Andrew Clayton skewers Spectre as a $200M flop, blaming Hollywood’s left-wing drift and star power collapse—George Clooney’s irrelevance contrasts with Spider-Man’s dominance. He links modern censorship to the Hayes Code’s absence, praising Casino Royale but mocking Daniel Craig’s "pro-socialism" quips in Quantum of Solace. Hollywood’s "bubble-dumb" culture, per John Nolte, shields stars like Seth Rogen from backlash, while films like The Hateful Eight face boycotts. Clayton concludes modern cinema trades integrity for woke politics, leaving only outliers like The Gift worth watching. [Automatically generated summary]
That's Sam Smith singing the theme song to the new James Bond film, Spectre.
James Bond is back, and this time his mission is to rescue Hollywood from idiot left-wingers who can't keep their mouths shut.
I think he's going to need more bullets.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clayton, and this is the Andrew Clayton trial.
I always feel like I should start off talking about politics because I know conservatives don't, you know, they feel if I'm talking about the culture, I'm not talking about anything important.
But nothing really is happening.
Was anything happening in politics?
Jeb Bush redesigns his campaign before abandoning it.
As a prelude to abandoning it, you know, I loved him.
He made a speech.
He got up in front of people and he said, I can't be something I'm not.
And I thought, right, like President of the United States.
So he's got his new phrase, his new slogan is, Jeb can fix it.
I heard that and I thought for a minute, oh good, he's going to start a plumbing business and get out of politics.
You can kind of imagine Jeb coming over your house and you're thinking, you know, he's kind of boring and uninspiring, but he really did pull that hair out of the drain.
He did a great job.
So anyway, he's done.
What can you say?
The heart wants what it wants, as Woody Allen said before banging his wife's daughter or whatever she was.
The heart wants what it wants and Jeb Bush wants to be president and nothing is going to stop him except the fact that no one will vote for him.
But let's talk, what I really want to talk about is I want to talk about this wonderful phrase that my friend John Nolte from Breitbart, I think he used to run Big Hollywood, but I think he's now just Breitbart's God King of some sort.
And he came up with this wonderful phrase for Hollywood.
He called them bubble dumb.
John may be one of my, he's one of my favorite people anywhere.
He's certainly one of my favorite people in the conservative movement.
He's just, he is just great.
We have a little, we have a difference of taste, let's call it.
He's always saying to me, whenever we disagree on a movie, which is anytime a movie comes out and we both see it at the same time, whenever we disagree, he always says, let's talk about this and find out why you're so wrong.
However, I just want to point out that one of his favorite films is Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigelow.
He told me, he said to me, he said to me, you have to watch this film.
And the only thing I could think was, should I shoot this guy and put him out of his misery?
I mean, no court on earth would convict me.
That was the kindest thing to do.
I will say, though, that I sat and I watched Deuce Bigelow Male Gigolo.
And aside from thinking, trying to remember why I talked to Nolte again, after about 20 minutes, I did find myself laughing helplessly at this film.
I mean, it's the dumbest film ever made, but it is funny.
I had a tiny, tiny bit to do with John being hired by Breitbart.
When Breitbart started Big Hollywood, he called me up at some point and in the course of a conversation said, what do you think of this guy, Nolte, run Big Hollywood?
And I said, you know, hire Nolte and you'll be happy for the rest of your life.
I mean, you will love having Nolte working for you.
And I almost never talked to Breitbart after that when he didn't say, boy, that was the best advice you ever gave me.
He loved Nolte and really thought, he thought he was like mini him because Nolte's such a fighter, you know.
But the difference was that Breitbart loved the limelight.
Breitbart loved to be mix it up.
And Nolte is too good a person, really.
He couldn't even stand LA.
I mean, he left LA.
I wanted to let the air out of his tires before I let him leave LA, but he was driving too fast.
I was like, get me out of here.
I was like trying to chasing after him.
My wife always tells me that I'm not when my friends leave town when they move away.
I'm not allowed to tell them that I'm sad because it makes them feel bad about doing what they have to do.
But since I can't hide the way I feel about anything, it's always like, I'm not sad, God.
I'll see you later.
But he did the right thing.
He got out of town, went to the country where he belongs.
But he's, anyway, he's great.
And he came up with this incredible phrase, bubble dumb, to describe Hollywood.
