Critical Drinker: The Real Problem with the Odyssey

i still stand by my overall assessment in my video which is it's meh i've heard some people talk about this as being one of the greatest movies ever made and it's insane it's like how many movies have you watched i defined the odyssey as a hero's journey with no hero do you think hollywood might actually be waking up and smelling the proverbial coffee yes they are they very much pivoted away from uh from all that like political identity politics pandering and it took tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue probably over a decade to finally realize it but they got there in the end it's just a shame that you know so many of these pop culture franchises that we grew up with you know whether it's star trek or star wars or indiana jones whatever it might be they've all been casualties of war in the process trigonometry is proudly independent and sponsors like hillsdale college make that possible access their free library of world-class educational courses at hillsdale.edu slash trigger many of you have commented that you're seeing too many ads in our videos we've listened to your feedback and disabled youtube ads in the middle of our interviews can we ask you a favor in return according to our analytics most of you who watch our show are not subscribed to the channel please help us to continue bringing you fantastic content by subscribing today hitting that like button and leaving a comment with your thoughts on this video critical drinker welcome back to trigonometry pleasure to be here again it's great to have you man you're crushing it um you're really enjoying your reviews and there's a lot to talk about there is yes it's been a busy time in movies hasn't it it has been uh which is somewhat exciting in many ways but we'll get into all the different ones the first thing you said when you sat down here and i was like well i really enjoyed your review of the odyssey and you were like i have got so much hate i thought you gave a very balanced and fair review which actually is what generates hate on the internet nowadays well yeah i mean i think a lot of people won't even have bothered watching the review they'll just assume that i hate it um and then yeah the reality is like i was fairly meh on the movie overall you know i praised some technical aspects of it recognized that christopher nolan's a very competent director um and really yeah my own my only real issue was um the lack of emotional engagement and i think that's a really good point because i think that's a really good point because i think that's a really good point because i think that's a really good point because it's not just it's not just emotional engagement and how kind of removed and cool and sterile it is but that's just a hallmark of christopher nolan movies at this point so yeah um it's become a very contentious film unfortunately it's just the way it's gone yeah why why do you think it is so contentious uh it's probably because of the race swapping uh and the casting choices that they've made um because when it was first announced everyone was pretty enthusiastic about it myself included you know it's a christopher nolan movie he's he did great with oppenheimer now he's going to tackle the odyssey like one of the foundational stories of western civilization fantastic i'm sure he's going to do a great job of it uh and then you see the the first trailer that came out um you know you find out that lupita nyong'o is going to be playing helen of troy obviously that's uh quite a change from what we know helen of troy to be elliott page is going to be in it the assumption at first was that they were going to be playing achilles which would have been really hilarious but it wasn't that in the end um but still it just it generated this um crazy pushback online i'd never seen anything like it since probably snow white uh with rachel zegler and all the stupid things that she was saying that same level of vitriol was suddenly leveled at the movie um and like i say it's not what i would have expected from a christopher nolan film what was interesting to me is seeing that reaction which by the way look somewhat understandable given the sort of era of constant you know inserting artificially in many in many cases a sort of artificial diversity into things but actually interestingly watching your review it's very similar to what i wrote about it which is yes helen of troy probably didn't look like lupita nyong'o but and elliott page again but they didn't really that that casting didn't really massively affect your experience of the movie and mine either no i mean it was one of the first things i wanted to dispel when i did my review um the both of them are in the movie for a grand total of like five minutes um and it is like a christopher nolan movie so it's like seven hours long exactly yeah and so you know the focus is much more on other characters they're very much just um ancillary to the main story and so it didn't really impact my perception of the film like i say my bigger issue with it was just the lack of of emotional engagement with it other people certainly have issues with its fidelity to the original text that's me yeah obviously what i've discovered as well is that there's a lot of people who've suddenly decided they're absolute experts on the odyssey and that's uh that's me yeah um online so again that's another fun aspect of this you don't know how much you really want to believe from people but yeah as i understand it he has taken quite a few liberties particularly with the characterization of odysseus you know turning him from this this brave adventurer with this burning desire to get home to his family uh into basically a vietnam vet with ptsd uh and survivor's guilt uh that's a very big change to the meaning of the story and again people who are familiar with it took issue with it um but apparently that all just lumps everyone into the same boat of just the casting became the focal point of everything so if you had any criticism of the movie it had to be because of that not anything else so it's an interesting approach one of the aspects i thought your review was bang on was when talking about the character because in the original text he's actually very smart very sharp very bright but also very arrogant which leads to his own doubt not only his own downfall but also the downfall of his men all of whom died but i think what's more important is the way that the industry is looking at it and it looks like it's going to be kind of a shoo-in to do very very well at the oscars yeah and