Friendly Fire: Fauci's Fabrications, A Socialist Repents & Blowing Up Bus Lanes

**Michael Knowles** (0:00)
I just want to know, before we begin it, because we haven't done one since, did you guys see the worst movie ever made by Hollywood in the history of images?

**Matt Walsh** (0:14)
I mean, well, what I've been told, what I've been told is that the Odyssey, the Better Movie would have been for there to be a man who goes around killing everyone, banging the lady who's not his wife for 10 years, and then killing all the chambermaids. That would have been better, probably, than this one.

**Michael Knowles** (0:34)
Now that you put it that way, I am actually coming around to Walsh's point of view.

**Andrew Klavan** (0:38)
That's how I see the flaws in the picture. That's it.

**Michael Knowles** (0:42)
I just don't know what we're going to- if I can't complain about the Odyssey for the next 10 weeks, I don't know, what are we going to talk about? There's nothing left to talk about.

**Andrew Klavan** (0:51)
I got a letter from somebody complaining that they had turned Odysseus into a weepy girl man. So I sent him the passage in Homer where he weeps like a woman. And I said, you think this is an argument between good people and bad people. It's really an argument between people who know what they're talking about, and people who have no idea what they're talking about.

**Ben Shapiro** (1:11)
What's funny about it is that I feel like we're all having the same argument about that we all agree on what the movie is trying to do. We just have disagreements on whether that's a good thing or not.
I think that- I heard your take on it, Drew, and I think it was basically the same take as my take on it, which I think was also-

**Andrew Klavan** (1:29)
You were more enthusiastic, I thought.

**Matt Walsh** (1:31)
You were more enthusiastic, I thought.

**Ben Shapiro** (1:34)
I like Nolan better than you guys like Nolan.

**Matt Walsh** (1:36)
Yeah.

**Ben Shapiro** (1:36)
I mean, but as a piece of morality, what he was trying to do thematically is obviously he was taking sort of the ghost of Christian morality and pouring it into the vase of a Greek story. Because I mean, and I think we all sort of agree with that. I thought that that's kind of a good thing, because again, if you wanted, I think we'll listen.
I get where Matt's coming from because he loves apocalypto, right? Apocalypto is here's what pre-Christian morality looks like, and then here comes Christianity, oh, thank God, right?

**Michael Knowles** (2:05)
I mean, that's apocalypto.

**Ben Shapiro** (2:06)
Right. Everything is horrible, and then, oh, thank God, the conquistadors are here.

**Matt Walsh** (2:11)
And I get that.

**Ben Shapiro** (2:12)
But that wasn't going to happen at the end of Homer's The Odyssey, because no one comes at the end of Homer's The Odyssey to save you from pre-Judeo-Christian morality, right? You're just stuck in that world where Odysseus is the hero who, again, bangs everything in sight and then kills all the chambermaids.
So that's not like an amazingly evocative story for a film. So again, you can make Northman. Northman does no box office.

**Andrew Klavan** (2:37)
I don't understand, though.
I thought it was an aesthetic problem. I didn't think his take really did quite graft on aesthetically to it. I didn't believe that Odysseus was saying those things even as he was played in the movie.
I didn't believe that those would be his problems, but so what? I mean, so it's a summer movie that's incredibly entertaining for three hours, which is hard to do. And so it doesn't all, you know, it's not the smartest movie in the world. But so what? You know, what's Nolan supposed to do? Is his job to sort of make everybody feel that their point of view is being represented in his movie? And by the way, I just want to say one thing, Ben. I would much rather hear you over praise a director that you love, which is a wonderful thing to love a director. There's directors that I love more than they deserve, but I just love their work. I would much rather hear that than a bunch of conservatives cranking that somehow they didn't get the ideological diatribe that they wanted from somebody.

**Michael Knowles** (3:32)
There's also on the ideological point, like Ben, you're completely right that he's Christianizing the story in a very overt way. He invokes the golden rule. There's a baptism scene. The big turn at the end is like literally confession. There is a scrim and he is confessing his sins to his wife.