Ep. 1586 - UK Parliament Hosts Incredibly Embarrassing Hearing Over Netflix Show “Adolescence”
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, the UK Parliament holds a hearing on that Netflix adolescence show that they're so obsessed with. The hockey player who kicked another player in the neck and killed him will not face any criminal charges. Viral body cam footage of a woman needlessly turning a traffic ticket into an arrest shows again why body cameras have killed the BLM and defund the police movements. And I had the unfortunate experience of watching one of the Star Wars prequels in theaters over the weekend. So you know what the daily cancellation will be about. We'll talk about all that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.

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There have been a lot of changes in the second Trump administration, as we all know, but there was one change from the very beginning that hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as it should. And it's when Trump stood up during his inauguration speech and invoked the idea of manifest destiny, which is, of course, deeply rooted in the idea of American exceptionalism. For the first time in many generations, a U.S. president felt no shame in proclaiming that

America is the greatest nation on the planet. And crucially, Trump didn't make this proclamation as a platitude. He wasn't seeking to get a quick soundbite out of it by reminding people of history class when they heard terms like manifest destiny and American exceptionalism. And we haven't heard it much since then.

Instead, Trump really meant it in a practical sense. We're the best nation on earth, he said, and therefore we can do what we want. We can impose tariffs and force everyone to the negotiating table. We can deport criminals and ignore corrupt judges to tell us otherwise. And in a matter of weeks, we can eliminate, you know, wasteful parts of the bureaucracy. We could talk about acquiring Greenland. We could become energy independent, which is no small thing when the entire continent of Europe teeters on the verge of a blackout. We could do all these things because we

In very real terms, we are unique. We have a fighting spirit that no other nation on the planet can match. Now, if you attended college in the last 50 years, you've probably been conditioned to not say things like this, to not even think them. You're told that it's gaudy or, you know, a relic of colonialism or something like that.

But it also happens to be true. And every day we're reminded that it's true. We can see right out in the open that, well, other nations are inferior to our own, which, by the way, is how we should feel if you love your country. That's how you should feel about other countries. Look closely enough and you'll see that they even kind of admit it. They're preoccupied with their own destruction. So let's start with the UK, which is allegedly one of our closest allies and

A couple of weeks ago, you might remember, we talked about the Netflix show Adolescence and how it's essentially taken over the entire country. Adolescence is a miniseries in which a white 13-year-old boy named Jamie stabs a girl to death after the girl rejects his advances. The hook, if you can call it that.

is that the show blames online culture for the killer's actions, at least to some extent. The victim had bullied the 13-year-old boy on Instagram, for example. He'd been called an incel and so on. And the point of the show is that male rage...

so-called, is fueled by online misogyny and bullying and the manosphere, and that children are liable to become murderers at any moment, even if they live in a loving, stable two-parent household. That's the message the showrunners wanted to convey, even though it flies in the face of common sense and every data point that we have. Beyond that, there wasn't anything very interesting about the show. The cameraman is doing more interesting things than any of the actors, since everything's supposedly shot in one take.

So it was reasonable to assume that after the initial hype died down over this miniseries that the UK would move on pretty quickly. That's the normal trajectory that shows like this tend to follow. And indeed, that's what many of my listeners said would happen. I received dozens of comments on the last monologue on adolescence where several people who lived in Britain explained that actually the show isn't that popular over there to begin with.

And additionally, as we discussed, there was an infamous interview broadcast on the BBC where the anchor grills a both of the anchors grill a conservative politician about the fact that she hadn't seen the show. They were stunned for the entire interview that she had not watched it. And no matter how much the politician tried to explain to these anchors that the show isn't real, they kept doubling down. And when we played that footage two weeks ago, it seemed like it was safe to assume the obsession over the show had jumped the shark.

Too absurd to continue. Everyone, even fans of the show, would certainly walk away slowly and find something else to fixate on. But that has not happened in the UK. Instead, adolescence isn't simply dominating political discussions anymore. Now the show is being used to justify new legislation that would dramatically curtail free speech rights in the country, almost as if that was the point of the show all along. In fact, the show's creators just testified in Parliament yesterday

to demand this new legislation. The government held an entire hearing on a fictional TV show in which the show's writer testified as an expert before the government's Women and Equalities Committee. That is the very dire and hopeless state of the so-called United Kingdom at the moment. So we'll start at the beginning of the hearing when a member of parliament named Sarah Owen

begins questioning Jack Thorne, who's the creator and executive producer of Adolescence. And this member of parliament is very interested in knowing more about Jamie and why he snapped and decided to kill a girl. But, you know, there's a bit of a snag because the politician clearly doesn't understand what the creator of the show is getting at, which leads to this mildly amusing exchange. Watch. I just wanted to come back on that. So you had those clear themes of where...

