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Welcome to the Ben Domenech Podcast. This week, Ben is looking back in an episode with the critical drinker from May 2021. All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all the Fox News podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. I hope that you'll rate and review this one as well as subscribe, of course.
Today we have an interesting off the beaten path interview with someone who I've been fascinated by on YouTube over the past several months. He goes by the moniker, the critical drinker. His name is Will Jordan. He's a Scott who also writes a number of different books on that are in kind of the, the spy novel suspense category. But Will,
what he's really known for and become known for on YouTube is really insightful deep dives into the problems that exist within numerous movies that are very prominent within Hollywood today, particularly the superhero genre and everything that's related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
As you may know, this is a situation where something that had once been kind of a very pro-American traditional approach. I still remember the moment in the first Avengers film where Captain America says, there's only one God, ma'am, and he doesn't dress like that.
I think that this is a situation where, unfortunately, we've seen these movies become more and more woke and political in a lot of unexpected ways, perhaps, but also ways that really resemble what's happened to the comics industry as a whole.
The Critical Drinker is someone who really pierces through the problems with these films and what really is going on underneath all of this, including the compromises that these studios are making as it relates to China and other issues. I hope that you'll enjoy this conversation with The Critical Drinker. We'll have Will Jordan right after this.
Get started with Greenlight today and get your first month free at greenlight.com slash Spotify.
Will, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So I want to talk to you about a number of different things, but first off, I have to ask you, when did you decide that your having opinions about movies and TV and comic books and the like would be worthy enough of, you know, needing to be shared with the world to the extent that you do? I mean...
It almost happened by accident, but I think there was a growing sense around that time period of, you know, when Ghostbusters, the remake of that, came out. And then, you know, things like Captain Marvel and so on came out, and The Last Jedi with Star Wars. I started to notice that there was a real...
undertone of lecturing and pandering going on in these movies that just really soured the experience for me and I think for a lot of other people. And coming from that kind of writing background that I have, it just made me realize, you know, this is really sacrificing the integrity of the ways that they're telling just to preach a myth. It's a message that a lot of people don't really want to hear anymore because they get bombarded with it every day. And my...
My take on it was just, well, I'm going to put my thoughts out there about this and express my frustration at the way this is going. And it seems like it really struck a chord with a lot of people and it really took off. And before I knew it, the channel had 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 subscribers. So it was quite a rollercoaster. I am curious about your perspective on where you think all this is coming from.
is the wokeness that we see being pushed by Hollywood, something that is organic? Is it top down? Is it a hive mind? Is it more of a plot to a certain extent by a number of different powerful entities? What's the real thing that's behind it? Because
Even, you know, 10 years ago, we didn't see this kind of push in such a all-encompassing fashion from Hollywood.
Yeah, I don't really think it's any grand conspiracy or anything like that. I think what this really is, is a group of shallow, narcissistic cowards who live in a bit of a bubble. And they think the world revolves around things like Twitter and Facebook and stuff. And so when they go in places like that, they see everything skewed in a certain direction. And they automatically think, well, that's the way I have to be. That's how I have to...
preach these kinds of messages to people in order to be popular and get applauded and get the likes that I desperately crave. And I think that's what drives it for the most part.
And I think there's also a kind of climate of fear around it where everyone in Hollywood is too afraid to say what they really think. And so they just toe the line because they know in a lot of cases, unless you're a mega A-lister who can just afford to say what they want, it'll kill your career if you say the wrong thing. And so they just all go along with it because they're too scared not to.
So basically you have to be Tarantino or Christopher Nolan or somebody like that to just reject this or to say, no, I'm going to have, I'm not going to try to subvert, you know, the idea of classic heroes. I'm going to lean into it. Essentially, if you don't have that ability to,
then you could end up destroying your career before it even gets started. Very much so, yeah. And I think if you even dare to criticize the kind of movies that they put out now and the kind of message that they put out, if you were to say, well, I'm not sure this is what we should be telling people or I'm not sure actors should be concerning themselves with, you know, the politics, that's it, you're done. As far as I know, so many people have been cancelled that way. And I just think most of them won't be done.
