduced. But do you think this is going to change over time? We talked about Top Gunman, but like I know the Daily Wire starting. Now, my big fear with the Daily Wire movies was like they're going to make like, there's a left wing Hollywood and they're going to make a right wing Hollywood.

and then we've just got two extraordinarily politicized movie-making things. And the people who actually just want to watch a good movie aren't going to do that. But from what I've been hearing, actually, the Daily Wire is making things that are the non-documentary stuff. That's just a good movie. Or that's what they're trying to do. So do you think the pushback's already started or do you think we're some way off? I think it has started, yeah. And, you know, companies like The Daily Wire, it's good that they're doing what they're doing.

They are, I don't know if they're really going to become a legitimate rival to Hollywood because they're ultimately just one company. They can only produce so many films and they've only got so much of a budget. Yeah, I've seen one and two of the things that they've produced, that the Run Hide Fight was one that I watched, which was all right. You know, it wasn't an amazing movie, but it's kind of a step in the right direction. And yeah, I had hoped that what we would see is just more of a realization with the way. in Hollywood themselves of we can't keep sustaining this, we can't keep bankrolling this kind

of lunacy, and they would gradually shift more towards the center ground. And there was signs of it for a while, like I know the guy who took over running Disney, Bob Cheapeck, he's very much just a money man. He doesn't care about ideology. And he even made that his mission statement, said, Disney's now a for-profit company. We're not here to push ideology and we're not here to get involved in politics. When he tried to do that, there was a massive backlash against them basically saying, well, you must be racist then or whatever. And staff were walking out. So I don't know how successful that's ultimately going to be. But I guess it's indicative of a bit of a shift where people are realizing that what we've been trying to do over the past five or ten years

it's slowly alienating people. You know, look at the Oscars. That used to be a huge event. People tune in to watch that. Now it's like their ratings are like a third of what they once were. The only thing that got people talking about this year was Will Smith. I was going to say, now that he literally have to beat each other to get their attention. I said this, I made a video about this. I bet you people are going to start starting fights at the Oscars now just to try and get headlines, you know. But I do find it worrying as someone who loves film, as someone who loves cinema. Just look at movie stars. Really, how many great or new movie stars have been produced recently. They haven't. You're relying on Tom Cruise, who is a brilliant movie star,

one of the greatest of all time. But how old is Tom Cruise now? He's 59. Yeah. Can you keep relying on him to do all these new films and get people into the cinema? Yeah, that age of the movie star has ended, and I've talked about this on my channel. What you have now is people who get interested in characters. You know, oh, there's a new Batman movie. Some other doches are going to be playing Batman now, or there's a new Superman film or whatever it is, you know, they're interested in the character rather than the actor playing them now. And so what you're losing is that kind of magic of stardom, which just doesn't exist anymore.

There used to be a time when, oh shit, there's a new Tom Cruise movie out. Of course we, you know, we need to go see that because I'm sure it'll be good. You know, he's like really the last one. Nobody is going to get totally fired up. there's a new Chris Pratt film or there's a new Dwayne Johnson film like those are just you know those guys have their their careers obviously and they make a lot of money but like they're not stars in the same sense that you used to get 20 30 years ago and why is that well probably because the studios have become so powerful that it's more of an assembly line of movies than it is you

know actual projects that people are passionate about it's probably going to become like that with directors as well. You used to have guys like Stephen Spielberg who would just, you know, they could pick and choose the projects they want you to do, they could get things commissioned on the strength of their name because they were so powerful within Hollywood. Now you've just got guest directors that get brought in to do things and particularly within these big, big budget Marvel movies. They don't even really direct their own movies. They are brought in to do scenes like this where people are sitting in a room talking to each other. Then when it comes to the action scenes or the CGI. Someone else does that. They do all that. And that's about 90% of the movie. So

now you've got directors who are just like the actors now. They are just gigging. They are happy to get the work that they can. But they are not big names anymore that people are excited about. That's the difference. And it's worrying when you look at the industry, when you look at a lot of the films that make the money are Marvel films. And look, I quite enjoy a Marvel film, but they just shows that there's a complete dearth of ideas out there where the only way to get people to go and watch a movie is to have Spider-Man or all the rest of them. What they talked about, and it was very telling,