I guess the responsibility or the interventions could have happened at school or at home and friends, but not social media or influencers. Was that a deliberate choice not to have that kind of theme in with it? Well, I think it is a theme and I think it does run through the whole thing. And it was, like I say, part of the sort of sphere of responsibility for Jamie.

but that came out in different chunks in different places. As a dramatist you're always trying to work out ways to tell a story authentically. What I meant was that it's not like a specific influencer, it was the two of... that relationship where he describes for example ******, anybody can see ******, it wasn't the outside influence, it was the influence on social media amongst friends that was the biggest influence, it wasn't a named influencer for example.

No. Yeah, I mean, there were lots of things that make up Jamie's complicated brain. And there's lots of things, you know, if I was to write, if I was to describe to you what Jamie's brain looked like, it would take me nine years to describe it because he is a complicated mess of things, as we all are. And so all these things play a role in his head.

Well, there's a couple of layers of embarrassment here. First of all, of course, they're talking about a fake person as if he's real. He says that it would take him nine years to unpack the brain of a fictional character named Jamie, who, because he doesn't actually exist, does not actually have a brain or a history or emotions because he's not real. And for her part, the politician who apparently chairs this committee in Parliament,

keeps pressing for more information about this fictional person. She's really determined to understand what makes this character tick, you know, that they're talking about in Parliament, even though he doesn't exist.

This went on for something like two hours, by the way. The hearing was full of moments like this. As it went on, because it became clear that Jack Thorne is especially concerned about conspiracy theories, as he calls them. And at one point in the hearing, Thorne elaborated on the term conspiracy theories. It turns out that, stop me if you've heard this one before, a conspiracy theory is something that's completely true, but highly inconvenient to the political left. Watch. I think you've explained...

In good detail, as to the extent of the level that you did in terms of research and how much you wanted to get this right, how does it feel when you hear, say, the leader of the opposition quote what has been described as conspiracy theories around the race of Jamie being, and she said, fundamentally changed in the story of adolescence? I think that's to do with her algorithm.

And there are a lot of people on X and in other places who make that claim and who have consumed the story that way. So, yeah, that just speaks to what she's consuming online, I think.

So that's his response when he's asked about the race swap in adolescence. He's asked about a conservative politician who pointed out that unlike what you see on Netflix, white kids from stable households are not stabbing very many people in the UK. That's the truth.

It's kids from broken homes, along with jihadists who are doing most of the damage. And in response to that point, which is obviously true, Thorne states that the conservative politician must be consuming the wrong content online. The implication, of course, is that anyone who tells the truth about knife crime in the UK and violent crime in general should be censored.

You're required to think that it's young white kids from loving two-parent households that are knifing everyone, and you're supposed to ignore the literal jihadist with an al-Qaeda training manual in his backpack who murders young girls at a dance studio. Again, this is the state of the UK, a country that we once had a lot in common with, but this is what they're reduced to.

I want to show one more clip from this hearing because it just kept getting more and more comical as it went on. Eventually, Jack Thorne left and he was replaced by a bunch of self-described experts and government officials who supposedly would provide some hard evidence in support of more online censorship. But then a funny thing happened when they were asked for evidence that misogyny is on the rise in the UK, which is what this hearing was supposed to be all about, actually, misogyny. And so they're asked for some evidence on that.

They couldn't point to any objective, verifiable information about all the young white men who are going out and killing women because of Andrew Tate or whatever. Instead, and I'm not making this up, the experts turned around and cited the show Adolescence.

And the testimony from Jack Thorne, which everyone had just heard. Watch. I just want to jump in on a couple of points you both made. So I think you're both in agreement that there seems to be a rise in this type of behavior in schools. What do you think is fueling that rise?

I think we've just had a really interesting session about a TV drama, but a very important one that I think has touched on many of the contributory factors that we're seeing behind this rise in misogyny in schools. I think one of the really important themes that was touched on in the evidence we've just heard

was that, yes, social media plays an important part in that. Sometimes it can be an accelerant, but there are a whole range of other influences on children and young people that can lead to profoundly inappropriate behavior. So social media is a really important aspect of it. So they don't have any data, actually. They just have the show Adolescence and the testimony from its executive producer.

According to the government expert, that somehow qualifies as evidence in the UK. Time to pass a law eliminating free speech on the internet, I guess. But the point here is not to mock the UK, as entertaining as that would be. The point is that this kind of embarrassing spectacle is not very surprising for them. There aren't very many people left in that country to speak out against this sort of thing. There are some, not many.