you're thinking to yourself well looking at it you're going hey it's not that good is it no but i mean how to describe it it's a million i'd rather watch this a hundred times over than just another piece of superhero slop or or franchise you know some some old franchise like star wars or um jurassic park getting recycled for the the dozenth time you know so it's taken a stab at least something a little more interesting so i guess if i was pushed yeah i'd rather that films of lesser artistic merit um but still yeah it's it's ultimately i found it to be a bit of a slog um it's very slow paced uh it's very lacking in emotional resonance uh lacking in urgency took a lot of liberties with the characters yeah i still stand by my overall assessment in my video which is it's meh i didn't hate it didn't love it it's just in the middle because i think it speaks broadly to the conversation about the quality of movie making at the moment that it's been hyped so much whereas let's say i mean we're all of a certain age now certain vintage shall we say if this was i'm just going to pick a movie year at random something like 1996 would this even have been talked about as much would it have been hyped as much would everybody be as energized or would it just simply be seen as just another big budget hollywood movie which is all right but let's be honest i think if it was something special max not maxim would have given it three out of five stars yeah i i think um the thing that always puts it into perspective for me is like i do a weekly live stream and one of the segments that we've done on that is um for each year of cinema we'll like go through some of the top movies of that year the biggest box office earners or some of the most well-regarded films of that year and every time we've done it all throughout the 70s the 80s the 90s the 90s the 90s the 90s the 90s the 90s the 90s the 90s the 90s classic after classic and you think my god we were spoiled back then absolutely spoiled and it might be that the era we're living in now you've essentially got what would have been considered an okay-ish film um 10 15 20 years ago is now hailed as this all-conquering masterpiece like i've heard some people talk about this as being one of the greatest movies ever made and it's insane it's like how many movies have you watched man but it seems like we've all kind of got like woke ptsd in a way where we had this narrative shoved down our throat for so long the top come to comes along and let's be honest i mean maybe you think differently but i kind of it was like a 7 out of 10 solid 3 out of 5 perfectly enjoyable action movie but people decrying it as this kind of anti-woke masterpiece this return to form hollywood's back baby isn't it amazing guns and all the rest of it and you're like really it's literally just a normal 80s or 90s action movie perfectly fun perfectly serviceable the plot doesn't do anything particularly revolutionary it's just a solid movie and that because that is so rare nowadays it does get hailed as this um you know breakthrough film that like no one saw coming you know whereas like i say yeah if it had come out 20 years ago people would have just said it's okay i guess perfectly fine it's interesting that you got a lot of hate for for what you said about it being made because to me uh and you see this like i was looking at the calci odds before we started the movie all this the odyssey starts out as being like 50 chance of winning uh best picture after it comes out there's a significant dip actually and you can see that so people are kind of going to it and recognizing it's not as good as it was as it was built but it's interesting you say what francis is saying about you know this great desire for hollywood to be good again and every time we've had you on we've talked about hollywood becoming a bit shit or potentially even sort of being on the way dying out but there have been several movies and since we last talked to you that i thought were really really high caliber for me nuremberg for example i thought that was fantastic you you gave it a meh kind of response as well you didn't like it um i thought it was fine i mean i don't know he just hates to see the good guys no um i think um you know performance wise like i'm not sure how close russell crowe is in terms of of guring and i think maybe it takes a few historical liberties um i would have rather seen it in a wider context but yeah it was fine like i watched it on a flight i didn't watch it in the sky you know you kind of know where it's going ultimately but perfectly fine movie i think yeah i i thought it was for me personally what i found interesting about it it was something that covered which was obviously a big topic and i thought it did it very well historically look this is the thing we should talk about as well it's like you you say it took liberties with the original text of the odyssey i mean that's what always happens isn't it i mean peter jackson and look i hated him for it to be fair he completely ruined faramir and in lord of the rings which was to me irresponsible it was horrific unacceptable he completely because he reversed the meaning of the character in that his yeah i mean his part was very much cut down and simplified um they do him a bit more justice in the extended cut but yeah i get what you're saying yeah um what i'm saying is isn't this kind of what always happens like to make a movie you have to change the story a little bit sure i can understand like cutting down really long segments or you know trimming down really convoluted stuff to to make it more digestible uh i think it's a really good movie i think the problems creep in though when you change the fundamental meaning of it i think everyone would concede for whatever liberties peter jackson took with lord of the rings he got the essence of the story 100 right whereas you could say well if you change the very characterization of odysseus from the odyssey and his motivation for wanting to get home uh you've lost the entire meaning of the story it becomes something very different now yeah that's a that's a different kettle of fish for me i don't want to be super nerdy but i will be that is exactly what they did to faramir faramir in the books is is sorry is passionate about this character aren't you well it's the entire point of of that segment of of the book because boromir falls for the temptation of the ring and faramir is his brother who resists the temptation whereas in the movie he doesn't and he fails right um so they did completely change the meaning which is interesting to your point