And I'll get back to that in a minute.
But first, let's talk about this James Bond film that's coming out.
And I was only half joking when I said Bond is expected to rescue Hollywood.
Here is from CNN's The Rap, which is their showbiz site.
October 2015 was the worst box office performance in 15 years.
And the last two weekends debuted no fewer than seven movies that flopped, most of which relied on movie stars.
Projects from Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, Hugh Jackman, Vin Diesel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Bill Murray all landed with a thud, underscoring the ever-diminishing power of Hollywood A-listers to open movies.
Now this is kind of, I mean, this is CNN's The Rap getting the news about 10 years, maybe 20 years too late.
Really, the star system in Hollywood is long, long done.
I mean, it used to be that a star opened a movie.
People went to see a movie because of the star.
That simply does not happen anymore.
I mean, maybe Julia Roberts may have been the last person of whom that was true.
Maybe Will Smith, but I would say, I mean, I remember seeing Julia Roberts in 1992 in Sleeping with the Enemy.
And Sleeping with the Enemy was this awful, awful feminist novel first.
It was so badly written.
It was just, I mean, I hate to knock other novelists, but this was really something.
And the book came out and vanished without a trace.
And then the movie came out.
And the movie was terrible, but it was a huge success and made the book a big bestseller.
And the thing was, the movie was awful, but it had a really good plot.
The book had a good plot, which was that an abused wife fakes her death.
And so that's cool.
And then the husband's looking for her and all this stuff.
And I remember watching this film and watching Julia Roberts, who looked, I mean, she looked like a fawn.
She was the most beautiful creature on earth.
And there's a scene at the beginning of this movie when her husband, the guy playing her husband, belts her.
He just like hits her.
And I remember thinking, sitting in that movie theater and thinking, I don't care how bad this movie is, because this was really not a good movie.
I don't care how bad this movie is.
I am not leaving this theater until that guy is shot.
I think everybody, every man certainly in the theater was thinking the same thing.
And that's a movie star.
I mean, that's what a movie star does, that you care about her so much that you're not even paying attention to whether the picture itself is any good.
Compare this now with George Clooney.
And this, by the way, is not to knock Clooney, who I actually think is a talented guy.
You know, I really think he's, I know he's a left-winger and all this stuff, and he's a big Obama supporter, but I think he's a good director, I think he's an interesting actor, and I think he's got an appealing persona.
Listen to the movies that he's made.
Tomorrowland, just tanked, went right down the drain.
The Monuments Men, and that had all kinds of other stars in it, Matt Damon and all these people.
Gravity was a success, and that was a really good movie.
But everything else, The Descendants, The Eyes of March, that was a good movie.
I don't think anybody saw that.
The American.
George Clooney is a movie star only in the sense that people buy magazines to read about him.
If he does something, people, you know, on people, people will, but he's not a movie star in the sense that he opens movies.
Even if he wants to open a movie, by which I mean bring people to the theater on opening day to see a movie, he has to star like in Ocean's 11 with a raft of movie stars.
People no longer show up for movie stars.
They show up for movies.
And the big stars of movies now are franchises.
I mean, Spider-Man is a star.
The Iron Man is a star.
The actors who play those people are stars because they are in those costumes.
It's not the other way around.
Nobody shows up for them when they go off on their own and do their passion project.
Nobody shows up for them.
And so that system has been gone.
And it's been gone for a long, long time.
I mean, it really ended.
The one way this is untrue, I should add, is that it's untrue overseas.
I mean, people do like movie stars, our American movie stars overseas.
And so they bring in a lot of overseas funding, which constitutes a lot of the funding of movies.
And the other important thing about movie stars I should add is that you never get fired for hiring a movie star.
You know, when they made Tomorrowland, people said, why did that bomb?
Why did that bomb?
But nobody said, well, it bombed because George Clooney was in it.
It didn't.
It didn't bomb because George Clooney was in it.
I didn't see it.
I can't knock it, but it probably bombed because it wasn't that interesting to people.
And so, you know, nobody is going to get fired because he got George Clooney in the picture.
They may get fired for buying the script.
They may get fired for pouring all that money into it, but nobody gets fired for hiring George Clooney.
That makes him a safe bet.
So today the movie star is the franchise, the franchise is the movie star, not the movie star.