There isn't much of a right wing in the UK or almost anywhere else in the Western world outside of the United States. And if you don't believe that,

Look at the election that just took place in Canada. After 10 years of destroying Canada's economy and opening the borders to hordes of foreign nationals, the Liberal Party was just reelected. Voters once again handed the Liberal Party control of government, even after the Liberals froze the bank accounts of peaceful protesters, arrested journalists in the street, trampled old ladies with horses, disarmed the entire population, effectively banned independent journalists from posting their content on social media platforms.

Canadians saw the government declare martial law over a bunch of truckers who didn't want to be compelled to take an experimental shot. And they saw all that and they said, yeah, we want more of that. And also, of course, they want more taxes so that they can stop the weather from changing.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the ins and outs of Canadian politics. If you're interested in a more granular breakdown, there's a Substack article from somebody named John Carter that goes into some detail about what happened in this week's election. And here's how it begins. Quote, Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well as by the demographic categories of age, sex and, depending on the country, race? Yeah, we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer versus tax eater status.

It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups, migrants, public sector workers and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation's capital. Perhaps it's that it's tax season and I'm in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but can't help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. Close quote.

That's a kind of a useful framework to look at what just happened in Canada, especially as you hear a lot of people blaming Donald Trump and blaming tariffs and so on. In Canada, very few young people can afford homes. There aren't many good jobs. The only really viable aspect of Canadian society is the public sector, which is sustained through taxes and borrowed money and retirees as well.

The public sector employees are the ones who celebrated when truckers were beaten by the police in Ottawa a few years ago. They resent the working class. Their only interest is seeing their pensions vest. Meanwhile, older Canadians have made their money and they don't seem to care about what happens to their country going forward. I mean, take a look at this chart, which is making the rounds. It shows the most important factors in people's votes broken out by age.

It's from Abacus Data, which is a Canadian polling firm. And notice that for most young people or that under the age of 44, if they count as all young, reducing the cost of living is the top issue. But for Canadians over the age of 60, the top issue in the whole that the country faces, the top issue was dealing with Donald Trump. In other words, Canadian seniors are

not even pretending, by and large, to be interested in the internal affairs of their own country. They don't seem to be concerned about the fact that young people are overdosing at increasing rates or that many of them are well into their 30s sharing tiny apartments with roommates just to make ends meet. What they care about instead is dealing with Donald Trump, an elected official from a different country who has not caused a single ounce of the misery that Canada has been enduring for the past decade or more.

In this country, by contrast, older voters were mostly concerned about the economy in the last election. In Michigan, for example, the AARP found that 24% of older voters cited the economy and jobs. Another 24% cited inflation as top concerns. So nearly half of these voters are interested in things that every American should be interested in, which is creating a stable and functioning economy so that people can buy homes and raise children. But in Canada, as in the UK, the priorities are different.

And that's why these countries are spending their time talking about Netflix shows and electing globalists who promise to send mean tweets to Donald Trump or whatever, whatever they mean by dealing with him. It's a sobering realization, but it's true. These countries, which are supposed to be great allies who we have a lot in common with, do not have a functioning conservative movement at all, really.

one that respects the sanctity of life from the moment of conception, one that values the importance of economic growth for everyone, one that understands the distinction between fiction and reality. With every election that takes place in Canada and every humiliating hearing on adolescence that the UK is subjected to, the truth becomes more clear by the day. It's time to admit it because it's unavoidable at this point. The future of conservatism and thus of Western civilization is in our hands. And increasingly...

Now let's get to our five headlines.

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In abbreviated headlines today, we'll start with this. Briefly, New York Post reports, a man arrested on suspicion of manslaughter following the death of ice hockey player Adam Johnson has been told he will not face any charges, British prosecutors said Tuesday. Johnson played for the Nottingham Panthers and died shortly after his neck had been sliced in a collision with Sheffield Steelers defenseman Matt Petgrave during a game on October 28th, 2023.

A man was arrested two weeks later, and though he was not publicly identified, Petgrave himself said in a crowdfunding appeal for legal fees that he's the subject of a police investigation. On Tuesday, the Crown Prosecution Service decided it would not bring criminal charges against the man arrested following what are described as a shocking and deeply unsettling incident. So you probably remember this case. It was a pretty big deal when it happened a year or two ago. And we'll put the footage up on the screen just for reference.

That's what happened in the article. When you keep reading this article, it claims that the way that Adam Johnson died is that Petgrave's skate became elevated as if it happened by some mysterious breach of the laws of physics. No, his skate became elevated because he swung his leg up and kicked the other guy, Adam Johnson, in the neck and sliced his throat. That's what happened. And now he faces no criminal charges.

