People Are Starving For Offensive Movies - Critical Drinker

What is happening with James Bond? Give me the updates. It's a bit of a mess at the moment. Um, so in a nutshell, uh, it is now being corporatized. Uh, the, um, Broccoli family who have been running James Bond on screen ever since the 1960s, and I can't believe I'm saying the word broccoli in relation to James Bond, but there it is. Um, they, it was originally Albert Broccoli and then his daughter Barbara took over. Um, and they have in a way safeguarded it to some degree. Um, it's debatable how good of a job they did in the Daniel Craig era, but you know, they kept it from becoming too exploited. Um, I think they got uh a little bit frustrated with dealing with Amazon who had bought over MGM, which ultimately owns the rights to Bond. Uh, and so the most recent development is that they have tapped out essentially and now Amazon have got full creative control over the Bond franchise and they are already talking about turning it into the next Marvel Cinematic Universe. Uh, essentially you're going to have the Bond cinematic universe. So, what they want to do is spin-offs of Money Penny and, you know, can she shuffle files quickly enough to meet her deadlines and, you know, Bond the early years when he was a kid and uh, you know, we're we're probably going to have TV shows with all the other double O agents, you know, with all them getting like their own little spin-offs and uh, and then having big team up events. Uh, that's what they want to do. It's about exploitation of the IP. Uh so that's where we're at now and it's not a good place to be sadly. There's a reason that Bond has endured uh as a franchise and as a character for the past what 60 years now. Uh and it's not because he was milked dry uh by a big money hungry money hungry corporation. Well, they did step in and manage to turn around Lord of the Rings in a manner that I think was actually impressive. I mean, it takes a certain level of skill to destroy something as thoroughly as they did and to blow a billion dollar um you know uh show. Uh but they found a way, you know, and then run it back on season two. Yeah. They'll keep going with it because they said they were going to do five seasons and they will just out of pure spite. Uh it kind of in the same way that Disney have managed to absolutely tank Star Wars as a brand, one of the most um recognizable IPs in entertainment history. uh in the space of less than a decade, they've completely and utterly destroyed it. So, it's it takes a certain level of skill, but luckily that skill seems to be prevalent in Hollywood these days. It's great. Uh well, we saw this recent thing with Bezos stepping in with the Washington Post. You see that he's saying we're going to have more balance, etc., etc. I don't know, maybe we'll start to see some more of that cross over a little bit into the world of Amazon, Amazon Prime. I you might see it. Um the problem is that Jeff Bezos um does not run Amazon Studios. Uh that is run by a woman called Jennifer Sulki. Uh and she is the one who's largely responsible for failures like the rings of power. Um because she is very much into the message as I talk about in my videos quite a lot. Uh and she essentially directed uh the way that Rings of Power has gone as a show. Um, even to the point where they had a Tolken scholar in who was tearing his hair out, saying, "No, all of this stuff that you're writing is complete nonsense. This would never happen in Tolken's world." Uh, and for his efforts, he was fired. Uh, so that tells you everything you need to know. So, yeah, Jeff Bezos may well indeed um be wanting to restore a bit of balance, which is great, but as long as people like her are actually in charge of their creative output at Amazon Studios, that's not going to change. So, people like her have to go, sadly. I was thinking about how Bond seems to have been protected, but as you've suggested, it's, you know, one very tightly uh defined set of boundaries around who it is that's got creative control. And as soon as you start to build that out into teams of 150 with a couple of people at top that paid a few million dollars a year, I imagine that your ability to stay true to the source material starts to go out the window. It absolutely does. Yeah. And as I said earlier, there's a reason that the Bond franchise has been this cultural mainstay for, you know, all the decades that has been around, well over half a century. Um, it's there's something timeless and um and consistently appealing about James Bond as a character. And they never lost sight of the fact that he was center stage in everything. It is about Bond. Uh, we don't want a money penny spin-off. We don't want a Q department spin-off or anything like that. You can't franchise Bond uh because he is the core of everything and he's a character that needs to be used sparingly. You know, one movie every couple of years. Uh don't delve too much into his private life, into his backstory. Maintain the mystique, maintain the things that have made characters like him so appealing for so long. Uh that's that's been the secret to his longevity and they're going to lose that. I think it is interesting how the sort of allurement of Bond is in his aloofness. It's the fact that there are all of these open loops and as soon as you begin to say, well, this is the the real woman that he loved and this is why he's womanized all the way down from and this is what happened in his past and he did the orphan and blah blah blah blah and you think ah okay this as soon as you give an answer all of the speculation that was exciting gets uh collapsed down to it's like shroing as bond you know there's so many different versions that it could be and then they tell you and it gets collapsed into the version that it is basic on what they said. But yeah, I mean, [ __ ] She-Hulk, you know. Did like, you know, there we go. Why did you have to say that name? Sorry. Yeah, I'm aware. I'm aware it's a trigger word for you. Yeah, I mean, well, it was a disastrous show. Uh I think everyone recognized that. Nobody, even at Marvel, can pretend that that show was a success. And uh it's been pretty much scrapped now. So, uh they can chalk that one up to uh bad ideas, I think. What did you think of uh Loki? What did you make of that? Uh Loki as a show um the concepts were interesting, but I hated how it absolutely cucked him as a character. Uh Loki at his best is actually a really intimidating character. They got him right when they did him in Avengers, the first Avengers movie, where he was actually kind of terrifying. He's actually really physically powerful, uh incredibly intelligent. He's a schemer. He's a manipulator. That is the the core element of Loki. Uh when they try to do this TV show with him, he's getting knocked out by people. He's he's crying all the time. He's emotionally vulnerable. You know, he comes up against a female version of himself who of course is better than him in every way because she has to be. Uh and all of those things diminish him as a character and they make him less interesting. In the same way that, you know, having Bond no longer be able to seduce women and and have him be emotionally vulnerable diminishes the mystique of his character. He was always more interesting as a an idea rather than a flesh and blood human. Uh they did the same thing to Loki. Um you know, the the more vulnerabilities you introduce to a character like that, the the less uh interesting he becomes and the the less uh menacing he becomes. So we saw it with Thor as well, right? that you go from this beautiful arc where competent, powerful, maybe a little bit sort of uh naive, so immature, sort of childish in a way, but that was part of charm. And then over time it just gets ramped up and up and up and up and up and then he's doing the splits over a set of dragons or whatever. And yeah, I mean, how many movies can we have where Thor needs to find his true purpose in life? Like he's done that about five times now, it seems. It's a permanent midlife. Well, I suppose if you live for a few thousand years, you get a couple of midlife crises. So perhaps that's Sure. I mean, a lot of these problems I would put down to Taiko YT as a creative. Um, and he he was straight up saying, uh, wouldn't it be funny if Thor goes through a midlife crisis and that was as far as he got essentially and then he just based a movie around that. So, wouldn't it be funny if he was like kind of useless and he didn't know where he wanted to be in life and he was just lost? And you know, you think, okay, after everything he's been through, after saving literally the entire universe, you probably have found your purpose by that point. You can't keep uh resetting that clock, but that's what he tried to do and just turned him into a complete joke. Can you remind me of the stages that I think it's either movie franchises or subg genres go through that finishes with parody? I swear that you taught me about this. Oh yeah, yeah. Um, so I'm going to paraphrase here because I'm just dredging this up from my memory, but uh you've essentially got the the early stages of the genre, right? So, um, the the trailblazers, the the, um, experimental movies that define it. Um, then you've got the, um, uh, the classic era where they've nailed the the formula. They've made it work. They they