So let me just go back, though, to this rap piece about what's going on.
Now, the one thing you have to understand is funding in movies for very complicated reasons is no longer really the movie business profits are no longer related to box office, American box office.
There's so many other funding streams that hearing what's happening at the box office does not always mean these movies are not making money.
So they say, they go on to say here that even though October was so bad, despite the dead October, the year remains on pace to be the best ever at the domestic box office because of the James Bond film Spectre, which is opening Friday against the Peanuts movie.
The end of this month brings both Pixar's The Good Dinosaur and The Hunger Games Mocking J Part II, which of course will be a hit.
And the Bond film, I think, the Bond film has already opened in Britain and been a big star, and been a big hit, so I think it's going to be, it's going to be a big hit here.
Now, the Bond franchise has been up and running, maybe the biggest franchise.
It's got to be one of the biggest franchises in movie history.
It's been up and running since 1962 with Sean Connery and Dr. No.
And I have to say, I have never cared about the Bond franchise since Sean Connery left.
I mean, I used to love those films when they were, even when they were first coming out.
And they were so, you look back at them, they were so innocent.
I remember there's a scene in From Russia with Love where James Bond deduces, I think it's Robert Shaw was playing the villain, and he deduces that Robert Shaw's the villain because Shaw orders red wine with fish.
And so he says, you know, nobody would order red wine with fish.
Everybody knows you drink white wine with fish.
And that was to American audiences then, it was so sophisticated that he would even know that.
Like, who knew that you didn't order, you know, you didn't drink a bud with your fish, you know?
Like, we didn't know.
That was the most British, sophisticated thing in the world.
But the other thing that I loved about Sean Connery's Bond is that he was just a stone killer.
I mean, he was handsome, he was, you know, debonair, he got all the girls, we all loved that, but he just shot people without blinking.
You know, and that was one of the things that disappeared when Sean Connery disappeared.
Almost in all movie sequels, if you pay attention to them, what they take out are the, they continue the least important part of the character.
So if you watch The Matrix, it starts out with this brilliant idea about the nature of reality, and the sequels are all about slow-motion action.
They just take the simplest thing that they think made the movie popular.
They take the simplest, stupidest thing and put that in the sequel.
So when they came on with Roger Moore, they basically took the tuxedo and the big action set pieces, and that became James Bond.
But they lost that kind of killer thing that he had.
He was a tough, tough guy, and that was so riveting to watch a man shoot somebody without even giving him a chance.
That's what made Bond Bond.
And then he became Roger Moore and all this.
And I have a friend who, Bruce Fierstein, terrific guy, really good writer.
He was brought in to reinvent him for the Pierce Brosnan version.
And one of the things he had to do was give him a heart, you know, make him care about killing people.
Like, I have blood on my hands, I remember him saying in one of the Pierce Brosnan things.
And Bruce is a great writer, and he put in some wonderful lines.
I remember there's one wonderful line in the Pierce Brosnan films where somebody says, one man's terrorism is another man's freedom fighter.
And Bond says, to be a freedom fighter, you have to be fighting for freedom, which I always thought was a great line, you know.
But I didn't care about a Bond who worried about having blood on his ends.
I just didn't care.
And then when Daniel Craig came and he made Casino Royale, that brought back the Bond that I remember.
That was a great, great movie.
And it was the last Bond movie that I liked.
I thought the rest of them were terrible.
Quantum of Solace, left-wingers got into that.
There's an actual remark in there that's in favor of socialism.
This is James Bond, who helped bring down the Soviet Union, who brought it down single-handedly as far as I was concerned.
And now he's saying nice things about socialism.
I mean, just these left-wingers, they ruin everything they touch, and they ruin these movies.
And then Skyfall, I just thought, was small.
I know that was a huge, huge hit, but I just thought it was small.
I thought the plot of the villain's plot, and I don't want to give it away for the three or four people who haven't seen it, but the villain's plot was just tiny.
I want a Bond villain to try and destroy the world.
So anyway, let's take a look.
Do we have a clip of just the trailer of the new one of Spectre?
This is just the opening of the trail.
Forensics finally released this.
What is it?
Personal effects they recovered from Skyfall.
You've got a secret.
Something you can't tell anyone.
Because you don't trust anyone.