He cut a guy's throat with his skate and killed him, and there will be no charges, which is obscene. I think I said at the time that I don't necessarily think that Petgrave was consciously trying to kill Johnson. I do think that he consciously decided to swing his leg up and kick him. I think because when you look at the footage, that's not a natural... I don't play hockey. I don't ice skate, admittedly, but

You don't often hear about people getting kicked in the throat when they're out on the ice. It certainly does not look like a natural move that one would do while they're skating, swinging their leg up above their head. You know, this isn't gymnastics. So I think he decided to swing his leg up and kick him. I think he was trying to hurt him, if not kill him. And that would be manslaughter. He did something in that case intentionally to inflict damage on somebody else. That action ended up killing the guy. It's like the definition of manslaughter.

So pressing no criminal charges is just insane. I mean, the guy's dead. What if Petgrave had punched Johnson, which, of course, is something that happens in, you know, tends to happen in hockey. But what if Petgrave had punched him and killed him? Would there be no charges for that? I mean, a lot of people get punched every day and don't die on rare occasion. One punch takes somebody out. And guess what? If you delivered that punch, even if you didn't mean to kill the person, you're going to jail. That's the way it works.

even if you didn't mean it, because you can't just kill a person and walk free. So I think this is ridiculous. I don't know. Is the hockey rink like a law-free zone now? I understand that there's a certain leeway you have to give in the context of sports. There's a lot that's done on the football field, for example, that would be felony assault in any other context. But that's all in the context of the game itself that everybody is willingly participating in.

So if somebody was tackled in football and then landed wrong and died, God forbid, I don't think the person that tackled them should go to jail, obviously, because that's a total accident in the context of the game. It's a legitimate act within the game that everybody is participating in. But if a player walked up to another guy and smashed him in the head with his helmet or something and the guy died, then, yeah, he should go to jail. That's that's an act taken outside of the game meant to inflict harm.

It's manslaughter. And kicking somebody in the neck is not a legitimate hockey move. You know, it's not the same thing as like hitting the puck and accidentally hitting somebody in the neck or something and killing them. It's just not the same thing. So I think that this is just pretty unthinkable and ridiculous. OK, so I want to play this to police body cam footage that I've seen circulating on social media.

I think this incident, it's circulating now. This incident actually happened several months ago. Maybe it was last summer even. And this just brings us back to the point that police body cameras have vindicated and basically vindicated the police and basically killed the BLM movement and the defund the police movement. That was never the intention when BLM was pushing for body cameras, but that's what happened. So be careful what you wish for, you know, because now we all see what police deal with every day.

And we see how most traffic stops that escalate into something more only escalate because the person who got pulled over went out of their way to escalate it. And there are exceptions to that, but the exceptions are just that. There are exceptions. And that's exactly what happened here. So let's watch this.

I'm asking for a supervisor.

I'm asking for your license and insurance. I'm asking for a man of a supervisor. Okay, in the meantime, I need your driver's license. I'm asking for a supervisor. Can I see a supervisor please? You can either roll the window down or I will break it. Are you going to provide your ID? Absolutely. Are you going to provide your ID? Speeding. Speeding was the reason for the traffic stop. Are you going to provide your ID? Are you going to provide your ID?

Okay, I've asked you several times you refuse to answer. Are you going to step out of the vehicle? Are you going to step out of the vehicle? Okay ma'am you are now under arrest. You are under arrest for obstruction of official business and for failing to provide your ID. Step out of the vehicle. Step out of the vehicle or I will break the window. Step out of the vehicle or I will break the window. Ma'am, I'm telling you one more time. Step out of the vehicle or I'm going to break the window. Okay. Oh my god! Please step out.

OK, so she was going 53 and a 35. Not the worst case of speeding we've ever seen, but that's speeding. That is definitely speeding. And the cops are going to pull you over for that every time when they set the speed trap up. You know, that's what they're looking for.

somebody going 15 to 20 miles over the limit. You're like, you're right in the sweet spot for what the cops are looking for when they set up the speed trap. So you're going to get pulled over. And once you are, that's it. They got you. You're going to get a ticket. 53 to 35, you're getting a ticket. And your only recourse now is with the judge in traffic court. So go to traffic court. Hope that you get a really nice judge who's having a good day.

And that's your only hope of avoiding points on your license and whatever, a serious fine. Arguing with the cop, though, is pointless. And doing what this woman did, and we see this a lot now with these body cams, doing what this woman did is just, it's sticking your finger in a socket. I mean, nothing good can come of it. It's a course of action that cannot possibly work in your favor.