know exactly what works with it. Uh then you've got the revisionist era where the you know the classic era no longer um resonates with audiences. We've got to find a new angle. Well well let's let's look back now and try and reframe things. Um a good example would be the western genre where in their late 80s early 90s westerns had fallen out of favor. Uh you've got like movies like Unforgiven uh which start to redefine it and and reexamine it in a more um mature way. Uh and then when you get beyond that the final stage is parody. That's where it's just like we we've got nothing else to do dramatically, classically, uh you know, in terms of mining new ideas. We're just going to make fun of it now. And that's when a genre dies. Seeing that and knowing that parody is kind of the uh there's a couple more nails to go into the coffin and then it's about to be brown bread. Uh once I've seen that, I can't unsee it. And I'm always on the lookout for whatever it is, whether it's a genre, whether it's a series, whether it's a movie, whether it's a franchise. uh even directors, you know, um their style almost becoming a caricature of itself. You being able to predict what it's going to be, even if it's a totally new movie. Might Shyamalan, I think, is sort of perilously close to becoming a caricature of himself. Yeah, I think so. I mean, like when your career is predicated on having mind-blowing twists that no one's going to see coming, um you're always in a competition to to one up yourself, um and to try and do better next time. And you can only take that so far before everyone knows. Well, it's an Might Shyamalan movie, so of course there's going to be some crazy twist at the end. Um, and that that's it. You've pigeonholed yourself to the point where you can't do anything new at that point. So, um, yeah, he he definitely fell victim to that and yeah, he just ended up, you know, putting out absolute sludge. If you want to cast if you want to cast your daughter in a movie, like, you know, what a what a lovely last harrah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he he put himself in most of his movies in smaller roles and sometimes larger roles like I think Lady in the Water was the the most egregious one where he cast himself as a misunderstood genius who uh was ultimately going to reshape humanity after his death and I just thought well everyone thought this um yeah you're you're reaching quite a bit there sir. Yeah the lady doth protest too much. So you mentioned uh you mentioned the message there. I every single time that I talk to somebody about sort of culture stuff and we talk about have we passed peak woke and how much inertia momentum has this thing got. Surely the movie and TV industry can only keep pushing awful productions that don't make returns for so long before they run out of money and need to change. So yeah, how much longer has the message gone? It's already changed behind the scenes. That's the the key takeaway here, right? what you see when you get movies that come out today, they were commissioned like two, three, even four years ago. So, they were based around the cultural zeitgeist of the time four years ago, half decade almost. Um, and so, you know, there's always a delayed effect um before these things actually come out. And from what I've been told by various people within the industry, u most of the executives at the big the big um studios are very aware of the problem. They know that uh this stuff doesn't sell anymore. They know that the culture has shifted radically, especially over the past six months. Um and uh they they want to fix it. They want to change things, but they obviously have movies that are in the pipeline that were commissioned years ago and they're just coming out now. Uh and so you're you're kind of seeing the last remnants of it coming out now. That Mickey 17 movie that I just reviewed uh a day or two ago is a good example of that where you've got Mark Ruffalo doing his worst possible Trump impression. It it just it honestly felt like a movie that would have been cutting edge like 10 years ago. Now it's just absolutely stale and cringe and played out. Um but that's the delayed effect that you get with Hollywood movies. They they take a long time to get made unfortunately. But what do you predict for the next 5 to 10 years? If you could throw a couple of coins under a roulette wheel for what we're going to see. Uh I think we're going to see the demise of the superhero genre. Uh we've kind of seen it already. Um there's a bunch of Marvel movies that are coming out this year. The first one has already flopped. Captain America. Um Thunderbolts is also probably no one's going to be interested in that. The big test will be in July when we've got Superman and we've got um what's it called? Uh the Fantastic 4 coming out, right? Two movies, same month. Uh if they don't succeed, that's it. The genre is cooked because it's super expensive to make. So, um you probably will see after that a a massive reduction in the budgets and the number of superhero movies. There's probably going to be a switch more towards video game adaptations cuz that's probably the next big thing that's going to happen. Um there's a lot of money in that. The the the amount of money that is made by the video game industry dwarfs Hollywood. Uh it is insane how much money changes hands there. And so if they can capitalize on that momentum and that fan base, um it will actually it'll be a new gold rush. It'll be like 10 15 years ago with the superhero genre when that's really exploded. Um, so I think there's that and I think you're going to see a return to um a bit of a swing more towards the center in terms of like the cultural impression that these movies want to make and the politics they want to push. Uh, I think they're going to be a lot more neutral. You're never going to get Hollywood pushing conservative ideas. It's just it's not in their DNA at this point, but they will probably be forced to concede defeat. Um, and they know this stuff doesn't sell anymore. So, I think you're going to see us a swing more towards politically neutral movies that are just about entertainment. Yeah. I mean, hopefully. Yeah. Well, let's not speak too soon. People vote with their feet and their butts on seats and their dollars. And as much as you can say, well, we want to make something that stands up for what we believe in. You go, yeah, but eventually there's going to be some very, very high up guy with a very, very sort of long job title whose entire job is to look at spreadsheets all day. and the far right hand column is going to be a big bright red number with a minus in front of it and lots and lots and lots of zeros after it. He's going to say, "I don't [ __ ] care. I don't care about how cool you think this new movement is. We're a business. Ultimately, we're a business. This isn't a charity. We're not here to try and promote some message at the expense of shareholders, stakeholders, IP, etc., etc." Um, so yeah, it's going to be interesting. I mean, you touched there on the video game industry. I think I'm right in saying the video game industry makes more money than movies, TV, and music combined together. Yep. It's It's so weird because to some extent like the the general um you know, culture is insulated from video games a little bit. It doesn't have that sort of mainstream impact that you might think, but the amount of money that's actually changing hands in that industry is insane. Um the the top level video games have budgets that would um almost embarrass Hollywood films at this point. What are they getting up to? I some of them are up to three 400 million easily for the for AAA titles. That's a lot of money. I remember when uh Kevin Spy was cast in uh Call of Duty. This is probably about 10 years ago, I think. Yes. Uh and then Conor McGregor was put in it. Not that Conor McGregor is exactly a sort of a AAA star, but I do remember thinking like, oh [ __ ] like Kevin Spy as a fully facial mapped all, you know, soundboard, all the stuff. Yeah. That it always felt like uh video games were cool and exciting and interactive, but the prestige was held with movies, right? You know, that's what you go to go see at the at the cinema. And now it feels like if what you're suggesting is correct that the world of Hollywood and movies are going to have to suckle at the teeth of uh the IP from video games. So how the they they will to some extent. And you know from their point of view it's actually a godsend because you've got characters and story lines and entire worlds that have already been created for you. All you need to do is adapt it. And Hollywood, you know, throughout the, say, the 90s and the 2000s, they were notoriously bad at this sort of thing. They couldn't find the formula to crack video games. Um, that's why you had god- aful films like the Mario Brothers movies and stuff um from the '90s. But in the 2000s, maybe they started to get it with like things like the Tomb Raider films that actually were fairly commercially successful. all those Resident Evil movies which were dog [ __ ] interpretations of the games, but they they made money again. Uh, and now we're into this modern era where we've got things like The Last of Us TV show, which not only is making u a lot of money for HBO, it's getting lots of critical praise as well because the