Okay, so this is the new picture.
Like I said, it's opened in the UK.
It's been a huge hit there, and the critics love it.
And Daniel Craig is out doing the Hollywood thing.
Celebrities Selling Out00:04:52
He's doing interviews and he's giving these interviews to promote it.
In most of these interviews, he's doing the usual thing you do.
Here he is talking, I think it's on the Today Show.
We have a clip of him on the Today Show.
And he's doing the usual thing, just how exciting it is to be James Bond.
Just listen to this brief.
I literally have to pinch myself.
I mean, coming to work, you know, like this morning when we come to the center of Mexico, I was driving an Aston Martin around Rome a couple of weeks ago.
I'd be numb not to get a kick out of that.
I'd be numb not to get a kick out of that.
I'd pinch myself, he says.
So now he gives an interview to Time Out, the UK entertainment magazine.
And I guess he was a little numb.
Probably had had a couple of Martini shaken, not stirred, right?
And he says, when asked if he would do another James Bond film, he says, I'd rather break this glass and slash my wrists, said Craig.
No, not at the moment, not at all.
That's fine.
I'm over it at the moment.
We're done.
All I want is to move on.
And when pressed if that meant he was done with Bond for Good, Craig replied, I haven't given it any thought.
I'm done for at least a year or two.
I just don't want to think about it.
I don't know what the next step is.
I've no idea.
Not because I'm trying to be gagey.
Who the blank knows.
At the moment, we've done it.
I'm not in discussion with anybody about anything.
If I did another Bond movie, it would only be for the money.
Now, that makes me want to rush out and see the next Bond to watch Craig collect his paycheck, you know.
Listen, all British, the thing I love about British actors is they treat themselves like garbage physically.
I mean, if you go back and look, take a look at what Peter O'Toole looked like in Lawrence of Arabia.
Peter O'Toole was so beautiful that I fell in love with him.
I mean, he just, he looked, I mean, he was a man as beautiful as a woman.
If you look at him, Albert Finney, same thing, these incredibly good-looking British guys.
And then look at them like 20 years later, 15 years later, they're just desiccated, old, fat.
They've obviously been drinking.
Their faces are sagging.
The American actors, it's like, you know, Harrison Ford, he's 75, he looks like he's 30.
But British actors, he just hit this.
So Daniel Craig was hitting this offs a little bit.
Now, obviously, this is going to have nothing.
Nobody cares whether Daniel Craig gets drunk and says he wants to slit his wrists, whether he does another Bond film.
But this is part of something else.
This is getting back to Nolte's idea of bubble dumb.
This is part of a bigger movement that movie stars are no longer class acts.
They used to be, if they weren't class acts, the studio system used to hide it from us.
I did a piece a while back when I was doing Claven on the Culture for PJ TV.
I did a piece, it was one of those periods when they were calling for a national conversation about race.
So I did a satire video in which I said, you know, if we want to talk about this one race that's not doing very well in America.
I think I put that in there.
Bring that up.
Just play a bit of this.
This is an old satire video I did about the race that's suffering in America.
For many years, there's been one group in the American melting pot that has consistently underperformed in terms of productivity, intelligence, and moral behavior.
I'm speaking, of course, about celebrities.
Despite every effort to lift them above their degraded state, celebrities continue to wallow in lawlessness, substance abuse, and an out-of-wedlock birth rate certain to lead to generational social catastrophe.
Indeed, stripped of their physical attractiveness and wealth and judged solely on their behavior, celebrities can clearly be seen to be among the most vulgar and barbaric classes of American society.
Some say the problem is genetic and point to studies showing that celebrities consistently score lower on IQ tests than other challenged groups such as buffoons and hedgehogs.
Some cite celebrities' historical disadvantages, including their virtual slavery in the Hollywood studio system, a shameful episode in American history whose harmful after effects lingered well into the third hour of Cleopatra.
Talk about a once beautiful celebrity who's now a desiccated rock.
Oh, that's me, I'm sorry.
You know, the thing about the studio system is actually true.
I mean, I can't go into it forever, but the studio system once had a a real grip on its stars and kept them out of the limelight as much as possible for the simple reason that since Hollywood began, since the beginning of Hollywood, social conservatives have been at war and have been trying to shut it down, have been at war with Hollywood, and basically saying that it's an immoral place producing immoral products and it's lowering the moral tone of America, all of which was true.