So she keeps asking for a supervisor. Like, what the hell is a supervisor going to do for you? Do you think the supervisor is going to show up and just tell you that it's fine? You don't get the, you don't have to have a ticket? You think he's going to show up and say, oh, what's going on here? Did you pull this poor woman over for only going 17 miles over a limit? Unacceptable. Ma'am, we apologize. Here's $10,000 in restitution. I mean, is that how you imagine the conversation going? It's totally delusional, of course. So this woman took what could have been

just an annoying speeding ticket and turned it into an arrest and a trip to the station and a much, much bigger problem. You know, she didn't want to be bothered with a ticket. So instead, she's bothered with a ticket plus handcuffs and also a trip to jail. And for what? Why? I mean, why? What's the point? It's not like she's taking some kind of brave, principled stand for her rights or

You know, sometimes someone could do that. If you're taking a if you're doing something that isn't going to work out in your favor, but you're taking a stand on principle. Well, then that that could be brave. That's a that's a sacrifice for the sake of the principle. But there's no principle here. She's not standing on principle. She was speeding. You have no right to go 53 to 35. They got you. So then why do this? Why not just give them your ID, take the ticket and move on with your life? It really is.

What is the problem that you don't have an ID and you're trying to avoid? Because if that's the problem, well, then again, like being an asshole is not going to help you. So it really is baffling. But cops deal with this nonsense every day. I mean, if you're a cop, this is every day of your life, every day dealing with people who are absolutely determined to turn every situation into the worst possible version of that situation. This is this is every day of your life. And why? You know, I think that's worth talking about. Why?

How do you explain? We see these kinds of videos all the time. You kind of gloss over it. But how do you explain this? How do you explain this woman? How do you explain any of the thousands of body cam videos like this where someone goes out of their way to make everything worse, where they go down a path where there is no win? There is no possible win for them.

And that's something worth talking about, but we don't talk about it. And that's partly because, once again, you know, there are uncomfortable racial dynamics at work here. The quiet part out loud here is that when you see body cam footage of somebody turning a traffic stop into an arrest for no reason, usually not always, usually it's not a white person. And at least part of the reason for that is the message that's been sent to black Americans, the message that cops are racist, that if you get pulled over, it's because you're driving while black.

that cops are involved in a racist conspiracy to oppress you and so on. That's been the messaging. That's been the conditioning. And it at least partly, I don't think entirely, but it partly explains this kind of hostile, aggressive demeanor that you see in so many of these videos. Even when the cop is being super calm, reasonable, non-confrontational, when the cop is not doing anything, you know, the cop is just enforcing the law. That's his job.

So it doesn't make any sense to be angry at him. And I think this partly explains it, the messaging and the conditioning, but also not all of it. It doesn't explain the entire phenomenon, because if you really did think, as I've said before, if you really did think that cops were involved in a conspiracy to, you know, oppress black people and they're just looking for any excuse, you know, to shoot a racial minority, if that's actually what you believe.

then you would think that you'd be, if anything, less likely to instigate a confrontation. So I think that the messaging explanation only goes so far, but it is something worth talking about. Okay, now we're, this is a quick clip from, because we're back to Michelle Obama's podcast. This is the gift that keeps on giving. And here is Michelle lamenting the fact that

People these days always have their heads buried in their phones, which I also lament that fact. It's a very lamentable fact. I lament it. I lament it all the time. But listen to Michelle's specific complaint. Here's why. Here's why she's upset that everyone's always looking in their phones.

There are a lot of people here of all ages who are trapped by their phones. And when you talk about us being disconnected and not talking to each other, I am not out in the world like a normal person anymore. But when I am...

People don't even recognize me. You know why? Because they're on their phones. Nobody is looking at each other. I could walk right past somebody with a hat on, you know, and I'm just a black woman in a cap. I don't know. No, I've done it. I don't know about that. I have done it. I fly commercial. I am out there with the people and folks are not paying attention.

i'm i fly commercial so okay okay yes this is the great tragedy of our collective screen addiction you know the i thought i thought the tragedy of our screen addiction which i again i do believe is tragic and i i realized the irony of saying that while you're watching this on a screen but i'm not saying that we should never watch things on screens i'm saying that um

you know, the average American being glued to a screen 12 hours a day or whatever we're up to now. That's the problem. There are some things worth watching. There are some there are some valid reasons to be glued to a screen like this show. That's a good reason. But that's only 45 minutes to an hour a day. So, you know, we could cut cut out the rest of it pretty much. So I thought that the real tragedy with everyone being glued to screens was

is that we're missing out on life. We're missing out on our physical existence, that there's so much of the world, the actual three-dimensional world that we're all moving around in, that we're missing. And there's so many opportunities to engage with other human beings who are around us, and we're missing that because we're constantly looking at the screens. I thought that was the tragedy.