games were very cinematic uh in their own right. So you you're seeing this convergence where games are getting closer to movies in terms of their maturity, the themes and ideas they present, the characters and and the the acting that they they are able to present to you. Um, and the commercial appeal of crossing that over into actual movies and TV shows because you've got a built-in audience, a built-in fan base, and a pre-made story with pre-made characters. So the the potential there is enormous. Why why is it not as effective to do that with books? There's way more books that come out every single year than there are uh video games, especially AAA, although probably about the same number of very a very small portion of video games and books make it to the top of the tree. Um why why why not start to build out Red Rising or The Name of the Wind or something else? Generally speaking, because books no longer have that cultural impact. Like when was the last time we had uh say a Harry Potter series, something that like crosses over into mainstream cultural awareness? Fifty Shades probably. We had that. We all we tried to do that, you know. Um and that's great if you're like a frustrated middle-aged spinster uh who who drinks a bottle of wine every night, but like that's not appealing to general audiences, you know what I mean? And that's the reality, man. Like the at this point the publishing industry is super female oriented. It is designed for um middle-aged liberal women, unfortunately. Like, that's all you get. And so, there's there's no more uh massive fantasy series, no more f massive sci-fi series. Uh you're you're not going to get a a Dune or a Lord of the Rings anymore or even a Harry Potter anymore because the conditions that that can allow that to flourish um and appeal to a broad market don't really exist anymore. It's geared towards a subset of the population. What's happening with the Harry Potter TV series? Because I I heard that. Oh, no. I haven't I didn't check in. Black Snape, man. We've got a what? So, Seus Snape from the from the movies and from the Yeah, obviously for the books. Uh famously played by Alan Rickman, who was a great um approximation of the character. Uh they've cast a black a black actor now to play him. They've decided to race swap him. Um and yeah, good luck with that, I suppose. Um yeah, the the problem is he's he's explicitly described in the books as having like long dark hair, pale skin, like dark eyes. Um so we know what he looks like. Everyone um agreed that Alan Rickman did a great um performance ascape. Uh but they've swapped him and it's just it's endemic to the the way of thinking that you have in Hollywood productions now. Well, we've we've got to get more diversity in there. um no matter what it means to the the lore or um you know being accurate or respectful to the source material, it doesn't matter. And they're missing JK is still heavily involved though, isn't she? She is. Yeah, I can imagine her signing off on this. Like I've I think she's said in the past like um Well, well, you know, there's there's nothing in the books that explicitly says that Harry has to be white. Sure. I mean, it's her it's her series. Like, if she wants to trash it, I'm not going to defend her for it. Say what you want, JK. Yeah, I suppose it's interesting that you've got this sort of uh um concern against progressive overreach thing, which in some ways slash many ways JK people might assume from the outside seeing JK tweet about trans issues uh that she would be aligned with, but actually she's just very very specific about protecting women's spaces and I don't think that it seems to bleed out that much into the rest of her politics. I don't know much about I I don't know much about her politics, but I imagine that she's probably quite a progressive sort of liberal lady uh who just happens to have one very staunch uh set of beliefs around women. Yeah, 100%. Um it's so funny when people start saying like, oh, based JK Rowling, uh it's like just because she has a problem with trans people, like people assume like a whole um slew of ideas about her politics. In every other respect, she is a raging hardcore lefty. you know, it's just that one issue that she has a problem with. So, yeah, like I can totally see her being behind changes like this to the TV show and not having an issue with it. So, fine if that's what she wants to do. I don't know, man. I mean, look, I every time that you go home for Christmas, it's it's kind of like some sort of weird tribute that you need to do where it's mandatory to watch at least 30 minutes of one Harry Potter movie at some point, sort of between the 20th of December and the sort of 2nd of January. it just it's on TV in the background at some point. I I'll I'll be totally honest with you, man. I never really gave much of a [ __ ] about the Harry Potter movies. I mean, for me, um I was always much more of a like Lord of the Rings guy or whatever. And when it comes to Christmas, you know, I I've got Die Hard, I've got Home Alone, I've got like all the Christmas classics there. Uh Harry Potter never figured into it that much for me. I totally respect the fan base around it and like if they love it, then great. It's just it never particularly grabbed me um as a viewer. So yeah, it seems to whether you like it or not, it just seems to appear kind of uh it just sort of uh emerges like [ __ ] Michael Boué uh around about Christmas time and it just comes out just appears and and Harry Potter Harry Potter omnibuses. Um, but my point was, you know, those are really dated. Like the first one will be coming up on 20 years now. Or maybe it'll already be over 20 years old. And, uh, it does surprise me that it's taken this long to sort of get back to continuing to rinse this franchise because this Harry Potter world at Universal Studios and all of the clothing. And you go to Edinburgh and there's Harry Potter stores, bookshops all over the place. Memorabilia. tell me about it. Yeah. And of course, close. And a lot of them have cues like right out the door and onto the street. Like that's still the level of enthusiasm for it. Um so it's still a massive brand. I don't know if they're still doing those um you know, Fantastic Beasts uh movies. Maybe they maybe they are. Well, I know they're certainly doing uh I think it's called The Forbidden Forest, which is this sort of outdoor experience. I did that in the north of the UK couple of Christmases ago. It's happening here in Austin, Texas right now. Like, dude, it's I mean, at no point in the Harry Potter law did it talk about scorching hot 30° sunshine for 5 days in a row. So, yeah, I I don't know how true to the source material that is. You mentioned Dune there. Um, I think one of the interesting challenges that seems to be faced is can you have Blockbuster that also does well when it comes to awards? Can you have Blockbuster that also ends up actually making its money back? Because it's a real challenge. What was the I I haven't done any research on this. What's the synopsis of how Dune got on? I mean, I loved it. Thought it was great. Seemed to have a lot of critical acclaim, but from a awards, monetary standpoint, everything else, how did it do? Uh, I think with Dune 2, it certainly did better than the first one. There was a lot more hype around it when it came out. Um, so like there was definitely more enthusiasm there. And I think um it probably is a good example of a a movie that achieves quite a lot of cultural and um you know commercial success and also was um actually a pretty intelligent sci-fi movie and a good stab at like you know replicating the source material. I'll uh let's see actually what it got. It was uh yeah so it made 714 million worldwide which is uh set against the budget of 190 million. That's actually all right. That's That's a pretty good earner, I would say. That's not bad. Yeah. I mean, well, the thing is you see tallies like that and you think, "Oh my god, that's insane amounts of money, but like you've got to factor in the cost of like advertising. You've got to cost factor in the the fact that um distributors take like between 40 and 60% of that revenue. And so it when you see it makes like 700 million at the the box office or a billion dollars really only like maybe five mill sorry 500 million actually goes back to the the studio that made it. So the margins are often tighter than you think. I was thinking about this. I'd really love to kind of get an insight about the state of the movie industry and what's happened to it now up against streaming. airlines seem to have movies within I don't know 6 weeks to sort of 12 weeks of of them being in in theaters and then you can watch it on some transatlantic flight on British Airways or something. Um you know a lot of the time I know musicians have got problems with what Spotify and streaming has done to record sales and the fact that there's basically a much smaller pie and everyone's having to do different things now. We've got to do more live. We need merch. We've got to have a membership site. You've got to get exclusive access. there's going to be a Patreon or whatever. Um, when it comes to the movie industry and sort of what the theater to Netflix, Amazon Prime pipeline or airlines and stuff like that's done, is this is this kind of a just a slow plane crash, a slow car crash