it was like one of those Disney internal memos, was the franchise ecosystem. And I thought that was just the perfect word to describe what they do now, because you get a new movie or a new TV show by Disney, whether it's Star Wars or Marvel, whatever, that will have an old character in it but it will usually have a couple of new characters and then they get their own spin-off movie or spin-off TV show and then that will in turn create

more spinoffs and it's just this ever-expanding tree of more stuff and yeah one of my one of my other content creators we were on a stream a week or two ago and he showed me all of the upcoming projects for marvel and disney over the next 12 months and I just hung my head and just died a little bit inside because there's so much it's so overwhelming now and that's all it is it's just it's all just about producing more content whether it's movies whether it's TV shows they're obviously now getting into the realms of streaming services where you just need that constant pipeline of new content so that people can binge it and what about the british film industry how is it is it significantly different

or are we making all the same mistakes here? I don't think we're quite the same as the Americans because we don't quite have that streaming focus that they do and we don't have these mega huge companies running things in the same way that they do. So Britain, I think, is more restrained when it comes to that kind of thing. But then how many big movies are we producing now?

I mean, we've got the Bond films. They come out once every like five years or so at this point. I mean, Bond will be a woman before long. Yeah. I am baffled by what they're going to do with Bond now. You know, they blew him up at the end of the last movie. And then they end with this little, James Bond will return. Like, how?

You know? In what form as a ghost? He's got a new identity, mate. Yeah. It'll just be, like, reassembled from all his bits. But the other worrying thing as well is that the independent cinema. Back in the 90s, when I really got into movies, you know, you had all these independent houses. It's okay they were then bought by companies, people like Miramax.

They were creating brilliant independent movies. That doesn't seem to be a thing anymore. Like these new rebel voices like the Tarantinos, etc. It doesn't exist. No, I mean, my hope was going to be when we had the lockdowns, the pandemic and everything. And, you know, there was no revenue coming in for movies. and my assumption was, okay, the era of the mega blockbuster might be over for now. You know, studios are just not going to be able to put two, 300 million dollars into each movie

because there's not necessarily going to be the return on it. People are wary of it going to the cinemas. And so what you might see is that middle ground that you used to have of movies on a budget, I don't know, 50, 60 million, relatively small in Hollywood terms, but big enough that they can still look good, they can still have big set pieces, whatever they want to do, and they can afford to then be a little bit more daring.

They can take more risks with them. They could take a chance on a new director who's got some crazy idea because they're not sinking that huge amount of money into it. But it doesn't seem to have happened. We seem to have gotten right back to business as usual. And you look at the movies coming out this year, you've got what the new Jurassic Park movie.

I mean, that was apparently diabolical. 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 for a couple of days. But yeah, I mean, they're huge budgets, again, back to what we were doing before. And what about taking cinema, especially post-COVID?

I used to love going to the cinema, and it used to be a real treat for me when you'd sit down, you know, everything goes dark, and you're just there just to watch a film. But I haven't returned to the cinema, and I think it's just simply that I got out of the habit of doing that. How have the cinema has been affected? I mean, I can't speak for each of them, but I know when I've gone to see movies this year,

they're not as busy as they were back in 2019, for example, or 2018, should I say. And whether it is that people are just watching at home now, whether they have gotten out of that habit like you have, they're just streaming it, or whether some people are still wary about going back to things like that, just for health reasons, I don't know. But, you know, the money that seems to be coming in from films still suggest that people are going. They are making money. So maybe they're, yeah, maybe I've just been unlucky with the screenings that I've gone to.

But I do think there'll be a proportion of people that won't go back, at least not like they did before. Yeah, there's always going to be that proportion, which is a real shame because there's something beautifully communal about going to the cinema. I love it. And I love the lack of distractions, because you'll know yourself. If you're watching a film at home, you've got your phone there, you've got other people in the house maybe you may be getting things delivered or the postman comes around or whatever. There's a million distractions for you. And so you're never quite engaged with the film you're watching in the way you are in the cinema. Like you say, the lights go down, the phones go off, and people can just lose themselves in the movie for a couple of hours.