But the real tragedy is that we aren't paying attention to Michelle Obama. You know, think of all the things that you might miss if you're glued to your phone. You might miss Michelle Obama. That's the main, that's the only, that's the, that's the most important thing. You might miss Michelle Obama walking by. I personally shudder to think of all the Michelle Obama sightings that I've missed out on because I've been looking at Twitter or whatever, which is really, I mean, this is some high level cope from Michelle Obama, uh,

You know, if she's walking around and no fans come up to her, it's because, oh, you know, I guess they were all on their phones. If only they weren't on their phones, they would. I feel sorry for them, really. I feel sorry for all those people who who would have loved to come up and tell me what a fan they are. But they were on their phone, so they didn't see me. And this is a theme that comes up with Michelle quite a bit.

She's complained many times, even going back many years, going back to when she was first lady. She's complained many times about not being recognized in public. She told a story once about somebody cutting in front of her in line somewhere because they didn't know who she was. There was another story, if I remember correctly, about being at a store and somebody thought she was an employee, allegedly, which I don't really buy, but that's what she says.

So this comes up often enough that it's obviously a real hang up for Michelle. And she deeply desires to be recognized, to be lavished with praise in public, which is pretty shocking, actually, because she's been in public for, you know, almost 20 years. She's been in the public eye. She's been a very famous person for almost 20 years. And to be in it for that long,

And still not satisfied, still desiring public recognition and fame, you know, to be like walking down the street and upset that more people aren't recognizing you rather than relieved that you're able to walk down the street one time without anyone like talking to you. That's that's really pathetic. She should relish every time she's able to walk down the street without anyone noticing her. And instead, she takes it personally because she really wants the attention. She desperately needs it.

She's still she's still despite being extremely famous for 20 years, she still has not had her fill of it. She she needs to be recognized and affirmed, as they say, because this is what you find. This this kind of this obsession with affirmation is we hear it a lot from the trans activists, but it's it's not just them. It's not just trans people. It's also Michelle Obama, although, you know.

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Well, despite what my critics may claim, I think I am actually a good dad. I love my kids. I make sacrifices for them. I sometimes even subject myself to unspeakable tortures for their sake. And that's what I did over the weekend when I took some of the kids to go see the 20th anniversary re-release of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith in theaters. I hadn't seen the film since it first came out.

And my initial experience with the movie was such that I had no desire to ever experience it again. But I didn't count on one day having children of my own who somehow would become diehard Star Wars fans. I don't know how this happened. I'm not a Star Wars fan. I didn't pass this fandom down to them. I don't come from a Star Wars family. My own dad was not a Star Wars fan. He was more of a Star Trek guy. That never really clicked with me either. I have no affinity for any sci-fi franchise with the word star in the title. I am, however, a fan of the actual stars.

You know, why watch Star Wars when you can look up at the stars at night and see the great cosmic pageant that God himself has written, produced and directed for us? That's what I've tried to tell my kids to no avail. I gave this speech to my son once and he said, yeah, but God didn't make lightsabers.

And I said, OK, good point. But don't talk back. You're grounded. And in any case, whether through some sort of genetic anomaly or more likely through pro Star Wars brainwashing from their mother, who my kids are now Star Wars fans, and they really wanted to see the third film in the prequel series in theaters, which has just been re-released. And so I agreed. And after suffering again through the entire nine hour runtime or what felt like it,

I can confidently say that Revenge of the Sith is even worse than I remember, like a lot worse. I remember it as a boring, miserable film, but I guess I had blocked out many of the details, subconsciously attempting to save myself from reliving the trauma. This movie is outrageously, offensively bad. You could, and I'm not, I don't just, I'm not saying this for effect. You could make a case that it's like the worst film ever made.

And sad to say, it's competing with more than one other Star Wars title for the top of that list. Everything about it is bad, except the score. The score is pretty good.

but not enough to rescue the film. If John Williams made a score for a video of a dog taking a dump, it would be slightly more entertaining than it would have been without the score, but it would still be a dog taking a dump. And this film is the cinematic equivalent of that. First of all, as many people have pointed out over the years, but I must reiterate, the dialogue is atrocious. George Lucas, it would seem, has never heard humans speak before.

He writes dialogue like I imagine an alien would write dialogue if the only thing he knew about the human race he learned by watching daytime soap operas. There is not one moment where the script reaches even like a C grade. It is the worst dialogue I've ever heard in a mainstream Hollywood film. It is shockingly bad. Last summer, my kids used one of our phones to make a movie, as they called it, where they pretended to be pirates or something.