about odysseus because one of the things i found very odd which you really honed in in your review is like matt damon's character is so emotionless which is very weird matt damon as an actor has incredible range but he sort of plays this like slightly autistic jason bourne character for some reason do we know why that that was done uh it's because it's a christopher nolan movie so um he doesn't have a reputation necessarily as an actor's director from what i'm told he pretty much just says right there's the script figure it out yourself in terms of your performance that's why so many of the characters in this movie so many of the actors should i say just seem to be on autopilot john bernthal as manalais uh he's just playing john bernthal every other tough guy character he's ever played tom holland is just tom holland like that's arguably the worst performance i think i've seen of his entire acting career and again he's a good actor but in that movie he gives absolutely nothing because christopher nolan doesn't direct people he directs ideas robert pattinson was brilliant though i mean he's he gave it his all which character so he played the head to the the most evil the head suit to the most evil one all right oh he was very good he was the vietnam draft dodger yeah yeah he's a he's a experienced actor obviously he understood the assignment in this case and probably took it upon himself to just be right i'm going to be the biggest prick that i can possibly be in this movie and he did a good job to be fair oh he did a great job but you know it's really interesting when because i've really got back into movies recently and it seems to me like this idea that hollywood is dead it's kind of premature because i went to watch obsession in the cinema i mean that's a good movie that is a great movie i think um yeah i don't think anyone would say hollywood's dead um i think it's been on a decline certainly in the past decade or so it's been kept afloat by these superhero movies things like the mcu and dc and so on um you know when you're pulling in like two billion dollars per film uh you you're keeping the entire industry afloat those are tentpole movies obviously that's petered out a little bit in recent years people are moving beyond superhero movies but the demand is still there for interest in films and i think movies like obsession prove particularly with horror all you need is a good idea a good hook to get people in you don't need a huge budget you don't need big special effects you just need a good hook a decent script and some good actors and away you go and that movie cost 750 000 to make it's sitting at like 450 million it's on track i think to be the most profitable film of all time relative to budget so the appetite is there for interest in movies maybe not necessarily on the scale that we've seen them before but scale down the budgets a little bit and you'll still turn a profit so it can be done for sure and you look at like for instance a movie like i don't know what it's going to cost but it's it's going to be a lot of money i don't know it's going to be a lot of money i don't know what it's going to cost but it's going to be a lot of money i don't know what it's going to cost but it's going to be a lot of money i don't know what it's going to cost but it's going to be a lot of money i don't know what it's going to cost but it's going to be a lot of money i don't know what it's going to cost but it's going to be a lot of money relatively low profile not anymore of course yeah the the girl who was in that i mean she deserves all the awards for for that performance she absolutely carried that movie i think indy navarette is her name um but yeah she will now be she'll be commanding like 10 million dollars a movie within a few years easily and what it actually shows is what you're talking about look and this was the thing that i found most egregious about the the woke period it's just all we ever wanted as audience members was to please tell us a story i mean it doesn't matter what the story is if it's a love story tell us a good love story if it's an action or there's no argument to be made that every story is a love but if it's an action movie just we don't want the other stuff just tell the story absolutely yeah um and that was always the pushback you know it's like i don't want this movie to espouse my personal politics or reaffirm all my beliefs about the world it doesn't matter it's entertainment i'm there to escape from like the mundane realities of day-to-day life uh and i'm there to escape from from all the politics that comes with every other part of day-to-day life so that's all it needs to do is entertain you it's not that hard but they made it hard you say they made it hard do you look at for instance the odyssey which isn't a woke movie as we've discussed and we look at obsession and we'll talk about project el mary as well do you think hollywood might actually be waking up and smelling the proverbial coffee you can spend three hours in the cinema watching christopher nolan's movie adaptation of the odyssey or you can spend that same three hours understanding the actual poem for free guided by a hillsdale college professor hillsdale college runs free online courses on the books that shape the western tradition taught by their own faculty using the same material their students study on campus the newest course covers home as the odyssey professor benedict weyland walks through it courage loyalty leadership temptation family and what it actually means to go home it has held an audience for close to three thousand years that doesn't happen by accident the scene that changes how you read the whole thing is calypso offering odysseus immortality if he stays with her and he turns it down he picks a mortal life an aging wife a home that might not even want him back anymore that's the entire argument of the book in one scene there are more than 40 of these courses and i couldn't recommend them more highly go to hillsdale.edu trigger to enroll it's totally free read the classics study the west that's hillsdale.edu trigger yes they are you can see a lot of the pivots starting to happen within the bigger franchises like marvel is a good example of that they've very much pivoted away from uh from all that like political identity politics pandering um and i think hollywood has grudgingly learned their lesson i think maybe they convinced themselves probably based on things like what they see on the internet on social media and so on um that the world was this progressive like hard left utopia you know and they needed to match that and it didn't work out and it took tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue probably over over a decade to finally realize it but they got there in the end and they're it's just a shame that you know so many of these pop culture franchises that we grew up with you know whether it's star trek or star wars or indiana jones whatever it might be they've all been casualties of war in the process and they're not really going to come back in the way that they once did do you think we're going to look back and go i know you've got your criticisms of chris or not and as do i he kind of reminds me of the guy you meet down the pub who's smart but likes to tell you how smart he is do you know what i mean you know using words like like Chathonic and Eric, you know everyday conversation you go did you really did you really need to christopher but are we going to look back at him particularly with oppenheimer and go like this is a guy who maybe saved hollywood i mean ultimately as i said earlier i would take like 10 christopher nolan movies over one like crappy you know franchise rehash um some dumb popcorn movie whatever criticisms i or anyone else might have of something like the odyssey it's still a relatively intelligent movie grappling with some pretty challenging source material and hey there's a lot of people now that are probably going to read the odyssey in its original form because of this movie they'll it'll pique their interest in classic literature so hey if hollywood has to go in one direction i'd rather it was that well yeah the only thing is like you said earlier when i think all of us were discussing this you kind of put it up there with the ancient world war movies and you go gladiator troy you know you can throw a few others in there but it's like it's not even on that level you know i mean it's and you you're talking about one of the greatest directors in hollywood history according to some people um and one of the greatest stories in west in the western canon if you like and it's just like seven out of ten at a stretch unlike a gladiator that was you know 10 yeah i mean for me the um the bar for this sort of thing is would i want to watch it again right yeah so you could probably say you were flicking through the channels you happen to catch gladiator oh yeah you'd probably say yeah watch this it's pretty good with the odyssey nah i said at the end of my review i'll probably never watch it again and probably not really think about it again but then you guys are asking me about it and you're making me think about it well you do this for a living you're coming on movies uh but we wanted to uh touch on that project hail mary as well that's another very very popular and successful movie yes absolutely um again when you guys talk about the lack of politics the lack of pandering in it great it's a movie that's going to be a movie that's just entirely about you know adventure science uh friendship just universal themes that basically anyone could watch and you don't have to be like some hardcore science fiction not to appreciate it you know it's not pitched at the same level of a christopher nolan movie um which is a great compromise you know it makes this stuff accessible uh and it tells just a nice charming story a relationship between a man and a rock effectively a rock monster and yet they make that that creature rocky uh more likable and they give him more humanity than all these like cgi star wars characters combined you know it's impressive what they did there but you know pleased to see things like that successful and i want to see more movies like that as well doesn't don't you think when you were watching this i was watching ryan gosling's performance and look credit where credit is due the way that he carries that movie he's likable even though he kind of plays this sort of wimpy nerdy guy and he looks like that he's not like that he's not like that he's not like that he's not stretching the boundaries of credibility shall we just say but however it shows the power of star quality the fact that he carries that movie opposite a puppy a puppy sorry a puppet well you can see puppyish qualities what movies are you watching but he has that that that shows the power of star quality i guess is the point i'm making sure and um you know they're in relatively short supply these days like actual movie stars who are box office draws and they're not going to be box office draws you know there's not many of them left like he's he's risen to that sort of level now where it's like you know a ryan gosling movie okay that's that's interesting tom cruise is obviously one that's a holdover from a previous generation but he just refuses to age out so fair enough yeah um but there's there's very few of them nowadays you know again like we're all by the same age we grew up in like the 80s and 90s you know there was back in the day it'd be like there's a new arnold schwarzenegger movie or what ever like that would get people's interest but we don't really live in that world now so when you get guys like that who can carry a movie partly on star power partly on just you know the likability of their character hey again it's it's proof that maybe there's a bit of life left in that that world still and do you know what i was watching um the uh arnold schwarzenegger it's not biopic it was just it's not it's not biopic but it was his documentaries uh based on his life and it was great on netflix and i and they were going through it and they were going through it and they were going through all his movies not just you know the terminator which is incredible or terminator 2 or predator all brilliant movies but things like twins and you just go oh movies were fun yeah they were they were allowed to be fun um and again like you know a lot of these movies wouldn't have made crazy box office revenue like we do nowadays but they're still memorable you know we still remember twins or you remember um terminator 2 or whatever like their box office would be pretty dwarfed by today's but um they had something about them you know i've talked before about someone like arnold schwarzenegger compared to someone like the rock who's the closest we've got to like a modern day equivalent an action star big burly guy you know and um really specializes in these popcorn action flicks but most people would struggle to remember any movies that he's ever done right maybe the fast and the furious but that's pretty much it the amount of money he's made over the years dwarfed what arnold schwarzenegger made at his peak but people remember arnold schwarzenegger movies they don't remember the rock well arnold schwarzenegger movies are better objectively yeah a lot better yeah you know there was more care put into them and probably better writing and i don't know maybe they came at the right time when the industry was different yeah well francis mentioned netflix and one of the things i really always wanted to discuss with you is what you think the impact of the streaming services have been because there's some amazing stuff there's some rubbish obviously but there's also some amazing stuff on there uh you know i'm really enjoying a house of dragon at the moment uh and also someone a friend of mine introduced me to landman have you seen that i have yes oh so good isn't it uh that's on paramount plus so yeah i think taylor sheridan created landman and he's got this entire universe of um shows like um oh what's the yellowstone yellowstone um tulsa king the dutton ranch like and they're all how can i describe it it's basically tv shows for men yeah like because it's all just like manly men like working on oil fields and like having punch-ups and stuff but he absolutely understands his audience and he said recently like um he almost does shows like that to piss off the hollywood critics because they know he stands for the opposite of what they stand for um and he'll intentionally just write stuff in there to because he's successful enough that he can get away with it but again there's a demand then for shows like that and so they work but yeah in terms of the streaming services and what they're going to do to the industry i did go through a phase where i thought they're going to be the the future you know theatrical releases are gradually going to dwindle and it's going to become the equivalent of um stage shows nowadays there'll be a poor audience of very committed people who still go and see movies in their own home and they'll catch it on their streaming service at home um or even on their phone or whatever while they're on the move um maybe we're not quite there now maybe it's there's a little bit of um the streaming bubble bursting perhaps we'll see but there's a lot of for all the good stuff that you get on these streaming services i mean come on there's a lot of slop oh there's a lot of slop it blows my mind like sometimes i'll just sit down i don't know what i'm gonna watch that night i'll bring up netflix let's have a look through and 20 minutes later i'll still be scrolling i haven't found anything that i want to watch and it's insane it's insane it's insane it's too much choice almost there is there is a lot of choice but i think i don't know it feels to me like the big screen will always be there because it's such a special experience and i think partly even if you could build a cinema in your house it's still not the same i think there's something about going outside of your house going to a place and sitting down in a venue with other people it may be lots of them maybe a very few of them but something about that that just gives you the feeling that you're there with this piece of entertainment this piece of content whatever it is undisturbed undistracted for two hours other than the twat next to you eating popcorn you know what i mean yeah i mean look you know again when we were talking about the odyssey it's you know done crazy business in imax because people want the spectacle of it you know that ginormous screen the huge sound system like really maxing out what you can do with cinema technology giving you the most immersive experience you can and great you know if people are still invested in that then that's good to see because i would rather it be that communal experience and that experience of shutting off everything else because you're never going to get this at home aren't you like you're always going to have your phone there or whatever and there's always that temptation but uh to switch off the phone to not have any distractions and just focus your attention for two hours on the movie the the problem as you say is just the things that surround it you know you've got to sit through like 30 minutes of adverts and trailers you've got to deal with that. i mean you're not going to have to deal with the asshole in front of you who's like making loads of noise or someone who's talking behind you or whatever um but every experience is going to have its pluses and negatives you know overall though yeah i'd rather see movies in that format if we can i always this is a question i'd love to ask you and again it's going to show my age a little bit to me the apex of cinema in my life was late 90s early noughties because what you had were movies that They may not have done well in the cinema, but when they came to DVDs, they got that second lease of life and it seems that you don't really get that anymore DVD was so important particularly when you think about movies like you know I don't know Good Will Hunting that's how I discovered Good Will Hunting on DVD so many and also classic movies as well watching Goodfellas on DVD do you think that's really hit the movie industry hard when that technology went away definitely yeah because it was factored into their financial model they would say like well there's movies that like might not have quite turned a profit at the box office but we know we're going to make like 50% more in DVD rentals or sales further down the line and so that movie then becomes profitable and so when you do that they are more willing to take chances on slightly unproven concepts or things that might might not necessarily work in the cinema but they'll eventually turn a profit from it and so you get a better breadth of artistic material out there you know there's the movies that people are willing to take these chances on what you got in the post-DVD world the post-physical media world is more and more of a reliance on proven IPs proven properties that's why you got these endless franchise movies like Jurassic Park 19 or whatever or like endless Marvel movies because once you find that model that works and once you find a franchise that works now you just keep making more of it and that's why they kept raiding all these old things like oh we're going to do another Indiana Jones movie you know like 20 years after the last one when Harrison Ford's on a Zimmer frame you know just anything that's got like a built-in audience because we don't have anything else except the theatrical release window it's got to make its money there and so it's got to be a safe bet and that's the problem is that there really are no safe bets in Hollywood if you take the classic example of a movie that no one heard of but did gangbusters something like Dirty Dancing who would have predicted that Dirty Dancing a movie about essentially a holiday romance would become one of the most iconic movies of an entire decade they somehow capture the cultural zeitgeist don't they and become part of it and I think what you see now is like we don't have that because there's that loss of the monoculture now they were becoming so fragmented like not just because there's like a million different streaming services you know you've got YouTube you've got all the you know online stuff that are competing for people's attention and so that that world of like oh my god I just went saw this amazing movie at the cinema at the weekend you should go and see it too that's dwindling now and so we don't get those shared experiences and so less and less these movies are becoming part of the culture and becoming memorable which is so true and I think it's so much driven by technology I remember as a young boy staying with my grandparents in Ukraine in the village in the summer and walking past the tiny local cinema it would have been like a 10 seater 15 seater 20 seater and there was a giant post I didn't speak English at the time of Arnold Schwarzenegger one of his movies at the time it was in the 90s you just like we now live in the era of mass customization where everything is so tailored to you that you have the exact politics that you want the exact beverage the exact food the exact everything that that it's it's probably one of the reasons that you will never get actors who are as big as that going forward because just not everyone is going to watch that movie because there's so much other stuff that you could watch that is going to be much more tailored to you specifically well give it a bit more time you'll be able to tailor movies to your particular tastes like AI will be able to rustle it up for you you know you can be like oh give me Titanic all over again but with a happier ending and it'll be able to render it for you and that's that's where we might end up where people get their own customized movie experiences and they're they're literally won't be a shared version of a film anymore that will be quite cool though because you can watch the same movie many times and see it go in different directions depending on choices you make like that's what video games are like now you know it's one of the reasons I enjoy them because you make choices that take the story in a different direction and it gives the thing repeatability and enjoyment and also the participatory value of that is very engaging I don't know about that in my happy ending Leonardo DiCaprio would always drown but no it's interesting you talk about video games there because like that as an industry dwarfs movies in terms of revenue it's like 10 times as much um on an annual basis and it's only getting bigger yeah so I mean like that could well be the future of entertainment and well there's a reciprocal thing with that as well because now you're seeing more and more adaptations of popular video games in cinema you know that was always the holy grail for them like back in the 90s they would fail like we've we all seen like the Mario Brothers movie from but I'm still having therapy for that but they're starting to crack it now and like these are turning out to be very profitable you know like the Mario the the new Mario movie or the Sonic movies or whatever the Minecraft movies were huge yeah yeah is there a Fortnite movie I imagine there should be yeah probably there's definitely a Halo one yes the TV show yeah TV show I watched a few episodes that was decent we're speaking of which there used to be a a video game way back when called June which reminds me of June the June movies what did you make of those the Dune movies uh yeah they were they were great I mean good sci-fi um the second one especially felt like an event movie like there was something really you know significant going on there uh I think it was a great adaptation of the book um I read the book like when I was a teenager so like some of the scenes they nailed pretty well and pretty challenging world to render into movie format obviously Lynch tried it back in the 80s and that was uh yeah uh I'm weirdly ambivalent about the third one though I don't know like I I feel like the third one is going to be Chani was right about everything and Paul needs to get punished for it so we'll see what comes of that but weirdly it's it's another Zendaya movie this year yeah we can't get away from her um do you know I'd love to talk about this with you so I've got a theory as to why Hollywood isn't as good as it used to be okay it's a the death of the shagger it's look and I'll tell you why think about the bad boy the good-looking bad boy both the actor I thought you were going to talk about Harvey Weinstein I was like I mean he did he did make some great movies but I'm just leaning out of shot there going uh listen I'm not sure about this so you're on your own you carry on so let's look at Miramax's canon exactly just in an all-male environment no no but if you look at for instance I'm not sure about this but I'm not sure about this instance, you kind of look at the Mickey Rourkes of the time, you know, the good looking bad boy who everybody kind of talked about and it would make, you know, he was problematic in many ways. You put a camera on him, boom, you got dynamite. And it's also not just off screen, but the characters on screen like the John McClane's. You knew this guy was trouble. You knew there was darkness there, but also he was magnetic. You don't get the Jack Nicholson. You don't get that anymore, do you? Well, there's a high degree of pacification in Hollywood now. So that's probably the reason for it. Like the actors and the characters that they play are they're not allowed to be dangerous like that anymore. Right. So this filters into all aspects of the industry, because if they are dangerous, if they're too domineering or they're too much of a loser. And they're seen as problematic. And that's that's scary for people. We get asked this all the time. Which VPN do you use at Trigonometry? The answer is simply CyberGhost VPN. CyberGhost isn't some fringe tool. 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Cause that's what art is really isn't it ultimately it's expressing truth and allowing people to make their judgments on it but if you're not allowed to express whatever truth you have in mind and it's just got to be the pre-approved version well then you're just going to get the same crap over and over again the same exact viewpoints the same exact worldview um and you see it you see it in hollywood movies like the only one i think that's different from that is maybe the the taylor sheridan's of the world that we talked about before where he sort of leans slightly the other way and he's not afraid to say that now because he's successful enough that he can get away with it um but generally speaking yeah i think the climate is one of fear because all it takes is for an actor to say the wrong thing in an interview to express the wrong opinion about one particular issue some hot hot topic um and that could be it that could be their career down the tubes i was just going to say i mean taylor sheridan to me is a very interesting example because i i do think you know we talked about the the kind of woke era i think the woke era also produced this idea that you know the way to make a great movie is to be like really really really not woke and then it sort of dragged in a lot of people who were who who were leading with that whereas taylor sheridan is clearly very good i mean the uh i did did he also direct 1923 and it was 1887 the prequels those just purely from an artistic point of view are incredible for me way better than yellowstone which i actually wasn't that much of a fan of but those two prequels are really really high quality and that's kind of where i always wanted it to go i didn't want a woke movie because it's annoying i also didn't want an anti-woke movie or something that's expressly political yeah um i see this on my videos occasionally where i might be criticizing some movie whatever that's not woke by any normal measure and so sometimes people will say like well it's not woke i mean what do you want and i'm like well i want a good movie as well like there's plenty of reasons why a movie can suck right it doesn't have to be just because it like pushes identity politics it could be badly written badly directed whatever it might be and so yeah i think there's we have to be very careful that we don't just um you know lump everything into that one basket like oh well it doesn't push any obvious politics therefore it must be good no we still want to challenge it and we have to be very careful that we don't just champion good art and that's a whole separate question but as long as i think if we can get back to that era of um you know assessing films on their own merits not about the politics that they push then that's great i mean that that takes the the horrible like culture war stuff out of it and it allows us to just get back to you know being geeky over star wars or whatever it might be rather than you know oh your politics disagree with mine guess you're gonna have to die then you know that's that's the way i think about it and i think that's the way i think about it that's what the level of discourse is like um yeah in a lot of cases well right and look i in sort of defense of the people who feel strongly about the culture well i mean it really does matter because it is you know certainly in my conception an attempt to undermine the very essence of our civilization and and it was important to counter but i think what has happened is you know if you stare long enough into the abyss the abyss also stares into you and now people are walking around with this sort of like woke anti-woke filter in their brain and they see everything through that yes um and you can end up um seeing enemies around every corner with this sort of thing i think the most ludicrous example i ever saw was a remake of a video game i think it was called dead space some like survival horror game in space and uh there's a restroom in it at one point on this space station that's overrun with horrifying monsters and it's some like gender neutral bathroom and people lost their minds over that saying this game is woke and it's like you're stomping like mutated creatures into the ground with your boots or like chainsawing them in half how is this you know that's that's where it becomes absurd yeah you know and so yeah it's it's there needs to be that uh perspective i think and just try not to go crazy with it and i think it's interesting because we're looking at the the last of the movie stars with ryan gosling and one of ryan gosling's superpowers is his intense likability is that even though he's this big handsome guy who could pretty much get any really like him whereas we compare him with the movie stars of earlier particularly like the mickey rourke's there was something fundamentally broken about mickey and as a result to my taste is it made for a more interesting performance on screen like you look at the wrestler for instance the aronofsky movie no i don't know any particular actor now who would be able to have that type of performance on screen it's the tortured artist effect isn't it yeah and yeah he's a prime example obviously he paid the price for it long term you know if you've seen him recently he's he's not in a good place um but i think generally speaking yeah like you kind of expect a certain intensity from your artists you know over and above like big popcorn movies or whatever but the people who are creating more serious films um they should have that that balance of light and dark in them whether it's trauma whether it's um inspiration or drive whatever it might be it creates a more interesting form ultimately and i've heard um heard it described nowadays as like these actors they seem like they just come across like from an assembly line you know they've all had the same experiences they all had that southern californian upbringing same worldview they've never really had anything bad happen um and so you don't get the same level of nuance from them you don't get the same interest you don't get the same uh intensity and maybe it's the same with writers as well in general again like people who are working there now have lived less interesting lives than the the hard drinking hard smoking hard partying guys of the the 50s the 60s the 70s you know those people all came from a lot of the time a tough background they had to claw their way into the industry they had interest in life experiences that molded them into interesting people that then came across in their writing maybe you don't get quite as much of that now it's much more controlled safe coddled and boring well you look at like again just to go back to ryan gosling i think he was in you know the mickey mouse club was he was that was that ryan reynolds maybe again but you just like the ryan's yeah just like the ryan's but anyone called ryan