And yeah, there's a great feeling there where if something funny happens, everyone's laughing along with it, you know, something shocking happens, you hear a little gasp or whatever. It's cool. It's a fun way of experiencing it. It's a bit like the theatre, I suppose. This is our modern version of it. Yeah. Well, I think I'm not making this up. I remember reading something about how he even if you watch a movie you didn't particularly like, just the two hours or three hours in a dark room watching one thing with other people, it creates what they call an afterglow,

like that feeling when you first walk out of the cinema. Of like having been in a different world, which is one of the reasons, you know, where we started this conversation, where you're constantly being dragged out of that other world by like, oh, here's a bit of social justice for you. Do you feel bad about yourself yet? Yeah. Yeah.

Look at this girl boss doing. in this or that or whatever. But I was going to, I mean, Francis, you mentioned Tarantino. And I was thinking, you know, I think Tarantino can be gratuitous sometimes. I mean, that is his trademark. But I also wouldn't want to live in a world where Tarantino hadn't made many other films that he ended up making. But there is no fucking way in the world that he'd be able to, a new Tarantino would ever get a shot now, would they?

No, I think the environment's changed. movies are just so much safer now. They're so much more corporatized for the reasons I've already described. You know, one, they're usually run by much bigger companies that have to protect their image, their bottom line, all that sort of thing. And they've usually sunk so much money into it that they have to play it safe. You know, most of the time they have to play to general audiences now. Whereas Tarantino's movies, obviously, you're not going to want your kids going to watch that, you know. But they're fantastic films. And so, yeah, he was very much a product of his time, and it feels like that time has passed,

and there's not a way to bring up guys like him anymore. There's a few directors who've got a distinct visual style. Like, one of the ones I talked about recently was The Northman. Great movie, and it was the same guy who did The Lighthouse. And the name's totally escaped me because I'm sitting here with you guys right now. But he's a really good director, and he's got that unique visual style where it's a little bit. abstract and it's a little bit art-housey, but it can be tied into that big budget movie style as

well. So guys like him are really interesting, but yeah, they're the few and far between now. There's just not people like that getting created, like really different, interesting creative directors, not in mainstream movies at least. And it's also counterproductive as well, because take the example of a film like Dirty Dancing, which was made on a shoestring, which had unknowns which told a story about, you know, a girl meets boy and it was in the Catskills, I think, in the 40s. And on paper you go, well, how is it, this isn't going to make money. But it's one of the highest grossing movies all times

and probably one of the most profitable as well. Yeah. Just a unique combination of really good actors. You know, when you got Patrick Swayze, peak Patrick Swayziness, you know, a great sort of 80s soundtrack. Yeah. And yeah, just one of those lightning in a bottle things where it just, everything somehow worked with it. I think there was a lot of tension on set, but then it showed in how they interacted with each other. And it just, yeah, a film like that was just one of those happy coincidences where it just everything happened to work.

Yeah, I suppose even, you know, a lot of the people who worked on it at the time wouldn't have predicted that it was going to be this mega hit. they just wouldn't have known. But yeah, sometimes films get lucky like that. Hey, Constantine, do you like shopping? No. In Russia, you skin bare with your bare hands and wear it. Obviously, this is for men only. Women and small children are allowed to use knife. Where did you get your blazer from?

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And we'll look, we've been talking for about an hour, an hour, 40 minutes, or whatever it is, and we've been a little bit negative. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. It's very unlikely. Yeah, exactly. Are there any, you know, green shoots? So is there any hope out there?

Maybe could the new Top Gun movie, maybe could that spark something? I think so, yeah. When a movie makes, I mean, it must be getting close to 800 million now. 800 mil? Yeah. The last time I checked, it was like 770 million worldwide. So it'll reach 800, probably 900. It'd be cool if it reached a billion,

but it's probably going to get pushed out by other blockbusters this summer. But when a film like that does that well, people take notice. And I think they definitely take notice of when films fail in a high-profile way. And so, yeah, I guess we just have to hope that we see more of this. And with my channel, with the reviews that I do, if I spot movies nowadays that are genuinely good and enjoyable, hell, I'll promote them as much as I can, you know. I'll recommend them to people. So what have been some of, obviously people should go and check out your channel,

but for anyone watching this, what have been some of the movies that you've actually thought have managed to pierce, sort of politicized social justice bubble. Well, that was one. The Northman was another one. I don't know if that made a massive amount of money, but it was one that I very much enjoyed. Everything Everywhere All at Once was a great movie. Again, it was a story about, I think, Chinese immigrants

and an older woman getting to see how her life might have played out if it should take in different paths and so on, but it was funny and inventive and just a great all-round movie. the, what's the other one? That Spider-Man movie, the most recent one, No Way Home, we were all blown away by it because it had no real politics in it. It had no social justice stuff.

You didn't have a female character that was magically better than everyone else, anything like that. What they did was they took all these older actors who'd played the same character, brought them all together into a nice, compelling story, let everyone have their moment on screen, and they were pretty respectful to previous generations of actors that had played the role. And it just all came together really nice.

So, you know, things like that, we were really surprised. Like, who knew they could make a comic book movie that was still enjoyable, you know? Well, there you go. Will, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. We're going to do a couple of questions for our locals. But before we do that, we always finish our interviews with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, that we really should be? You know, I was wondered, why are so many people allergic to nuts these days?

I think we should be talking about that. It was unheard of when I was a kid. Now, it's like everyone seems to have some kind of nut allergy. I don't understand it. We used to let them die. Which is how it should be, really. Look, if you can't eat your peanut, I mean, you didn't make it, you know what I mean? It was like, you know, little Jimmy just got really ill every time he had a peanut butter sandwich or something.

And that was fine. It was the system that worked. Do you know what I mean? Someone had to come in and mess with it. It's separating the wheat from the chaff ultimately. Agreed, mate. You're not actually allergic to people. You just don't like them.

That's a different thing. That's okay. You can not like things. Yeah. Nice to have ended it on a super right wing note. Thanks for me. There's nothing right wing about saying you deserve to die if you can't handle the peanut.

It's just practiced in reality. You're just not keeping up with the tribe. You're slowing everybody else down. Yeah. But it's been an absolute pleasure. Will, if people want to find you online, where is the best place to do that? You can find me on YouTube under the Critical Drinker,

and you can find me on Twitter by the same handle. Fantastic stuff. Thanks so much for coming on, and thank you for watching. This is a question that I would ask you. It's a brilliant question. It's from Andy Kidd, and he wants to know your top five films and why. Oh, I always hate these questions, actually. Well, at least there's five, so it's not like too difficult.

But top five, one of them would be saving Private Ryan, just like probably a definitive war movie for me just absolutely fantastic what else I always had real fondness for falling down that Michael Douglas movie fantastic the man who I based my image on yeah great man I need that flat top hair stuff yeah big trouble in little China just because it's absolute peak John Carpenter lovely and cheesy and just really good fun so love that one back to the future Love it. I could happily watch all three of them and just have a great time. But yeah, the first one is just fantastic.

Just real magical movie. And the last one, probably Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Ring, I think, is my favourite. Again, on the movie, you can just absolutely lose yourself in. So those would be my picks, I think. But you asked me next week, it would probably be different ones. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to pick, isn't it?

Yeah. And somebody called, I'm sure it's not actually the Home Secretary, Pretty Patel, but somebody called Preet Patel on our locals. I'm pretty sure my immigration papers are in order. Yeah, you're getting deported back to Scotland. Or Rwanda, whichever you prefer. She says, why are prequels and sequels so often disappointing in comparison to the original?

I think a lot of the time because the original wasn't written with a sequel in mind. And so what they have to do then is try and pick up the threads of whatever story they had and then to construct a new narrative around that. So that's why you sometimes have a disappointing sequel and also a lot of the time you just end up rehashing the same basic ideas just bigger. And again, it's not going to have that same magic the next time around.

You know, the example that I've used before is something like Predator. Yeah, one of those 80s action movies, but it worked great because it was this mystery about what was killing all these people, you know, and how does it work? How can it go invisible? All that stuff, all those things have been answered by the end of the first movie. So you try and do another one. All you're doing is just doing the same thing again, but you're living. losing the mystery of it. So I think that's part of the problem. And then prequels,

kind of the same issue in that you know where it's ultimately going to end. And so if it's, if it comes to characters and so on, and they're put in danger, you know they're not going to die because they're going to be alive in the next movie. So, you know, you've got a little bit of a problem there as well. Yeah, a lot of the time it's just trying to construct narratives that weren't really meant to be there originally. That's why they're often disappointing. And I suppose it's probably quite hard to get a studio to agree to making like a three-part movie unless there's been a hugely successful book like The Lord of the Rings or like you're not going to get someone to sign up to three three episodes let's say over like a completely new thing yes yeah makes sense all right

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