One of the things that's interesting, and I don't know a lot of people in Hollywood who are, you know, A-listers or close to it, but I do know a couple. And one of the things that constantly comes up is, well, I do think this.
But for the sake of the studio or the dynamic around this movie, I need to either not say that or I even need to affirmatively kind of go in the other direction publicly or imply that I'm on the other side publicly because the politics of it would lead to, you know, really disaster for my career. And I know that this is true of people.
who have done movies for major studios and are big parts of franchises and the like. And so it's almost like the experience of someone like Gina Carano is meant to send a message to them. You know, don't do this. Don't start to think for yourself or even have ideas that, you know, are basically just Republican. Because that's going to be really bad for you in the long term.
Very much so. Yeah, and I think people, like you say, they are just going to be afraid to speak up. They know what it will do to their careers. It's easier to just go along with it and collect your paychecks and get your next role and so on. But it's interesting because if everyone collectively just said, no, I'm just going to say what I think, what I really think,
the whole climate of fear would just evaporate because everyone would realize that, wow, so many people that I thought were super one direction actually aren't, and they actually think a lot more like me. They won't do it. And so the result is, yeah, it really destroys artistic expression. So many movies that should be free to concentrate and tell a great story, they feel they also have to be lumbered with all this baggage that comes with it. And they spend so much time doing that.
It killed their ability to actually tell stories. Well, you know, one of the things that is a dynamic in Hollywood over the past couple of years is that there have been a number of different directors, Michael Bay, Peter Berg, you know, different producers and the like who are basically very pro-American military or pro-military generally. But then they also have this problem where
Which is that, just using Bay as an example, his dumb Transformer movies are extremely popular in the Chinese market. How much has China's influence had an effect in the kind of thing that's getting made or that's not getting made when it comes to Hollywood? Because when I was a kid, I'm a child of the 80s like you are. I remember growing up and seeing movie after movie where the Soviets were the bad guys.
or at least not viewed through some kind of gray lens in terms of their depiction on the screen. But we don't see anything like that when it comes to China today. And even director controversies, such as we saw with Nomadland, are ones where China feels completely emboldened to assert its control over what gets heard by their own people. Yeah, very much so. I mean, I've talked to various other content creators
We almost look back, well we do in fact, look back really nostalgically at those 80s, 90s movies where America was very much the hero and the main character would be this big, strong archetype of the all-conquering hero. And you bought into it. Even here in the UK, we loved it. You just wait to see an American hero kick ass. What's wrong with that?
But yeah, like you say, it's almost like that's not allowed now. You can't have that just that honest, wholesome patriotism anymore. It has to be covered with, oh, but look, there is so much dark history that goes with that. It's so conflicted now. You shouldn't just support your own country. You have to reckon with its history of various bad things that have gone along with it. It's almost like it tries to make you feel guilty just for existing and just enjoy things. Yeah.
You had a phenomenal video recently about heroes and what they're meant for, why they exist, and why that they're kind of a deep human connection with our past and the way that we've been telling the stories for as long as we've existed.
And you talk about them being these larger than life figures who urge us on into better things for ourselves. And that really touched a note with me because it's something that I've said a lot to people.
my political friends, which is they tend to be, you know, a lot of conservative intellectual types in America tend to look down on pop culture and they say, you know, oh, that's low culture or something like that, where I think it's actually of the utmost importance, because I think that's how, especially, you know, given that so many of these things are written
for boys who are teenagers who are trying to learn how to become men. It's a guide to the different things that you want to pursue in life. It's something...
that you strive for as opposed to being something that is has to be constantly subverted. Tell me a little bit about the importance of that for you because clearly that was coming from a place of deep understanding of the importance of heroes in literature going back and art going back, you know, as long as human memory exists. Yeah, the hero
in stories, whether it's from classic literature like the Iliad or something like that from thousands of years ago, whether it's Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, it's all drawn from that same idea of this character rises from a lowly place, they test themselves against some great challenge and they rise to the occasion and they eventually triumph. That is...
That's the essence of what being alive is. We all encounter difficulties in our life. We all encounter hurdles to overcome. And the hero in classic storytelling is just the idealized reflection of that. And like you said, and like I pointed out in the video, it was to give you something to aspire to. It was something greater than you, but it made you want to be better.
yourself. It made you want to be stronger or more capable or more able to take on greater challenges. It was a positive thing. It was a great thing for people. That's what people need.
And that's why you, you know, even as a kid, you would see the action movies from back then, you know, you would see Arnold with his big muscles and you would think, man, I want to be like that. You know, you never would be, but it doesn't matter. It gives you something to aim for, you know, and it gives you something to inspire you. Whereas now,
Yeah, that's all been taken away and now you're told that you know the heroes that you liked back in the day are really that good and you should be kind of self-conscious and almost ashamed for supporting them and you know you've got this horrible and nihilistic view of the world now that keeps getting pushed where nothing really matters and nothing's really better than anything else, there's nothing to strive for, you just have to accept yourself as you are. What a horrible message to give to people.
If we all just accepted things as they are, we'd still be living in mud huts. That's not the mentality that gets you through life. The thing that put people on the moon and caused us to build great skyscrapers and invent computers and all that, that was the striving for something better. And I think we're losing that now. And what happens...
you know, we stagnate. We don't achieve anything anymore because we're not encouraged to, you know, and like when you were mentioning there that people can look down on pop culture, they really shouldn't because pop culture is your biggest weapon for influencing society. It's what everyone is tuned into, whether they're even aware of it or not. It's a reflection of us and it's a guide for us at the same time. It's absolutely true. And actually,
So there are two quotes that come to mind for me about this whole issue all the time. One is from C.S. Lewis defending the idea of reading fairy tales. He says, he wrote, when I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. But the other is from G.K. Chesterton, who is, it's misquoted frequently because I think
Someone, I think Neil Gaiman, put it in the front of one of his books, but he misquoted it. So the misquote's more popular than the real quote. But the idea is the fairy tale doesn't tell the child that dragons exist. The point of the fairy tale is to provide him with a St. George to kill the dragon.
And to me, that is what so much of these powerful, you know, mythic, epic films that have become the tentpoles for Disney and for so much of the industry are really designed to do in a fundamental sense. And it speaks to us as humans because this is something that we've always appreciated.
you know, used as a motivation and as a way to aspire to something greater. You actually, you did a video relatively recently, I think, about one of my favorite superhero films, which is criminally underrated, and that's The Rocketeer. To me, it hits so many different notes that are excellent in terms of not just story structure, but telling you and showing you in ways that don't,
beat you over the head or treat you like a fool. And I will admit that one time I went into a bar in New York City and I physically ran into Jennifer Connelly and I turned into a melting, you know, 10-year-old boy. So, but anyway, the point that I would just take away from something like that is you're highlighting, this is not beating you over the head with a no doubt song in a moment that doesn't make any sense.
This is a story that is designed to make sense along the way. And that speaks to, you know, a lot of our different fundamental understandings of it. Why aren't more films like that being made today, given the amount of stuff that is just same sameness, sameness, sameness over and over again from Hollywood? Why don't they give something like that an opportunity to come back?
I think because there's two reasons. One, that classic story of the hero discovering his power. In the case of the Rocketeer, it's this rocket thing that allows him to fly through the air like Superman. And the fact that he is...
your classic hero in that he saves the girl, he defeats the bad guys. You can't have a man saving a woman now, that's not allowed, she has to save herself. It's again this view that we can't take any of these classic stories and these classic archetypes and use them anymore. They all have to be subverted, they all have to be told
They have to be proven to be toxic and worthless, and so you lose that kind of awesome storytelling. And the other reason, I think, is particularly before the pandemic happened, movies had become so huge and bloated and expensive
that you couldn't afford to take risks on anymore. If you were sinking $200, $300 million into your movie and you needed it to break a billion in order to turn a profit, you have to play it safe because you cannot afford to gamble with that kind of money. And so that's why you get this.