And the dialogue, the dialogue in their three minute pirate movie was better than anything George Lucas came up with. So just to give one infamous example, in a scene early in the film, Anakin played with the charisma of a metal folding chair by Hayden Christensen, goes up to Padme, played by Natalie Portman, and says, you are so beautiful. And then Padme responds, that's because I'm so in love. To which Anakin says, no, it's because I'm so in love with you.

That is actual dialogue in this movie.

It commits every sin of bad script writing. It is clunky. It's on the nose. It doesn't sound natural at all. Humans do not speak this way. Even humans in galaxies far, far away, unless they're living on planet cheese ball in the lame dork galaxy. This is not how humans or any other species of sentient life forms speak or would speak. One of the most basic principles also of script writing is to show, don't tell. This is script writing 101. The absolute worst way to convey a character's emotions is just have him say it.

So a clever writer or even just a professional one knows how to bring us into the character's mind without having him broadcast it. And so if you're telling us that, if you're trying to tell us that Anakin thinks Padme is beautiful and Padme is so in love, there are like a million different scenes that any decently creative and literate person could come up with that get that message across. Instead, George Lucas just writes on the page and then Anakin says, you're beautiful. And Padme says, I'm so in love. And Anakin says,

No, I'm in love. And Padme says, no, I'm in love. And then they kiss. And then after they kiss, they both say at the same time, I'm in love. And this way, the audience will understand that they're in love. I mean, that's literally how the script was probably written. It was written like somebody was transcribing the off-the-cuff ramblings of a five-year-old. The entire movie is like this. There is not one line of dialogue that sounds authentic, much less clever. And to make matters worse, the acting is uniformly bad, in some cases, grotesquely bad.

Now, granted, the actors were given the impossible task of delivering George Lucas dialogue, which is the modern film industry equivalent of like pulling the sword from the stone. There may be some actor out there in the world who can make this crap sound good, but he's never stepped forward. His existence is only a legend. Maybe Daniel Day-Lewis could do it. I'm not sure. But I do know that Hayden Christensen can't. Neither can Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, Samuel L. Jackson, who are all terrible in this film. Even R2-D2's performance fell flat and uninspired.

Reportedly, I read this, that George Lucas wanted to cast Tupac in the role that ultimately went to Samuel L. Jackson, which makes Tupac's death perhaps a blessing in disguise. At least he was saved from the embarrassment of being in this movie. So we've established that the acting and dialogue were terrible. Many apologists for the film, and I've heard this just since yesterday because I tweeted about this, and a lot of people were very upset, as you would expect, that I thought the movie was bad. But what I found is that a lot of people were conceding

both points, but then claiming that the movie is still good. Now, of course, saying that a movie has bad acting and bad dialogue, but is still good is like if you ask someone their opinion of the local Italian joint and they say, well, the customer service is terrible and the food tastes bad, but overall, it's actually a great restaurant. By definition, it cannot be a great food service establishment if it fails in the areas of both food and service. And a film cannot be good if it's poorly written and poorly performed.

What's left to make it good? What could possibly rescue a film if both the guy who wrote it and the guys who acted in it have failed in their jobs? Now, you might want to say, well, the acting sucks and the script sucks, but at least the action is good. I would submit that a poorly written and poorly performed film with good action is still on balance a bad film. But as it happens, this movie doesn't have good action scenes. The action scenes are long and busy and lots of things happen in them, but they are not good.

I mean, the fight choreography is terrible. It's clumsy and nonsensical and uninspired. Many of the Jedis who are supposed to be like intergalactic ninjas, like the karate kids of the cosmos or whatever, have shockingly bad reflexes. I mean, Revenge of the Sith, fantastic.

Features some of the slowest fight scenes I've ever seen. There's a scene where Emperor Ovaltine, or whatever his name is, who I guess is not an emperor yet in this, but he fights off a group of Jedis who came to apprehend him.

And the actor who played Ovaltine was in his mid 60s and and he moves like it. And yet, despite swinging the lightsaber with all the speed and vigor of a retiree playing softball, he still easily dispatches like multiple Jedi warriors who are supposed to be, you know, the greatest warriors in the universe. And it just with a with a casual, you know, flick of the lightsaber, they're dead. That's it.

And the fight scenes are also funny because they use stunt doubles or CGI to have the Jedis do flips and random like midair 360 corkscrews like Simone Biles for no obvious strategic reason. But for the rest of the time, they have the actual actors, I guess, doing the moves. So we're treated to the spectacle of fighters who can jump and flip like Olympic gymnasts. But when they're not jumping, they move like these clumsy old dudes. So the action isn't good.

Script isn't good. You know, acting isn't good. What's left? The story? Can we possibly say that although the acting is bad, the dialogue's bad, the action's bad, at least the story was good? Well, no, we can't, because unfortunately, this ship hit multiple massive narrative icebergs so that by the end of the thing, the end of the end, the thing was so riddled with holes that it could just barely stay afloat. So let me give you just two examples, both from the end of the movie.