anyone called ryan but if you look at like the steve mcqueen's for instance like you look at steve mcqueen's journey how he started out i mean he was in i think he was in a care home for for kids and then when he left and then he did a variety of it gave an authenticity that for me nobody is able to match that no the same with guys like kirk douglas or um charles bronson like these guys all came from tough backgrounds um and went through all kinds of deprivations in their childhood to eventually like claw their way into an industry that wouldn't accept them necessarily but they forced it to um you don't get so much of that nowadays they're they're manufactured now and i guess that's to me that's a real problem because ultimately and again you could argue this is a taste thing it creates a less interesting and compelling story because i like nice people i i i like nice people nice people are nice to work with and nice to hang around with and whatever else do i want to see a nice person on screen do i want to listen to a nice person's album not particularly you know i don't want to listen to a nice person's album i don't want to listen to a nice person's album i don't want to listen to a nice person's album i don't want to listen to a nice yeah it's the same with um what would i compare it to so you know that new tv show what's been out for a few years now the rings of power on amazon right that's their adaptation of the lord of the rings all that the tolkien lore and so on you compare the actors that you see on that they're all very like soft very amiable like they look like they just want to wear a nice cozy jumper you know and have a cup of cocoa compare that with like the lord of the rings from 25 years ago you had guys like vigo mortensen sean bean like those guys look like you could just dump them in the wilderness and they would survive no problem you know it's a different they had a different upbringing different experiences but it molded into much more interest in people not just in their performances but how they look how they carry themselves the confidence they have and uh we're just kind of losing that i think now in cinema and that's to me the real problem because again but i just don't think nice people create great art if i'm being honest you look at you know people go for instance picasso and they'll go oh picasso was like this and he was problematic or any other type of artist and i just go yes but what did they create what would you rather go to a nice person who creates art that's or would you rather go and see a great artist who let's be fair maybe a bit of a cunt yeah so basically what you're saying is you want to see actors suffer yeah more and then see but you know you read about the kubrick's of this world i don't think being an actor on a kubrick set was particularly enjoyable or fun yeah having said that being evil doesn't make you a great artist no hitler would be a good example of that yeah and you know i've done many videos about like movies that have had difficult productions um whether you know it was actors directors clashing with each other or whatever it might be and sometimes it results in um great art or great movies like you know james cameron is a notoriously hard-driving director stanley kubrick obviously uh other times you end up with complete garbage at the end of it like the island of dr moreau so obviously there needs to be talent behind it all but yeah as you say a bit of friction is necessary i think to create something really good speaking of challenging production you reminded me we went to the to the premiere of the rise of merlin uh have you seen that the is that the tv show it's the the daily wire made jeremy boring made yes yeah have you have you seen that one i've seen like the first episode of it what do you think uh it was interesting they were trying to cram a lot into it there's a lot of lore there's a lot of characters there's time jumps and stuff and i feel like they were trying to do a lot of heavy lifting very quickly yeah i'd agree with that definitely but what what i found was uh it was interesting rather that that i think they didn't have a massive initial release uh in the u.s but it's now on on the stream i think it's on amazon now yeah and it's become very popular yeah very very popular so uh good on them for doing that critical drinker great to have you back uh we're gonna ask you some questions from us , supporters in a second but as you know final question always the same what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be oh man i had a good answer for this last time and now i'm not sure because we've talked about so much in this yeah um why is zendaya in everything all of a sudden she was so horribly miscast as athena she frowns a lot that was her role i don't understand like athena is meant to be this majestic imposing figure who's a mixture of the warrior and the intellectual we didn't get that really from the odyssey did we she was kind of she she sort of came across as more like his conscience than a goddess yeah which is very this is the bit where actually i'd agree with francis where it was so inauthentic to the ancient greeks because to them gods and goddesses were they had agency they were living beings who had their own agendas their own flaws their own faults and to sort of have a goddess be this sort of almost like a spiritual thing that just is there to reflect you back to you in some way and guide you along the path that's not the way the greeks thought about gods and goddesses at all no and i think it's what happens when you get a man of science who fundamentally doesn't hold with religion or with mysticism or spirituality and then ask him to weave a story in a world that's saturated with that and demands that stuff um you get this weird attempt to rationalize the gods as well they're just poseidon is now a story and they're not a storm on the ocean and you know um zeus is like thunder in the sky or whatever and it's it doesn't fundamentally work with a story like that they should be an active part of the the story the narrative all right uh great to have you on thank you head on over to triggerpods.co.uk where we're going to ask the critical drinker your questions don't forget to click the link in the description of this episode to grab the special cyber ghost vpn discount it's completely risk-free so check it out today besides the recent success of the odyssey it appears that the hollywood model for producing movies i.e creative casting shoehorning ideology into storylines is failing why hasn't the ship course corrected yet you you