into uh it not being viable and stuff's just going to go straight to streaming? What do you think? I mean, to a degree you're seeing um streaming exclusive movies that are getting bigger and bigger now. um like The Gorge was one. I think that came straight out onto streaming with with pretty respectable budgets and pretty big stars attached to them. So, it's no longer this idea of like direct to TV or direct to streaming movies that are just like lowbudget trash. So, it's definitely changing. Um, I think uh the the fact that piracy is more of an issue now, the fact that uh streaming services are are able to throw so much more money at it does um incentivize studios to get things out onto streaming as quickly as possible. So you do see um a really short theatrical window now and a really short gap between theatrical release and you know streaming or or whatever. Um, so it's just the economics of the new technology that we're grappling with. And also, yeah, like, um, maybe for a lot of people now, the hassle of going to the cinema, um, and the expense of it is becoming more of a a thought for them and it's becoming more of a um, you know, big investment for you because, you know, say you you want to take your wife and kids to go see um, the latest Disney, you know, kids movie or whatever. you want to go and see Snow White if you've completely lost your mind, then you know, uh, that's you factor in the cost of tickets, you factor in the cost of all the popcorn and all the crap that like everyone needs, that's well over $100. Probably what, six months of your Netflix subscription. Yeah. And and that's to sit in a crowded movie theater with a bunch of people who are talking and looking at their phones and just disrupting the whole experience. Or you could wait a few weeks and watch it at home in your nice comfortable living room and uh, do whatever you want. and you could pause it whenever you want. What would you rather choose? That's the reality of cinema going now as an experience. It's changing. So, what does that mean for the future of it? Um, it probably means that it will become um gradually more like the way we see uh going to the theater, you know, to go to see a stage play or something. It'll become more of a niche thing gradually uh where you know a smaller selection of people who are real connoisseurs or real passionate about that particular um you know method of performance still go to see it but general audiences will just watch at home. Yeah. Well I mean we saw it was enlivening to see I think the passion around Interstellar's 10y year anniversary and you know they put that back into 70 mil IMAX theaters. Maybe there'd been a little bit of tinkering to sort of dial up some sound and and you know refine some resolutions and stuff like that. you think that that caught I spoke to McConn about this this very thing and uh that's a that's a question he was lament perhaps unsurprisingly lamenting the loss of the romcom and uh you know he said that you could sort of spin this thing up for between 10 and 20 million and it would be an easy return at the box office and you get you know replays on holidays replays at Valentine's Day date nights um that seems to He that seems to be a genre which is almost exclusively just being eviscerated. Is it ever going to come back? Well, I mean we didn't we have the Bridget Jones whatever like Bridget Jones 17 like the old folks home or something. Um just that just came out. Yeah. I didn't see it either, but I know it did exist. And so there there's still the concept of romcoms. I think uh comedies in general, just straight up comedies are dead at the the cinema. Um, and the reason being everyone's [ __ ] offended by everything. And so when you you you've got to tiptoe around every potential issue and you don't want to offend anyone, you can't be funny anymore. It's impossible. Uh, and so comedies have died. I've talked about this many times on live streams and so on. Uh, we tried to name like what was the last truly good uh, comedy that hit cinemas and the best we could come up with was like Tropic Thunder and that's well over a decade ago. Yeah. and would cause an awful lot of uproar if he did it. Sure, it would never be allowed today. But all that stuff like political correctness is the death of fun and it's the death of comedy and it's the death of entertainment. I suppose that's the reality of it. We're seeing, you know, I think Andrew Schultz's live special life is number two, number three in America at the moment on Netflix. And um maybe we're seeing comedians who can kind of bear the brunt and have less oversight from uh executives and franchise owners and different stakeholders and people that say we can't say that, we must not talk about this problem. Um so there maybe the absence of comedy movies has created a vacuum which is going to allow more standup specials to appear on streaming services and stuff like that. I think the hunger is always going to be there for comedy because everyone wants to have a good laugh every once in a while and you need it. And I think what you're eventually going to see is this is all part of this growing backlash that we've seen to uh wokeness for lack of a better word that uh it it's uh it's so puritanical. It's told you all these things you're not allowed to say that you're not allowed to laugh at that you're not allowed to make fun of. And I think as a collective society we have reached the point of saying I don't give a [ __ ] anymore. I just don't care. I don't care about your stupid um censorship. I don't care about your fake offense. I don't care if you you think that's racist or sexist or anything. All of those words have stopped meaning anything now. You've used them to the point of insanity. No one cares anymore. And I think now the the ground is now like prepared for comedy to actually make a comeback. If if some studio actually has the balls to do it and make a comedy that's not afraid to be a little bit edgy and offensive, um if they were to do something like Tropic Thunder now, I actually think it would play really well cuz the society I think we're ready for it now. We pass through all this crap and we're ready. Yeah, I I think you're right. And uh you might not be realizing that these two things are related, but I promise you they are. Lizo's BMI and the preparedness of the world to accept new comedy movies. Uh the reason I say that is I think we had a period where toxic compassion or performative empathy or I stand up for the good guy. Look at me. I this is you know saying good whilst doing bad or at the very least saying good whilst not doing good. um kind of nobody scrutinized for a while and it was all around post posting a black square and and and making sure that you sort of support the message. Uh but Lizo has dropped a [ __ ] ton of weight because Ompic is a hell of a drug and she appears to genuinely be taking care of her health and you go okay well if and the same thing at the Golden Globes. You know, the Golden Globes just proved that body positivity was a total [ __ ] farce all along because as soon as people were given an easy route to be able to get themselves out of being plus-sized, they did. And I think that that is one more little Jenga piece that gets pulled out of this tower, which was already pretty unstable, of the performative empathy, of the saying good whilst not doing good thing. And uh yeah, I think it's it it's so fragile that it's getting to the stage where it's in its own parody phase, if that makes sense. So yeah, I think I think the that progressive overreach stuff, [ __ ] for those of us that have been swimming in the waters of it for the last whatever 5 years, like it felt like we were already in parody come back end of 2020 and then we've just been waiting for this behemoth Leviathan to finally kick the bucket. Yeah. And it's great to see it actually collapsing now. But it makes me excuse me, it makes me sad to think about all the people that have uh suffered as a result of this. Whether it's all the people that said the wrong thing or, you know, they dug up an edgy tweet that they made 10 years ago and that got them cancelled or they were forced to issue grling apologies or the the people who literally ate themselves to death because they were told like, "Oh yeah, you're 5'2 and you weigh 300 lb. Oh, that's fine. Like you can be healthy at any size." No, you [ __ ] can. Like if you're I if you sweat walking across the room, guess what? You're you're you're in trouble, man. And uh yeah, this is I'm glad that common sense is gradually reasserting itself, but man, how many people have suffered and died because of this? Yeah, you know, I I shudder to think about that. How many fat influencers that were so proud of themselves literally died before they were even 40? You know, that didn't have to happen. And how many brain cycles, how much attention of people's precious short, sweet time alive on this little spinning rock has it taken up? Is that really is that really what we want to look back? Well, so Dad, tell me what it was like between the year 2020 and 2025. Well, son, it was kind of [ __ ] Yeah, we all lost our [ __ ] minds as a society and uh we were, you know, we were prevented from uh asserting common sense and we just had to agree with everything no matter how stupid it was. You know, this it's crazy time that we had to live through. If you'd said to me 12 months ago that Ryan Reynolds would be considered one of the less likable or would be sort of a declining stock, that would have been something that I I mean, I [ __ ] adore that man. Like I think he's so charming, so funny, so likable, seems really down to earth, doesn't take himself too seriously, had this sort of great fourth wall breaky thing with his wife going on where I think she posted a photo of Hugh Jackman on his birthday saying, "Happy birthday, honey. Love you or something." And then he did it he did it back. You just think this this is so cool. This is exactly what you want sort of Hollywood. They're not they they swear a lot. And this Blake Lively thing has really sort of turned the eye of scrutiny in his direction in a way that I just straight up couldn't have expected from, you know, 50,000 ft straight down to cruising altitude. 