This formula, you know, the bland, generic, like Marvel formula that they just use in every single one of their movies because it works and it generates revenue and it gives them that return that they need.
but they don't take risks anymore. I don't know if that's something that perhaps will turn out to be a good thing about all of this, that when movies eventually start getting made again, they won't have those enormous budgets anymore. They'll be smaller, but maybe they can take a few more risks and do something a bit different. I've said for a while now that the most significant development in terms of determining the future of Hollywood was the making of the film Swingers.
Because you have Favreau come out of it. You have Vaughn come out of it. You have, you know, Jon Favreau doesn't have the ability to go and do Iron Man and insist that Robert Downey Jr. be his Tony Stark if Swingers never gets made. You know, it's something that is sort of this weird butterfly flapping its wings kind of element of it. But I have to ask you now,
seeing what he's done with different properties in recent years and
Look, I've loved a lot of things that Jon Favreau has done. I've loved some of the advancements that he's made. But do you think we'll look back on the period of his sort of stature in Hollywood at this moment as being known more for its blandness and sameness and story beats that are all from Saving the Cat, you know, over, you know, on the specific page, this specific thing needs to happen and it needs to happen in each movie, right?
Are we going to look back on this as being something that also, as popular as it was, kind of killed the art and the uniqueness of, and maybe disastrous uniqueness in the case of some movies, but something that had been kind of in place that allowed people to be more creative?
I mean, I don't know if I'd pin this on Favreau as such. I mean, he is essentially the guy who started the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So without a doubt, he began that steamroller of a franchise. But he didn't maintain it. You know, he was kind of out after Iron Man 2. And bless him, he's doing his level best to salvage something from the wreckage of Star Wars. You know, he's trying to get a TV universe off the ground there. So I think he's a guy who actually...
has the talent and he has the natural storytelling flair to tell great stories. I just think a lot of the time he's been a little bit constrained by what studios want. Um, I, when I think about blindness, I think about guys like JJ Abrams. Yeah. Who, you know, who just comes in, you know, produces a dumb, um,
watered down remake of an existing movie without an ounce of originality and just takes loads of credit for it and then just runs away before everything falls apart. So you mentioned JJ. I find him to be so infuriating because I always say he's the best trailer director in the world. He creates movies that are basically made to be trailers and
And he never can end anything. Nothing he ends, ends well. It always seems like, I don't know what to do with this. Now it's over. Yeah, his style is what I refer to as rapid fire stupidity, where he will throw a bunch of stuff at you and it doesn't make a lick of sense, but it doesn't matter because it all happens so quickly that you've moved on to the next thing before you've got a chance to question it.
And that's how his movies work. They are based on nonsense, but you don't get a chance to interrogate them because they just move on to the next plot point and the next wacky adventure where you've had a chance to think about. And yeah, he...
he can't end things. He can begin things because he's got his trusty mystery box that gets you guessing but he never knows what's in it because he leaves it to someone else to open it and the one time he's forced to actually end something it turns into the rise of Skywalker which was an absolute disaster.
It reminds me of the family guy cutaway where they win a boat. They have to choose between a boat and the mystery box. And Peter says, you know, the boat's a boat, but the mystery box could be anything. It could even be a boat. So when you look at, I mean, another creative who obviously has
his own issues, but certainly has been a powerful force, uh, over the past decade or more is, uh, is Joss Whedon. I, I personally find pretty much everything that he's made other than Firefly really irritating. Um, but he also has, you know, certainly a fandom that is now, uh, dealing with all these, this kind of parade of stories coming out about how terrible he is. Um,
Tell me a little bit about his influence and what you think that's done to Hollywood in terms of both the kind of jokey, repetitive, heroes-making-light-of-certain-situations approach, and also the fact that certainly he did, at least in the early going, seem to inject some real nerd culture into Hollywood in a way that proved to be
you know, result in the making of a lot of things that might have not been made without his sort of push for them. Yeah, like, Whedonisms are great in small doses, but the problem is when you get them movie after movie, it really wears you down. And it's the same kind of light-hearted, jokey, you know, ironic humor that he uses all the way up to The Avengers and beyond, even when he did Justice League. And
Yeah, it had its time and its place, but it's starting to feel really dated now. It's almost like we've had enough of that and we kind of need to move beyond it. But it became the benchmark for Marvel films. Ever since the Avengers, that was just news time after time. And it was successful, so they keep doing it. And I think that's...
That's just the hallmark of how Hollywood operates. If something's working, then they'll just keep milking it until it stops working. Then they'll move on to the next thing. It's made money. In terms of the behind-the-scenes stuff, yeah, it's not great. The things that I've heard about him, when it was Ray Fisher talking about him being
kind of abusive towards people on Justice League. There's a part of me initially that just thought, well, directors are assholes. That's just what they do. Like if they yelled at you, so what? But then the more you hear, the more you realize that this just wasn't a bad day for him. This is kind of how he is. So yeah, it's not great for him. And it seems to have really killed his career.
So I watched your bit about the woke and insipid WB Batwoman show. And the big question that I had, even though your commentary was very entertaining, I've never seen the show, is how do you force yourself to engage with people
a show that's that bad and seems like it would be really taxing to watch in order to produce this commentary for people like me who will never watch a minute of the show. I mean, I literally did it for no other reason than I was kind of forced to watch it by another content creator. And we did a watch party sort of thing with it because they really get a kick out of it. And I took part. I just thought to myself, right, I've been forced to watch this thing. I'm going to, you know,
do something good with it and I'm going to put something on my channel for review. And it was when you get to the level of something like that, I can only liken it to a food critic being sent to McDonald's. It's like even the basic elements of what you would normally look for are just lacking here. So you're just stuck. And I just tried to have a laugh with it. I'm convinced that show is some kind of money laundering scam. Yeah.
There's no one watching today. Well, yeah, it's kind of like that restaurant that's always empty, but somehow still stays open. Yeah. Is this just a tax write-off or is it the front for something? Exactly, yeah. So your analysis when it came to Canon,
That was made for a fascinating video. And the controversies that are generated when you have these corporate interests and these woke begrades that are interested in altering canon or changing it to suit their purposes, that's something that obviously crops up quite a bit. We've seen it most recently, I would argue, with the Falcon and Winter Soldier TV series.
Tell me a little bit about the way that you see that playing out in the future. And do you think there's going to be opportunities for original fan bases to basically reassert themselves in terms of saying, look, you know, you're taking this story in a direction that we feel like seems inauthentic, doesn't seem to really hit the right notes. Or is it such a top-down game that's all about selling toys that nobody's really going to care?
Yeah, I mean, the one thing I would say going forward with this sort of thing is if you've got a favorite movie or favorite TV show from back in the day, buy it on physical media.
and hold on to it because if it's just coming from a streaming service, it's real easy for them to go back and edit things or delete them. And that's it. You can't undo it then because they've got the only version of it. I've got my Blazing Saddles Blu-ray right upstairs. Yeah, that one is... That's going to get cancelled one day, man, honestly. That could never, ever get made today. Oh. But that's so true of so many different things. I mean, one of the things that amazes me is...
I sometimes wonder when we see these controversies perk up, it's like, you guys do realize that South Park's still on the air, right?
There's so many things now when I look back on movies and the first thought that comes to my mind when it's something funny or a bit edgy or whatever is like, oh, that wouldn't get done today. Even recent things like Tropic Thunder where you've got Robert Downey Jr. as a black guy. It's funny and it's really satirical and it's not meant in any kind of mean-spirited way. It's to show, you know, Hollywood actors are often miscast because they're famous.
But it wouldn't be taken like that now if it was made that way. And it would be a storm of outrage. And so the movie would get canceled. He got award nominations for that role. It was brilliant. His performance was amazing. Like every time he spoke, it was funny. And again, we don't have that perspective now. And so that would just never have gotten made. And so we never would have been able to enjoy that. I'm curious about your attitude toward this whole group of actors
different film reviewers that exist primarily on YouTube. I would say that most of them, you know, are doing it slightly differently than you are. You're pretty unique in the approach that you have. It's more like you're doing kind of an essay as opposed to
Um, you know, so a lot of people who are just talking through it with their friends or going over little Easter eggs and the like, um, I certainly remember watching red letter media videos back in the day, you know, in their early iterations, uh, and loving them. But now there's this whole galaxy of people who are out there. I guess I'm curious. Do you think that that's
Is that seeping through and having an impact on the way that movies are made particularly given that so many of the people Doing this kind of content seem to be pretty woke. I mean This is something I've tried to make clear in a lot of videos When I criticize a film or policy in Hollywood or whatever I'm not doing it from a position of hating it and wanting to destroy it or anything I'm doing it because I'm trying to like help people out. I'm trying to help them realize look I
you've produced all these great movies in the past, they were awesome, they're classics and people still love them today. What you're producing now,
People don't feel that way about it. You're doing something wrong. Please rethink. And I'm going to explain to you why you're doing it wrong and what you could do differently next time. That's what I'm trying to do with it. And so hopefully they would understand that. I don't know if they would or even would want to listen to it. But yeah, it's not coming from a place of hatred. It's coming from a place of positivity, if possible. Yeah.
the conversation around the movies today is obviously that everything is either a big superhero tentpole movie, uh, or it's a tiny movie that's designed to be watched by almost no one, but win a bunch of awards. Um, and that the number of really unique, uh, creators within the industry are few and far between. So you've got Tarantino and Nolan and, you know, uh, uh,
a couple of others who you know have the ability to make basically whatever they want
But they're the exception. Do you think that's something that is going to be permanent and that there's going to be a real brain drain where people who would have been making movies, say, a few months, a few years or decades ago, instead go into television because they feel like there's lower stakes there, but they also can get a pretty sizable budget and have a greater degree of freedom?
I think the pandemic has really changed the landscape of all of it. I think, if anything, it's probably going to give smaller productions and smaller directors a chance now. Because the era of these mega-budget movies, $200 or $300 million, I think is over for the movie industry.
And so you're not going to get these giant tentpoles for superhero films as much as we used to. And I think that then opens up a possibility for other movies to fill that void. I hope that that's what's going to happen. I mean, time will tell because things are only just starting to reopen now. So I have to ask you one question, which is that you're obviously a Scot. You live in Scotland, I assume. You...
are certainly someone who leans into that with regularity. And yet your image is of you downing a bottle of Jack Daniels. Yeah, people ask why. You come from the country with the greatest whiskeys on the planet. Why would you drink Jack? That image was actually taken, it was a screen grab from a video that I made 10 years ago.
And it just happened to catch me at that moment when I was down in the booze. And I was poor back then, and Jack Daniels was literally all I could afford to get wasted on. And so that's just what I stuck with, and it's been there ever since then. But you're not going to switch to Bunahabin, is what you're telling me. I mean, I'll drink it under normal circumstances. I just won't change my image for it. The whole conversation around the future of
of these different enterprises, it really seems to me to be one where the, the online network of wokesters, uh, have really figured out a way to give themselves a megaphone to make themselves seem like they're much more plentiful and, uh, and, you know, loud and, and, and, uh, that they represent a huge number of people, even if that's not the case.
I think, for instance, about just to pick a controversy at random, the frequency of the use of Rose in Rise of Skywalker.
Like that to me seemed like a completely fake controversy. Nobody was angry that there wasn't enough Rose and Rise of Skywalker. Like nobody even cared. Nobody cared about her character in the first place, you know? And so it just seemed to be completely internet, internet generated.
Is there going to be some way of reasserting to these various studios that don't listen to these people? They don't actually represent, you know, a cohort of people who will not consume your product based on you making a decision about story that they don't particularly like.
I genuinely don't know because as long as Twitter exists, it's always going to lean in their direction and support people like that. Whereas it really suppresses anyone on the opposite side of that. Who could balance it out and say, no, we didn't like Rose Tico anyway, so it's fine that she's not in the movie.
whatever the controversy might be. But I think so many of these people in Hollywood, whether it's actors or producers, they go to social media because they don't really hang with normal people and they don't get to hear what the average person on the street thinks. That's their little window out into what they think is the real world and that's all they see. The only thing I think is that ultimately box office returns might be the thing that influences them. They can live
listen to all the people on Twitter that they like, all the fake they want. But ultimately those people aren't going to go and see their movies. They're not going to support them financially. See their movie fail and think, oh, maybe that was all a bit of a sham and it wasn't really real. If someone gave you a billion dollars to start a movie studio or a TV studio, what would you produce?
Could I just buy over Lucasfilm and undo all the things that they've done? No, I would produce the kind of action thrillers and exciting movies that we used to get back 20, 30 years ago. Ones with absolutely no agenda in them. The only priority was telling good stories. I would only hire people who felt the same way. That would be my starting point.
Well, I mean, that dedication to story now feels almost old-fashioned. I mean, the reality is that so many of these things, they seem meaningless. People skip right past them because it's all just a mush of CGI and actors are playing essentially caricatures of their own personalities and so many different entities. It's very rare that you have a film that comes along with
in this day that really seizes you, that grabs you, that demands your attention and that you want to return to in order to see it again. What's something that's been like that for you in the past couple of years? A recent film that really grabbed your attention? I mean, probably Joker was the most recent one that I can think of. That film was just...
an acting masterclass by Joaquin Phoenix, a good, interesting storyline. And one that's, yeah,
Yeah, it really got your attention right away and it really held onto it for the narrative. So that was probably the most recent one. There was other movies that just stood out to me almost just because they were good old-fashioned comic stories like Ford vs. Ferrari. Just didn't do huge business and it's really just a recent movie but the performances were great.
you know, he depicted a father who was a good, a good father to his son. And like, you know, that almost seems like a trope from a different era as well. Like they'll have to be like absentee dads or deadbeats or whatever. This guy was just a good man who, who son. And wow.
Who would have thought we could get movies like that in this day and age? Yeah, they certainly do seem to be the exception. So before I let you go, is there anything that you're particularly looking forward to coming out of Hollywood in the next couple of years? It does seem like a lot of different projects have gotten pushed back. I had been looking forward to the new iteration of Dune, for instance, and just because I'm curious to see how that's executed.
what are some of the things that you're actually looking forward to that might have been either delayed by the pandemic or that are coming in the next year or so? Dune is one of the few ones that, yeah, I am excited to see because I've read the novel, really liked it. I remember the, I think, David Lynch movie from back in the 80s. I'd like to see them take another proper stab at it. So hopefully that'll be good. But otherwise, yeah, there's not much that's exciting me. You know, all the Marvel movies are just...
dead in the water now. Nobody cares about most of them. The James Bond film, I can't wait to not see that. There's going to be many people excited for that one. So what's your next video going to be on?
I'm probably going to do one on my second channel where I do older movies and stuff and I'm going to do a review of First Blood the first Franco movie because you know compared to all the other ones like big bombastic action and stuff this is just a little thriller you know and it's actually quite restrained and quite thoughtful in a lot of places so I was quite keen to talk about that
No. Well, it's always great to watch your videos and to laugh along with them and to hear the points that you make. I really appreciate you taking the time to join me today. My pleasure. Thanks very much. From the Fox News Podcasts Network. In these ever-changing times, you can rely on Fox News for hourly updates for the very latest news and information on your time. Listen and download now at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.