Quentin Tarantino's Year00:08:27
I mean, that's exactly what was happening.
But the movie guys, the studio people, were desperate to keep these reformers at bay for the simple reason that sex sells and decadence sells and violence sells and they didn't want to be shut down.
And the problem that they had was that these scandals kept happening.
The movie stars, there was a guy named a comic actor named Fatty Arbuckle in The Silence, and he was accused of rape.
Now, he was actually not guilty, I believe, but he was involved with young women and partying and all this stuff.
And it took three trials to finally acquit him.
And all that time, emblazoned across the newspapers was this rape trial, and the reformers were going nuts.
This is Hollywood.
And then there was a famous director.
What was his name, Bill?
Let's see, did I write it down?
There was a famous director who was shot and he was secretly gay.
And that started to come out into, this was around 1920, 1921.
This started to come out into the papers, and the reformers were just going crazy.
And so what they did was just a year or so before in 1919, baseball had had this huge scandal called the Black Sox scandal that involved betting on the World Series and somebody throwing the World Series.
And so they came up with this idea.
They thought, we'll have a commissioner of baseball.
That's why they had a commissioner of baseball because of that scandal.
And so the movie said, well, we'll do the same thing.
And they got this guy.
He was a big church-going guy.
I think he was postmaster general.
His name was Will Hayes.
And they brought him in to run what was then the Motion Picture Association of America, something like that.
And ultimately, by 1929, 1930, there was this thing called the Hayes Office, the Hayes Code, which was a code of standards where the movies wouldn't curse, wouldn't have sex, there wouldn't be, bad guys wouldn't win, things like this.
And that brought on what many people consider the golden age of movies.
And some people complain about this.
They say, how can you call it the golden age of movies when there was censorship?
Let me read you a list of one year, okay?
One year, 1939.
You won't have heard of some of these films if you're not a movie buff, but they're classics, okay?
This is one year, 1939.
Babes in Arms, classic Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland musical.
Beaugest, classic adventure film.
These are films that you could still watch today.
Dark Victory, Betty Davis, one of the great weepers, the great women's movies of all time.
Destry Rides Again, still a great film.
Jimmy Stewart.
It's all one year, okay?
The Four Feathers, another great adventure film.
Gone with the Wind, you may have heard of, right?
One of the greatest films of all time.
The Wizard of Oz, one of the greatest films of all time.
1939, every one of them.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Gungadin, Hunchback of Notre Dame.
I talked about the other day when Marino Harrow died, a classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington with Jimmy Stewart.
This is all 1939.
Ninachka, classic comedy of the movies, Only Angels Have Wings, a great Howard Hawkes adventure.
The Roaring Twenties with Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney.
Stagecoach, which made a star out of John Wayne.
I mean, watch the opening 20 minutes of this, and you'll see why John Wayne was the biggest star that Hollywood ever produced.
On and on.
I mean, Wuthering Heights, another one, Young Mr. Linton.
These all one year.
That's one year.
If Hollywood made one picture that good this year, it would be a classic year.
It would be a banner year.
So the studio system, which did keep its control over its movie stars, and the Hayes office, which did censor the movies, there's just no question about it, produced a year like 1939.
You cannot argue with the fact that those were great films.
All right, so now the studio system falls apart for all kinds of legal reasons.
And basically, by the 60s, the inmates take over the asylum.
The movie stars take over.
They become these powerhouses.
Now they can say anything they want.
So what do they do?
Okay.
The other day, what was the film?
Steve Jobs comes out.
And Steve Jobs is about to open, and everyone, it's testing well.
Everyone's predicting it's going to be a smash.
And then Seth Rogan hears Ben Carson say that if the Jews and the German people really is what he said, if they had guns, Hitler would have had a harder time committing his atrocities.
An obvious truth.
This infuriated Seth Rogan, you know, high school dropout and dope head.
And it made him so angry because really, a lot of people said it was a racist comment because, as we know, left-wingers feel they own black people, so black people have to say whatever they want.
Left-wingers feel they dominate women, so women have to say whatever they want.
We on the right, we have a war against women by allowing them to say whatever they think.
And of course, we want to put black people back in chains by getting them to think for themselves and actually talk about real life.
So if that makes sense to you, vote for Hillary, because you're on the way.
So Seth Rogan sends out a tweet, F you, Ben Carson.
The picture bombs.
The picture bombs.
And my pal, John Nolte, goes nuts.
And he just, and as they're doing all these post-mortems, why did this movie bomb?
Why did it bomb?
And Nolte says, it bombed because this guy opened his big mouth, or at least consider that it might have bombed.
He didn't say that was the reason.
He said, consider that it might have bombed.
And he accused the Hollywood reporter in the LA Times of covering up this fact.
And the Hollywood reporter, there's a guy in the Hollywood reporter named Paul Bond, who's an honest, fair guy.
And so he gave Nolte a chance to show up and make his case.
And so Nolte just said, you know, they asked him, how much did Rogan's tweet cost at the box office?
He says, I don't know, but it's just anti-science to think it didn't hurt movies.
This is Nolte speaking.
He says, Hollywood is the only business I know of that doesn't worry about what the face of their product says.
If Mr. Whipple, the toilet paper guy, or Ronald McDonald, said Christians are Nazis and people who oppose gay marriage are evil, and F Ben Carson, the people in those industries would worry about selling less toilet paper and hamburgers.
But in Hollywood, Mr. Whipple, in this case Seth Rogan, can attack 50% of the customers and it's believed it doesn't affect the bottom line.
And so he said, he said, the guy asks him, did it occur to Seth Rogan that it might be insulting some of the fans?
And Nolte says, it's the Pauline Kale thing.
Nobody I know voted for Nixon.
People in Hollywood are smart, but they're bubble-dumb.
They're never challenged, and they don't know anyone who disagrees with them.
And so they saw Carson as this black apostate and figured everyone feels the same way.
Rogan thought everyone in Hollywood will love his tweet because it's so ballsy.
Of course, doing something everyone loves isn't ballsy at all, but that's another topic.
What he didn't think, because he's bubble-dumb, says Nolte, is that there's a whole world out there, and Ben Carson is more popular than Hillary Clinton, and he's been a folk hero in the black community for 20 years.
Rogan is a provincial.
He doesn't understand the rest of the world.
And there is no greater example of this than our friend Quentin Tarantino.
I am not a big Quentin Tarantino fan, but just play.
I know we're running out of time, but just play that clip of what Tarantino said about the police at a recent protest against police violence.
And when I see murder, I cannot stand by.
And I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers.
So now there's thousands of police organizations, at least a thousand police organizations, calling for a boycott on this Christmas release, The Hateful Eight.
Harvey Weinstein put all this money into it, and they're saying that Tarantino will apologize.
We'll see if it matters whether he apologizes.
Because one of the things I think is Hollywood is bubble-dumb, not just in their politics.
They don't know what the rest of us believe, but they're bubble-dumb in their manners.
They don't know how the rest of us treat each other.
All of us have relatives who have other political beliefs.
All of us have friends.
Many of us have friends who have disparate political beliefs.
We don't insult them.
We don't yell at them.
We don't sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, at least we try not to, and start screaming at them and saying, you're murderers, you're racist, you're this and that.
These guys are bubble-dumb in the sense that they're so protected, they're so wealthy, they're so sequestered from the rest of us that they've forgotten how to treat human beings that they disagree with.
I mean, we all treat human beings politely whom we disagree with.
Why can't they do it too?
All right, I gotta stop.
Let me just go quickly over stuff I like.
Usually I go for kind of classic stuff, but I thought I ought to do something really contemporary.
Gift of Corruption00:00:52
Over the weekend, I saw on pay-per-view this tiny movie, tiny thriller that came out called The Gift.
And it was written and directed by Joel Edgerton, who played the cop in that gangster film, Black Mass.
He played the corrupt FBI agent in Black Mass, but he wrote and directed and has a part in this.
He's not the star.
Jason Bateman is the star and Rebecca Hall, the British actress.
And Bateman is absolutely terrific.
This is one of those, it's a genre, a picture like the hand that rocks the cradle, Pacific Heights, Unwawful Entry, Lakeview Terrace.
These are pictures where somebody edges into your life and starts to take over your life, and then it turns out that he's really a bad guy.
The gift is like that, but it's really smart, really different, very, very intelligent, and very surprising.