100%. Yeah. And look, I I want to be judicious about what I say because like the facts are still coming out and so on. Like it's still very much allegedly. Allegedly allegedly. Exactly. Yeah. Um, and allegedly, uh, he is an absolute dick behind the scenes. Uh, throws his weight around. He is not the happy golucky, self-deprecating, uh, you know, lovable guy next door that, uh, we know him as allegedly. Um, he is, uh, a real [ __ ] Um, and you know, this is what he does. He leverages his power within Hollywood to prop up his wife. uh which you know you can understand like you're obviously going to want to defend her but uh to the point where you're bullying directors into doing what you want them to do. Um and so yeah, it's it's kind of a a sad downfall really because like you said, he really seemed like one of the good guys. Uh a guy who didn't take himself too seriously uh and was seemed to be very accessible, was always up for a laugh. And uh we're seeing a very different side to it all now. But hey man, you you don't become like one of the biggest names in Hollywood by being nice. I think that's probably the thing to remember. I don't know. I just wish I'm aware that every movie that Hollywood has produced has tried to tell us that sometimes the good guys actually do finish first, but uh I kind of hope that that was the way that it worked. Anyway, maybe maybe it's not. But I I I wondered whether you think we'll be seeing more um production fourth wall breaking [ __ ] in the future after this sort of it ends with us debacle whether it's going to be the uh yeah like the production equivalent of me too that behind the scenes we're going to be hearing a lot more about not only whether a movie is good or bad but what the process of creating that was like because you can say what you want. This has garnered an awful lot of attention. It's driven an awful lot of attention. If people think they they might not learn the lesson, which is to allege things incorrectly and to overblow and to selectively edit the storyline that you put out, um, that's bad. But what the lesson they may take away from it is if I want to put myself on the front page for 6 months, I just need to cause a bit of a hoo-ha about the way that this movie was made. I think uh, if they've got any sense, they'll be very careful about doing stuff like that because then you're getting into lawsuit territory. That's the reality of Hollywood. Um, most of the time when you sign on to movies like this, you sign an NDA. Uh, you you definitely have a non-disparagement clause uh in in any contract like that. Uh, and so if you break that, you're getting into the territory where everyone has to sue everyone else, and that can bankrupt you and ruin your life. Um, this was an exceptional circumstance. I don't know if we're going to see more like this cuz everyone thought like after the Oscars where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, it's like, oh damn, there's going to be like a punch up at every Oscar ceremony now because someone's going to want to garner the attention. It's not happened. Uh so I yeah, I think they have to be very careful when they do stuff like that. This is something that was just quite unique. Um and yeah, there's there's always things that you learn about movies after the fact. There there's plenty of movies that have had torturous production uh processes. uh whether it was just difficult shooting or you know the actors and directors being absolute dicks towards each other. Uh it's hilarious when it happens but it usually comes out years down the line. Yeah. I remember watching a behind the scenes of maybe the third or the fourth episode of the final series of Game of Thrones. It's the one where they had the battle at Winterfell and uh the actors and actresses were talking about how, you know, it's pretty cold and they're just sat on their little stools with their name on the back with the little foot thing. They're just sat on that shivering for ages and ages and ages for the shot to be gotten right. And uh I don't know, I've been on a couple of movie sets, but I've not exactly sort of lived and breathed it in that way. But I do get the sense that it probably from the outside seems like it would be all glamorous and fun and sexy and you turn up and sort of say the lines and oh my god, here's an award like go and spend your $100 million. But in reality it's lots of waiting. There's lots of waiting. Yeah, there's a lot of waiting around. Um I mean I could say from tiny little bit of experience like uh I used to be an extra on things back when I was at uni. um just this like for beer money basically. And yeah, you spend you can spend the whole day just like sitting in the green room or just waiting on on site just waiting to get used and nothing happens like and it's uh it's usually boring and it's quite cold if especially if you're in Scotland. Um and so yeah, it's not always a glamorous process for sure. Um but that's just the nature of the work that they do. I'm sure the stars are looked after for the most part. Well, they'll have a big RV and the makeup artist and the massus and so on and so forth. Yeah, for sure. Uh, you mentioned the disparagement thing. Uh, Rachel Ziggler. Uh, what happened or do we know cuz Snow White's coming out imminently? 10 days, I think, from now. Yeah, the 21st. Uh, and have you got any idea how much they've had to retrospectively edit, add, remove stuff from that, or is it all speculation? It's speculation at this point. No one's really come out with a a you know good reliable leak on this one. Uh we do know that they put the movie back by an entire year. Uh and I think you can summize that they did a lot of re-shoots during that time. I'm pretty sure they changed the entire dwarf thing where they were going to be played by liveaction humans and now suddenly you've got these CGI monstrosities that are just pure nightmare fuel. Um it's just it's the most predictable failure ever. Like when you have to do all of this, when you do massive re-shoots like this, you add tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to your budget, um, and the the word of mouth around the film is terrible. Everyone hates the idea of it. Rachel Ziggler is super unpopular as on a personal level. Uh, this movie has got everything that you could possibly ask to go against a movie. It's it's all pinned to this film. Uh, so it's a perfect storm of shittiness and it's going to be hilarious. I was going to say this is this is like a catnip for you. This is just pure YouTube channel fuel. Sure. And you know there's always that temptation to like report on every new development and it's like no I'm not doing that. I'm not going to go to that extent. This is like the Snow White breaking news channel. Sure. Exactly. Yeah. Because like you can put Rachel Zgler's face onto a thumbnail and you'll get like a million views over it. It's insane. But I'm going to wait now. just wait till the movie comes out and then do a review of it cuz I've talked about a few different aspects of it and that's enough at this point and uh man yeah you can only beat that horse so much but it is content gold for for YouTubers that's the reality of it just like the acolyte was for Star Wars you know when something truly terrible comes out like people it's just human nature they like to see it get torn down speaking about uh beaten down horses Megan Markle new Is that that from or sorry with love or something from Meghan Markle? Yeah, it it will probably shock you to know that I haven't watched that. I I thought my thing at the front at the front of the queue of Netflix, there's a I was polo that was bitching, man. I couldn't get enough of that stuff. Um, there was a a screenshot floating around on Twitter that's her hands reaching down toward a cake or something and the sentence says, "When I think of honey, I think of bees." As in like this really profound insight. And uh, apparently there's one episode where she spends a good bit of time explaining how to build a balloon arch. It's like, you know, [ __ ] you haven't built a balloon arch. What are you talking about? You know how a [ __ ] balloon arch is made? You know, your your butler's butler knows how to make the balloon arch. Yeah. It's like what can she teach normal people? Like what has she got that people can aspire to? There's nothing really like you're just going to do another generic like home lifestyle. Exactly. And a a thinly veiled PR rehabilitation process. I this is allegedly uh on the podcast run that she had that she did briefly in between each answer from the guest and her response there was a producer sat next to her telling her what to say. So that's how heavily curated it was that she was being ventriloquized by some person sat slightly off camera. It's so funny when you got people like that who have actually no discernable skills or personality or like personal history that makes them interesting, but they're somehow famous anyway. And so you've got to try and do something with them. Like what do you do? I think the Kardashians kind of encountered that problem with Kim where it's like her one and only ability is to stand still looking hot and like anytime she has to speak or do anything like intelligent, she's completely lost. But you know, somehow you can parlay that into a billion dollar empire. runs run skims up, dude. Yeah. I mean, look, I really enjoyed Suits. I think I bailed out in season five or six. I It kind of got a bit confusing and but the first few seasons of Suits I thought was great. I thought she was like a good character in it. She sort of definitely visually fit what you would have wanted to expect to sort of overly glitzy. Everybody is unnecessarily hot in this law firm for no apparent reason. Uh but I thought that was I thought that was good. I enjoyed her in that. But yeah, I mean, holy [ __ ] what a way to what a way to not only torpedo your own trajectory, but that of a literal royal at the same time. He He's so going to regret this in years to come. He really is. Do you think he'd be able to I mean, can you as a royal divorce someone like that? Like, that just seems like it would be such a huge U-turn. The amount of egg that you need to wear on your face would [ __ ] suffocate you. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that if you really wanted to do it, you'd have to divorce her and come back to the UK and beg forgiveness um from the king um and serve in the armed forces for another couple of years. Yeah, I mean he's getting a bit old for that, but like maybe there's something that could be done there. But yeah, there would have to be a humiliation tour, I think, to get him back on track and I just don't think he would be willing to do it. I think he's just too he he honestly feels like a a hostage almost like he looks like he's been completely emotionally captured by her. Has anyone seen if he's blinking Morse code secret? I know. Yeah. Help me. Um, yeah. It's like when they do the like interviews with people like Oprah and like he's almost like waiting for permission to speak from her. You can tell 100% like she just like wears the trousers and just dictates everything that he does. You know, the energy the the energy it gives me. It gives me Jada Pinket Smith energy. Yeah. Yep. Real Jada Pinket Smith energy. Speaking of which, give me your thoughts on the Oscars. Should we have thanked the sex work community before we started the episode today? That was a weird one. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure if like honoring them is quite what you should be doing. Like like a like a land acknowledgement before you start. Yeah. But because um what was that actress saying? Like, oh, I want to pay tribute to the sex workers of the world. Like maybe you should like focus more on helping them so they don't have to like be doing this for their their careers. I don't know. I don't think there's anything particularly noble about that. But um yeah, I mean the Oscars in general were just a snoozefest this year. There was nothing particularly controversial. There was not nothing particularly interesting. Anora pretty much uh was the big winner of the night. A a fairly solid stodgy drama. Like there wasn't a hu huge amount I could say about it. Um yeah, the Oscars was just boring really. There was nothing really to pick up from it. Would Dune 2 not have been in the bucket for this one? Uh, it would I think it was nominated for best visual effects or something. So, it was there, but uh I don't know. I just figured, you know, it's this epic movie did really well at the box office fan favorite. I artistically seemed to be sufficiently legitimate and edgy that it would, you know, justify people that know what movies are about to put it in. I think they wanted to do a bit of a 180 from the previous year where there was a lot of um bigname box office successes uh up for contention. You know, you had things like Oppenheimer, Barbie, that sort of thing. And um this year, I think they wanted to go the opposite direction and it was very much like smaller films, um you know, independent movies, all that sort of thing. Like very much your traditional Oscar bake kind of movies. I don't know if they thought that was going to give them a bit more uh legitimacy and like raise the interest in it or what, but it seemed to have the opposite effect really. No one was really talking about it. Yeah. I Do you think it was uh purposefully sedate? Was it? I think so. I I think that maybe there was a memo that got passed around saying like, "Right, don't get political. Okay, that that [ __ ] ain't working for us anymore. Like, I don't care how much you hate the orange man. Uh there's no point ranting about it because no one cares anymore. We've done this for 10 years and it's uh it's old now. I think so because they were pretty pretty toned down about it for the most part. Yeah. I mean, or alternatively, Hollywood realizes that nobody really cares all that much now and that celebrity law is genuinely losing steam and they're adapting. I'm aware that uh both me and you might be um skeptical of Hollywood's ability for like self-awareness, but uh um perhaps that's actually happening. It might be to a degree. And uh the yeah, the way I described it was like Hollywood at this this entire like awards season, they give the impression of a man who has been bent over a table and like violently humbled by the by society at large. They have been told in no uncertain terms, "We don't give a [ __ ] about your political views. We don't care what protest or what cause you want to support. We're not interested in that. And we're increasingly uninterested in your actual movies even." So, uh, yeah, the it was very toned down. It was very, um, sedate and almost intentionally non-controversial. And if anything, that is a good thing. Like, it's good that they're they're recognizing that. And now that's probably where I would recommend that they go as an awards ceremony. And maybe they need to let go of the idea that it's going to be this huge event that like hundreds of millions of people are going to tune into. It's not really it's an industry event. It's a chance for them to like recognize talent within their industry. Uh in the same way that companies have award nights for like best employee of the year or whatever. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. is like you're not going to pretend that like you know the the average person on the street is going to give a [ __ ] about like Microsoft's top coder this year or anything but for the people in it for the people in that industry it's super important so great such a good take yeah totally makes sense I don't know it's you've got this weird like anchoring bias thing from the past people used to be normal people used to be interested in awards ceremonies therefore they should be moving forward but there's no reason to assume that that was what was accurate and now is an aberration or some sort of flaw in the typical system as opposed to they fluked it. People were interested for a bit, but this is actually reverting back to what it is. You know what it is? I think um it was the novelty of seeing your favorite movie stars uh unscripted. They were just there. They were all hanging out together. Like back in the day, it would be like, "Oh my god." You know, like um uh Steve McQueen's hanging out with Paul Newman just like chatting away and they're having a few beers or whatever. Like that that was quite the novelty. and like to hear them get up on stage and give their their unfiltered speeches or whatever, that was cool. But now you see them everywhere. They're on social media. They're giving every [ __ ] thought that pops into their head is like going out onto their Twitter feed. And so there the novelty of seeing them in this unscripted environment doesn't exist anymore. And so the appeal of that starts to diminish. I think that's the reason. It's so true. I've thought about this for ages that uh the allure of celebrity for the most part is really hard to hold on to. Uh how are you supposed to do that? People know the name of your dog. You know, they know that you recently bought new pet food for them and and they they didn't agree with it or whatever. This the fourth wall has been sort of thoroughly smashed open and and left open and people can just stare in 24 hours a day on your Instagram feed or on your Twitter feed or whatever. Thing is, it's not obligatory for you to do that as a celebrity, as a movie star. You don't have to have an Instagram feed. You don't have to be on on Twitter or whatever. Um, you can forgo all of that and maintain that that distance between you and the fans. It's it's just they're chasing that cheap dopamine hit. And I think probably during things like the pandemic, it was uh it was really acute because uh they couldn't be in movies anymore. Um that everything was shut down for a time and so they wanted a hit somehow. They wanted attention and so they would go on social media and do it that way and get that validation. But the downside is, yeah, we get to see you as a as a human, as a flesh and blood person, just like me and you. Um, and uh, and not the star anymore. Yeah. You're not supposed to be Yeah. You're supposed to be untouchable. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You're supposed to And obviously it's a fantasy, but like it it was something that made them interesting, like the mystique around them. Kind of like what we talked about earlier with James Bond. The more you tell me about his private life, the less I'm interested in him as a character. It's the same with movie stars. The mystique is what drives our interest in them. So true. Who do you think has got the right balance? Who do you think from sort of modern movie stars has got a good uh a good blend? Gosh, now you're you're asking um I'm trying to think maybe someone like uh Anna Taylor Joy. I think she's not super active on social media and in which case that's great. Like she's an interesting performer. Um, I'm always kind of curious about what movies she's in. They're not always great, but you know, I think she's still quite an interested star. Keanu Reeves seems to have got a good blend of it as well. Yes. I mean, he's obviously from a different generation, but he's still Yeah. very much active now. Um, yeah. And yeah, it's cool. I don't know. Would you There's a bit of me that kind of wishes that Nick Cage in his heyday was like uploading stories all the time behind the scenes because that would have just been [ __ ] brilliant. It would have been Vokers. Yeah. Like Nick Cage is uh he's something truly special. I hope that man never stops working. Well, I think based on his financial position, I don't think that that's an option for him. Possibly not. No. Yeah. Uh Star Wars, is it redeemable? Uh that's a complex question, right? Can it get back to being profitable financially? It can. Yes. It needs to rest for between 5 and 10 years before they start doing more stuff. The ideal scenario would be um stop making new things in Star Wars. Um say that we're kind of shelving this brand for a time, fire everyone at Lucasfilm who's responsible for anything that's happened in the past 10 years. Uh and then come at it fresh with a new trilogy of movies to great fanfare and great fan anticipation. Let people miss it again because that's what we need. Um so yeah, that can come back to being profitable. Will it be this cultural juggernaut that like you know you you walk down the street and like everyone you you meet will have heard of someone like Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader. Um will it get back to being that? Probably not. No. I think that's that time has come and gone sadly. Um and it's just it's brand destruction and there's certain um there's certain bits of damage that you can't undo and I think this is one. You had a a tweet. I think this is four or five years old now, but how to be a Hollywood creative today. Number one, pick some old franchise with a loyal fan base. Number two, remake it, but remove everything that once made it popular. Number three, insult the fan base when they protest your creative decisions. Number four, blame negative reviews on toxic trolls. Number five, move on. And uh still holds true. It still holds true today. Yeah, that's pretty much it. And uh wow, they just do not learn from their mistakes on that one. It's crazy, man. You can lay the playbook out and it's always going to happen. So yeah, we have this odd world in which um we're at Star Wars saturation. Meanwhile, George RR Martin seems to be having a competition with Patrick Rothfus for who's going to write their next book last. Yeah. Like I I saw he opened a coffee shop or something the other day. Bar cocktail bar. Yeah. And you think someone had tweeted it's like it's been 2,100 days since Windsor Winter came out. More like 4,000 uh days. Yeah, it's Nerd Rotic. An absolutely excellent channel that you should definitely have on here to talk to. But uh yeah, he's every time something new about George RR Martin comes out like some business venture or whatever, he'll just post the number of days since the last book. Yeah, that dude will do like George R. Martin will do anything to avoid writing that book. And I think we all know why. He doesn't know how to end it. He doesn't know how to continue this series. Is this the final one or is it the penult? No. So, there's one more called Dream, sorry. A dream of spring that's supposed to end the the song of ice and fire. Uh, realistically, that's never going to happen in his lifetime. He's already really old and fat and really unhealthy. And um if he even gets Winds of Winter done, that'll be a miracle. Wow, that sucks. I mean, so does someone know? Is there a is there a potential for somebody to continue on his legacy? Is he is he going to pass this down to the people that did the world of ice and fire? Are they going to complete it? I I mean, I don't know if he's named anyone, potentially named a successor, a health successor. I I think so because like really like the publishing house must have some kind of plan in place uh to say like you know look George is uh he's probably not going to finish this and uh we need to have someone who can pick it up and carry on. They'll probably talk to him about it and I think maybe some people have suggested that like this is intentional on his part. He doesn't know how to finish it and he doesn't want to live with the uh the backlash of it being a crap. So I'm going to open a cocktail bar instead. Yeah. Well, he'll do anything. Like he'll, you know, he'll um produce like five more TV shows and he can use that as an excuse to not be writing or he can say that, you know, it was a cloudy day and he felt sad or, you know, Trump's in the White House and that made him distracted so he couldn't do anything this year and like anything basically to avoid like writing the book. Um because if he passes away, um and I'm not wishing that on him in the slightest. I hope he lives for another hundred years. But when he eventually happens, uh, he can go down as like, well, this this genius who never quite got to finish his creative vision, and if the subsequent books come out, they're not great. Well, that's someone else's fault. I really hope that that's not the case. Meanwhile, [ __ ] Brandon Sanderson is just a one-man word factory who seems to be able to put out, what was it that he announced? Was it last year or the year before? said, "Oh yeah, alongside all of the other stuff that I've been doing, by the way, here's a five bucks series that I just wrote on the side. Just dumped another couple of million words on you." I mean, when you when you've got that creative drive going and it's in full swing, like, why interrupt it? I mean, it's great to see. Uh, plus hard Mormon energy, that's what that's what George That's what George should do. George, if you are listening and you convert to Mormonism, there is a there's a spirit that speaks through your pen. There was there was a great um Twitter thread like I don't know if you ever saw it but uh it was some other author who offered their opinion on George and uh his work and they said that his fundamental problem is that he is a lazy nihilistic mill sorry uh um liberal boomer you know he comes from that baby boom generation uh and he's his entire worldview is colored by like this nihilistic view that there's no good or evil that like everything is just shades of gray great and that like heroes can never like really get the job done and like no one is the the people that you think of are evil or are not. Um, and it's like he he conceived his entire storytelling philosophy as a direct response to people like JRR talking. Uh, he didn't want that clear delineation between good and evil and good ultimately triumphing. It was uh much more bleak and nihilistic than that. The problem is uh you ultimately end up hating your own creation because it is so depressing and it is so difficult to wrestle with as a creative to the point where now he just doesn't know what to do with it. Um and it's it's interesting. I think it's an interesting philosophy. Well, it's sexy and complex in some ways because you have twists and turns and you realize that the person you thought you hated you don't actually end up hating. I mean Jaime Lannister is a really great example of this. pushes a [ __ ] 8-year-old kid out of a window. Episode one, and uh by the end of it, you think, I really respect this man. I really, you know, he's standing up for his principles. Yeah, sure. He's [ __ ] his sister, but you know, aside aside from that, twin sister, you know, nobody's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. We've all got our ways that we like to spend our evenings. Um but I and you end up really I ended up really liking him. I thought he was one of my favorite characters in the entire series by the end of it. Um, and that's cool and unexpected and subversive in a way and and that's that's pretty exciting, but it's also the delineation when you haven't actually worked out what the trajectory is. Um, this is one of the reasons I think that uh Top Gun Maverick was such a success that it was easy bastards in black helmets versus good guys that wear leather, right? Like that's it. They very easy to work out. good versus bad. But I mean, even now we've seen Suicide Squad. The only way that you can have a goodie is for the baddies to be the goodies. And even they are conflicted somehow internally. And there's there's no clear delineation anymore between heroes and villains. I think ultimately it's going to come down to the execution because there is ways to make it work. But I think what you want to circle around to eventually is uh a a redemption arc or an idea of there there being uh clear lines between good and evil and that you just have to go through a bit of a torturous path to get to that. And I think that's what George might have once uh had in mind for A Song of Ice and Fire that like you've got all these characters squabbbling over their petty political rivalries and all that crap, but meanwhile you've got this big existential threat that's creeping up on you in the form of the White Walkers that are literally going to end the world. And you know, eventually those characters have to put aside all their [ __ ] and all their politics and like band together to actually defeat this much bigger threat. And actual heroes have to rise to take them on again. Um, he's just never quite gotten to that point. I don't know if he has the ability now. Are you a Severance fan? This is something I haven't watched, but increasingly I'm seeing Break the Internet. Yes. So, um, I only started it relatively recently, so I'm like four episodes in. Um, fascinating. Yes. Season one. Yeah. Uh, so I'm late to the party on this one, but a very interesting show. Really cool premise. Um, deals with some very interesting ideas from that premise. you know, if you're your personality is literally split into two people with two different memory sets, um, what do they do? How do they come into conflict with each other and can they interact in some way? So, very, very interesting. Um, hopefully it doesn't go down the bad road of mystery box storytelling where the answers are like super disappointing and you just think, Christ, I waited like five seasons for that. Lost. Yes, exactly. Um, hopefully they've learned some lessons for that. But yeah, man. Like Apple TV, they don't make a lot of stuff, but they do generally make pretty good stuff. I will say that for them. What was that one with uh Jason Mimoa where he was blind? Was everybody blind? Maybe everybody was blind. Sight or something. What the [ __ ] was it called? Jason Jason Mamoa Apple TV. Uh C. It was called C. Uh 7.6 on IMDb, 63% Rotten Tomatoes. uh came out in 2019. Only did one series. Um it was really cool. Uh yeah, all of their descendants have lost their sense of sight and uh it's that was that was pretty fun. And I remember thinking that was the first thing I ever saw on Apple TV. And I Apple TV, they're just going to be buying up other series. But no, they're a legitimate uh like production house and they're making this stuff and they're commissioning things and the ideas seem to be interesting. And uh yeah, the only issue is that for every new exciting network or technology that has a production house attached to it that actually makes good stuff, it's another membership that I need to buy. I'm like, "Okay, well, I need Max and I need Disney Plus and I need Apple TV and I definitely need Netflix and obviously I need Amazon Prime." And before long, you like, "How the [ __ ] do I aggregate all of this stuff?" I mean, unless you're willing to sail sail the high seas, of course, that's the solution to a you know, even just uh you know what would be useful is just like a search engine that encompasses all an aggregator. Oh, that would be so good. Well, just put your login here and we'll give you all of the options that we think that you'd like. And then if you could um I I've thought this for ages. A lot of the time you don't know what to watch. People will send you Spotify songs. They'll send you um albums and and tracks from artists freely. There's no I don't even know how I send a friend something from Netflix. I don't even know. I take a photo of it and say, "Hey, you should find this on Netflix." But I'm not going to do that. It's just not in it's not the sort of headsp space that I'm in when I'm doing it. But if there was a way for your friends to refer to you what they think you would like. Yeah. Oh, Stephen suggested that you should watch Severance with a little note or this a star rating or something like that. That would be [ __ ] awesome. But yeah, I mean we are in the this weird scenario where um there's all these different streaming networks. They don't really communicate with each other and like if you want to watch one thing, it's on one network. You want to watch something else, it's on another. Uh and it means lots of login, lots of uh subscriptions and it does really start to mount up. and uh the the ones that are ultimately going to stand the test of time and the ones that are going to be successful are the ones that have got some other bit business attached to them, right? So, Amazon, right? It almost doesn't matter whether Amazon Prime Video is successful or not because they make a [ __ ] zillion dollars every day from like their actual online website, of course. So, this is just a vanity project. It's like we can have fun with that. Same with Apple, you know, it's a trillion dollar company. Who cares if like people watch their stuff? Um, but it it allows them to finance it and do interesting things. So great. The ones that are in danger are things like Paramount Plus stuff like the the smaller networks, even Disney Plus actually. They do have the theme park business attached to that, but it's still uh a smaller network that doesn't have a huge financial infrastructure to support it. And those are the ones that I think are eventually going to get swallowed up by other people. What's happening with the production of Rust after the Alec Baldwin incident? Is that just [ __ ] continuing as if nothing ever happened? So, I have no idea what's happening to that movie. I don't know if they can even release it at this point. Like the the the sorry the public perception around it has got to be absolute toxic. Okay, I've just asked chat GPT what is happening with the production of Rust? Production of film Rust has been notice notably turbulent due to a trag tragic incident in uh Okay, I mean this is years ago that the accident happened. So 2021 uh following this event, production was halted but late resumed in April 23. Film was completed in May 23, premiered in Poland November 20th, 2024. As of now, there is no announced release date for Rust in the United States, but uh Alec Baldwin is doing the Baldwins. I watched one episode of that out of pure morbid curiosity and it's uh it's the Alec Baldwin equivalent of that Megan Marco show. Uh thinly veiled PR. Yeah, that's all it is. It's like, hey, let's all pretend like we're a happy family. This didn't happen. Let's all pretend that this didn't happen. Yeah. And it's like, well, they they do actually um they do reference Rust and the court case and all that, but it's like what they want to do is garner sympathy by showing that he's got like 12 kids or something ridiculous. his wife is about 30 years younger than him. Um, you know, and it's like, oh well, you can't send this guy to jail because, you know, look how many people rely on him and look at them having fun together. And it's like watching them do things that they've clearly never done in their entire lives, like try and bake a cake. Honestly, it would be like watching my my pet dog um trying to like cod a video game. You know, they've clearly got no experience with this whatsoever. And uh yeah, it's just fake. It's all fake, dude. Uh what are you focused on over the next couple of weeks and months? What have you got apart from obviously the uh star-studdied release of Snow White? Um what else are you focused on? Uh we've got some more movie projects in the works because I did a short film that we released last year. Um we are doing uh more of that that we're working on right now and we're hoping that we're going to launch a Kickstarter uh in the near future to to hopefully finance that. And um we we want to branch out like rather than just doing one movie, we want to do a slew of like smaller films and give people who back it an opportunity to get some of their projects made as well. So uh it's like a a a little mini production studio that we're going to start to do where we can crowdfund uh movies and like let people vote on the things that they want to get made, which we we think is hopefully going to be quite an interesting idea. Unreal. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of that stuff and everything you do? Uh, so yeah, you can find my channel on YouTube, The Critical Drinker. Uh, I also have uh a gaming channel called The Critical Gamer. Very imaginative. And you can obviously find me on the usual places like X and so on. [ __ ] yeah, dude. I appreciate you. Until next time, man. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a god? Is it able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself? Well, the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you, bespoke. So go and go and check it out.