In the climactic battle sequence between Anakin and Obi-Wan Kenobi, which takes place on a lava planet for some reason, I don't remember why they went to a lava planet, but

Maybe there was a good reason. Okay. Why would anyone go to a lava planet? If there are thousands of planets and you can go to any of them faster than the speed of light, why would you ever choose the lava planet for any activity? What possible activity could you, why would you ever go to it? Why would anything ever happen on? Is it because Anakin was evil?

So when you turn evil, you suddenly develop an affinity for lava. You know, yeah, that's that is it. That's that's George Lucas's writing for you. Well, he's evil, so he must like lava.

Anyway, so they were on the lava planet fighting and they were leaping from one piece of floating debris to the next because that's how it works. Right. Never mind the fact that if you jumped onto a piece of metal that was floating in lava, you would quickly burn to death. But that's not the point. The point is that this scene ends with Obi-Wan Kenobi jumping off of one of the lava rafts and onto a gently sloping hill. And he turns back to Anakin, who's still floating on the lava and says, it's over. I have the higher ground.

The fact that Obi-Wan Kenobi is slightly elevated over Anakin is supposed to somehow mean that he automatically wins the fight, except that Anakin just five seconds earlier had leapt like 30 feet in the air with effortless ease. So even if the higher ground is decisive, he could easily just jump higher than Obi-Wan Kenobi was standing, or he could walk up

the hill and continue fighting. This is a wide hill. Anakin could jump to any spot on the hill where his opponent is not standing, or he could float down a ways and jump onto a different hill and then continue the fight. There is no reason why Obi-Wan Kenobi standing on a hill should have ended the fight unless Anakin did the one thing he decided to do, which was to jump directly over Obi-Wan's head so he could just casually reach up and cut his legs off. And that's how it ends. That's the whole sequence with Anakin just presenting his legs to be cut off. Here you go.

It made no sense. Also, there's this problem. This is the last thing. The whole reason that Anakin turns to the dark side is because he had his visions that his wife Padme was going to die. Ovaltine promises him that if he goes to the dark side, he can stop his wife from dying. And then, which by the way, is not a bad concept. Like that idea is not a bad idea. And then right before the final battle, Anakin seemingly chokes her to death himself. And this could work in a tragic sense. He turned to the dark side to save his wife, but then he ended up killing her.

Except the problem is that for some reason, we learn in the next scene that he didn't kill his wife. The doctors tell us that his wife did not sustain any physical damage at all, yet she was still dying of a broken heart or something. So rather than having the tragic ending of Anakin killing the woman who he was supposedly trying to protect, for some reason, Lucas pulls the punch so that the whole choking incident was irrelevant. And now we have Padme giving up on life because her lame goth boyfriend turned evil and

So instead of her dying a tragic death, she turns out to be a selfish coward who's not motivated to live for the two children she just gave birth to.

And then we cut to the next scene where Darth Vader finds out that Padme died and then throws his hands in the air and shouts no. More atrocious writing from George Lucas. I mean, there were dozens of potentially profound and interesting ways to have this character respond to this news. Instead, Lucas beats you over the head with the cliche sledgehammer, literally having a character throw his arms in the air and shout no. I've never seen anyone do that in real life ever. It just doesn't happen.

So anyway, the point is, at this point, the promise that Ovaltine made to Vader has been revealed to be a lie. So why does Vader stay loyal to him? There's no reason. The entire narrative motivation for this character's transformation was yanked away at the last minute. And there's no attempt to deal with that problem at all. So the acting is bad. The script is bad. The action is bad. The story is bad.

What can this movie hang its hat on? We can't even give it marks for tone because tonally the film's also a disaster. It's written and acted like a campy, cheesy comedy that has old guys doing backflips with laser swords. But at the same time, George Lucas wants it to be like this dark operatic masterpiece. He even has Anakin slaughter a whole room full of children

No, I have no issue with your villain doing something heinous, but you can't have a campy, cheesy movie that's also dark and also features the mass murder of kids. Like all of those notes together make not for a symphony, but for a hodgepodge of noise. If anything, it sounds more like the orchestra warming their instruments up before the performance, which is maybe the best analogy for this film because it's

despite being one of the worst movies ever made, it does maybe have the potential to have been pretty good. It has some good ideas, at least. It just needed a new script, different actors, and a better director. So maybe it didn't have potential after all. Anyway, my kids liked it. But still, Revenge of the Sith is today canceled, along with this entire Star Wars franchise, needless to say. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed.