teens.ed writing in my i started publishing an american spectator when i was 18 years old. , and fromin manhattan the age of 11 or 12, i would wander around to movie theaters and see stuff after school and on weekends. inot fundamentally literate movies that i could write about them. that was over 37 years ago. now, if you are 18 or 19 years yearsou have another 37 that you have something to be responsible about it i don't know if it is as easy as it was then. fores had only been around 50-60 years then, and now they have been around for 90 years, so there are more movies to take account of. reviews,ou reach her you see politics sometime. how influential have movies been on what our political culture is? it's the quake question about whether they reflected or lead it. i think for the most part, movies reflect our political culture, and they are an effort to gain the largest possible audience by being the most capacious they can possibly be not to offend the people as much as possible. to make't tend to try breakthroughs politically. culturally, i think it is a little different. how aally, you can see lot of what i think has been the culturally liberal direction in which the country has gone, particularly in the last 20 years, you do see how popular culture and its portrayal of what we used to call alternative ways ofes and alternate living have now become mainstream, because they were presented as such in popular culture, and made more palatable. of course, there is this great thetion -- disregarding legal and criminal issues surrounding bill cosby, even i think barack obama would tell you that because the show, 20 years before barack obama's , made barack obama's election possible. it portrayed an upper middle-class black family as the ideal american family, that when a long way to allowing this image to become one that would too provocative for people upon seeing a black man running for president. back in february 2014, you ssful this -- "succe entertainers are often awful people. if you put fame, wealth, and narcissism in a blender, the resulting brew can be toxic. toe causes ordinary folk worship the entertainer and to view him as a superior being to be served. wealth provides the means and the opportunity for narcissism makes it also natural, appropriate, deserved." that?d you write mr. podhoretz: since i don't remember having written it, i of't recall which work popular culture might have inspired it, but i think if you think about some of these people , cause be included, woody allen is another good example, and to its -- and to an extent donald trump could be in this category, you see how success and fame can liberate people from conventional social norms, and make them feel as though they and they don't need to follow the same rules as everybody else, and indeed they often don't. ,hen the question is how far what it is inside of the that they can liberate and stretches the boundaries of what is proper? many people just aren't bad people, so they would not really use their fame and wealth and celebrity as tools to get what they want, whether what they want is moral or legal or permissible. some do, and it can be horrifying when it becomes public. >> how many movies do you see a year? mr. podhoretz: probably 100, 120. something like that. >> wind you decide to review a movie, and why? is aodhoretz: the deadline good driver. i have about 45 deadlines a year for the weekly standard. so, generally speaking i have to have a piece in on wednesday night. job and othertime responsibilities, three kids of so i can't just go to screenings at will the way a lot of other people who do this for living do. i tend to duck in and out of a movie that i think has promise, or suggests that there might be something about going to say about that. having done this so long and haven't written about so much -- and having written about so a challengeomes ready about the 11th or 12th superhero movie that is made the last two years. what am i going to say about that? it is easier to write about , what are now considered independent or art-house movies, because they have stories that are really about the way people live, and the way people live now. they are just sort of fantasy versions of our lives. there is a little more meat there. let's see what you remember from the movie selma. you reviewed that for the weekly standard back in january 2015. we will run a clip, and that i will read what you said, and you can embellish on that. >> this violence continues toward unarmed people of selma while they are assaulted with tear gas like an enemy in the war. no citizen of this country can call themselves blameless, for they all bear a responsibility for our fellow man. i am appealing to men and women of god and goodwill everywhere -- white black and otherwise, if you believe all are created equal, come to some. -- come to selma. join us. >> what your member from seeing selma? mr. podhoretz: i was disappointed in seeing it there and i thought it was a hagiography. martin luther king was a great man and he america and changed the world. was a very interesting and complicated and complex person, and aside from the fact that it showed that he had done things that have been harmful to his marriage, he was very much as saint walking through the movie. that makes for something that is really not that interesting. >> by the way, what is hagiography? hagiography would be a term for a biography that is a portrait of somebody entirely without warts. it is a celebration that finds a person out and turns them into a godlike figure. >> you wrote the marketing genius of movies like selma, the highly praised docudrama about the march in alabama that tribute the 19 65 voting rights act, is that they simultaneously confuse and intimidate critics and audiences by making them feel as though it would be an act of disrespect to speak anything but words of praise for the way they depict life and death, historical events of great moral moment." mr. podhoretz: that is one of the problems you face when you people and about -- or people make these movies, and then they feel constrained, because they know that kids are going to see it, and they wanted to become the definitive portrait of something and don't want it to feel as though they are doing anything to tarnish the reputation or worldview or views of a figure that they admire. i tend to think that dramatically, that is a great , because what makes movies are stories about people in a crisis, and the crisis , and if youes them don't show conflict and don't and don't show someone going out of their flaws or something like that, you are seeing something you cannot really connect to, and it doesn't quite have the same impact. >> you said by the way, selma is actually quite boring. mr. podhoretz: i think so. you can justify the view in the end by the public perception of it. itple were not engaged by enough for it to be the movie of the year. i feeling a lot of people thought it would be just before it came out. .t was talked about in that way advanced word was so positive, but the performance of king by oyelowoactor david was very stiff. king was a very charismatic and flavored guy with a sense of humor and spirit. he led and guided people in all kinds of different ways, and if you make them into a plaster saint, you're taking away some of those things that will help people connect to him. >> we need to update the john podhoretz story. you have been married how long? mr. podhoretz: three is is october -- i do think my kids have ever read one of my reviews. they wouldn't have -- i don't think they have seen selma. they were too young when it came out. i have written about some of the things they have seen like inside out and the pixar movies. it'll be interesting to see now that they are getting older -- getting older -- not only do i write reviews, but i write columns. it will be adjusting to see how they respond as they return to the point of a rack want to read what i write. >> who reads the commentary you edit? mr. podhoretz: the commentary has about 30,000 paid subscribers. on the web, we have about 500,000 unique visitors a month. so 10-15 times the size of the paid readership. it is like all things older, people over the age of 45 or 50 for the most part, mostly jewish because it is a magazine that focuses somewhat on jewish affairs. it is a conservative jewish publication, so the liberal jewish community they mostly liberal, it is a minority publication for the cohort it serves. serves publication that a minority of a minority of a minority. in that context, we publish a lot of good stuff, and a lot of provocative stuff, and have some real influence on the national debate. and mother are ok? my dad is 86: years old, my mother is 89 years old. they are both in relatively good health, with some back problems. they are all there. the editor of commentary from 1960's through 1995. there was a 14 year separation theeen him and me when magazine was edited by my friend. i was recruited to take over by the board. i grew up with the magazine, and it was the formative intellectual experience of my life to be the son of these two .ntellectuals at the age of 48, i took over the publication and have had to put my own stamp on it in a much different time. >> you see the movies that you watch and critique where? mr. podhoretz: movie theaters, always. in new york. upper west side of manhattan, usually. >> let's go to another movie. the boston globe story, a movie called spotlight. it.his is oneotices law covering for priest. there's another 90 up there. i am not going to rush the story. >> we don't have a choice. -- ifdon't rush to prints we do was to print, someone nice will take the story. >> mike. >> why are we hesitating? >> he told us to get the system. we need the full scope. that is the only thing that will put an end to this. about the "i feel often insanely false and widely romanticize detections on screen of the way newsrooms function, and the glamorized portraits of those who work in them, the way many people feel about nails upon a black board." what did you think about spotlight? mr. podhoretz: i thought it was easily the best movie of the year. it has the best portrayal of the inside of a newsroom that i have ever seen or ever hope to see. year 2000, so the what it portrayed as a world that is now gone. physical libraries, where clips are kept in file folders and envelopes that you can search through piece by piece, ,eporters sort of docking it doing most of their work on the phone or in the office, having to hustle to courtrooms. a lot of this has been superseded by the internet and searchable functions that way. a lot of people work from home or remotely. whatspotlight captured was that iswhen a newspaper serious about something commits resources and let something bubble for a long time, with the real possibility that what it is searching for, they will not find. in this case, they did in fact find this astonishing scandal involving the archdiocese of boston and how it covered up these molestations, hundreds and hundreds of molestation's and hid the molesters from justice. the signalf achievements of journalism in our time. the movie intoning in spirit is just as spectacularly good these of work, partially because it is unflashy. it is so it also looks like an old television show, without effects. go to another movie, a whole different feeling. compton, back in 2015. a little bit different than what we saw. let's watch. >> what you have is on the ground for? >> sit tight and let us do our job. can you stay right there please? these are artists. >> excuse me, artists? wrappers. they're working with me in the studio right now. i am the manager. >> you're wasting your time. they look like gang members. andou can't come down here arrest people just because of what they look like. compton,ht outta compton california -- compton, california. that ihoretz: i recall whenlready too old for rap it came in. it is a form that does not speak to me at all, and i never felt any connection to it. than that.quarer the movie itself, as a kind of story about how the band got together and -- and recorded its big hits, it was strikingly effective. manifest ironies in like it gets very sentimental even though these themuys were -- some of did very questionable things in their lives, and the fact that people have wound up playing cops on tv having recorded very anti-cop lyrics, about which i was very disapproving of the time. again, another story about how american success changes everything. ice-t --ve >> that is dr. dre. >> and that he is on lawn order, you can see how the culture kind .f takes you in in homogenized as, softens them to a point where you can barely remember where they came from. when this anti-cop wrapped started,it was -- rap there were major political issues. the constant wonder get out of their cars to do anything about -- they were scared about getting out of their cars, polar seas were not in place -- policies were not in place. there were hearings in congress about it. 20 years later, one of the major movieortrayed in the plays a cop in the movies. >> you have three young kids. you talk about language. i want to read this from your .witter account "lately i have taken to cursing quite a bit. life is short." mr. podhoretz: now we're moving on to twitter. what are you doing? mr. podhoretz: i don't know. the good part of that is that there are 63,000 followers there, all of whom i got one by one over the course of those eight years. what am i doing? a tweet is 140- characters, a one-liner basically. twitter is a form of haiku performance art for me. i do a lot of joking, and it is also a weird thing, it is like a virtual cocktail party 24 hours a day. let's say you are sitting at your computer, doing something, and it is just too much. you get anxious because you are writing and just want to turn your attention for five minutes to something else. you can kind of opened this door and go in and there is this big conversation going on that you can join for a while, and then you can step back out close the door and go back to work. it could be a form of press nation, or could be a form of creative process working itself out in another way. the cursing thing is i think a me the of what is to nightmarish quality of the inction that really began march of 2015, which i think is thriving a great many people to near insanity. we have 59, 58 more days of this. the time they see this, it'll be a lot fewer days. mr. podhoretz: it can't come soon enough, because the heightened emotions and feelings and the hostility with which one is greeted, that causes one to respond hostility. >> are you cursing on twitter because you are feeling hostility? well my cursing -- my kids aren't on twitter yet -- they are not in social media except someone has an instagram account, which is private. started because of confrontations that i had with a group of people have come to be known as people who heard speech, theton's alt-right. there on twitter with extreme views.list a lot of them are disgustingly anti-semitic. people would send anti-somatic tweets toward me, saying just the most horrific things like you should get in an oven, and it is too bad that hitler's didn't kill you or kill your grandparents, or your children should be in an oven. there are two ways -- three ways to deal with it. blockn ignore it, you can those people, and the third is to engage with them. of monthsfor a couple to engage with them. my form of engagement was to spew invective at the. >> did it make you feel better? mr. podhoretz: i don't know. it is an ongoing dispute about this question of what he doing -- what are you doing? really -- felt got to or felt in my gut, that it is a form of acceptance that if you do not respond, you are essentially either suggesting that they got you and you are cowardly without responding, or that it is ok to talk this way. particularly since this is public, that somebody tweets people whot me, follow me can see this. a lot of this was instinctual, but i felt like i couldn't not respond, and that the only proper way to respond was not to say "how could you say such a --rible thing?" but to say to go after their jugular. sometimes that requires profanity. with talked about tweeting and language. we can go back to august 24, two thousand 15, and you write this york, thew, in new big news is the broadway opening of a musical biography of alexander hamilton told in hip-hop. such a deliberately -- such a deliberately and i could do stick retelling of american history is automatic grounds for deep skepticism." " i haven't seen hamilton, and may not get a chance to see a four-year, given its $35 million advance, but it is not my inability to get ticket that has brought this sadness. what is being performed these days seems to provoke the kind of anticipatory thrill that once went hand-in-hand with being a serious customer, consumer, and it is used of culture." success.a huge what you think of it? mr. podhoretz: i think hamilton is a masterpiece. great culturale masterpiece of the 21st century. i say that not only because i myself find it immensely stirring and listenable, and i listen to it a thousand times, i many timesi heard before i sought. my kids know it by heart. .hey start listening to it they engaged with it in a way i've never seen them engage with anything. i took them to see it in june, and these are kids -- since they are new york city kids, they have seen a lot of theater, even though they are 12 and 10. i have never seen a response the way they responded to the last one. about in thelking passage that you read is that from the time of my early teens when i really started paying attention to culture, the release of certain things were events. a big book coming out was an event. , a big novel of the year much-anticipated biography, it was an event. people knew about it, waited to see the reviews. movie openings were an event. in new york city in the 70's, a woody allen opening was an event. francis ford coppola opening was a big event. these were things people waited for and read articles about before the alo, andhe yoimes a gotxcitbow it andald about it, and tr the tein tity thathto s shin i, and was s ou you wld wait r e waseal,ther pres importance. irel is mu tuinart becaus there' so muf it. stg. s tfery weeit sms, o anhb.new es, there are more books published than ever before. there are more movies released than ever before. most things do not achieve that level of it opened downtown in new york at a public theater and people started buzzing about how interesting and funny it was. what is most interesting about a, and i say this as someone who edited pieces before i saw it, it was logical. i run a conservative magazine. a law professor at syracuse university, she wrote me and told me, "i have just seen hamilton and it is astounding." she writes a lot of of the in whichand the period the constitution was written in, and there's a lot to be said about what this could mean for americans today. i published that. meanwhile, everybody on the other side of the political aisle was falling before the of the music,iter the book, the lyrics and was the star of it. by the time i saw it, in the winter, last winter, you know, it was as though, it was essentially the one thing that people would say, have you seen hamilton? really? i'm not going to see it until july. how was it? who is the best one in a? like that. mr. lamb: let me interrupt to show you a couple of clips of phd's who ares, met andns, who have talked about hamilton. we have had people here that have talked about it on both sides. you are not an academic. there is beginning to be a sense of unhappiness amongst some of the academics about hamilton. professor from the city university of new york, graduate center. first of all, he is talking about the problems with hamilton, the musical, and i want you to hear what he has to say, given your perspective. >> number one, it is celebratory of the founders. but, number two, it is celebratory of particular founders. listg a neo-confederate answer partition of every aspect of this. privileging of character and personality over political issues and content is tied to issues of leadership and the looking of things from the founder's perspectives. the fourth thing, which increasingly buttresses it all is this idea that these good founders were anti-slavery. mr. lamb: suggesting that they were not. mr. podhoretz: you know, there are 10,000 things i could have said about whatever that was, 45 seconds. mr. lamb: say whatever you want. mr. podhoretz: would you have first of all is not your federalists, it is federalists. the big debate, the remarkable scene, and the fact that it is a scene in a musical that is totally historically, in which he takes great pains to get the debate correct, a song in which hamilton and jefferson go after each other over hamilton's famous proposal to create, establish a state bank. you know, the debate that was going on is jefferson essentially says in rap, this is going to privilege new york over virginia. we are growers and all you do is move money around. we paid our tax to new york on the revolutionary war, and new york has not. you are just pushing us around and how dare you. "yes, youponse says, have paid your debts because you do not pay for labor because you have a slave economy and we do not in new york, and so do not horse get on your high with me about this." ok, now i take my children as an example. my 12-year-old now knows more from this one song that is an accurate representation of the battle between the federalist and the nonfederal us, hamilton the federalist and jefferson the anti-federalist voice. from anything else or the age of 15 or 18. this is a central debate. hamilton was in fact the head of the manumission for fighting for new york city. he was an anti-slavery activists. his friend, john cornyn, attempted to set up to fight in the revolutionary war, and radical historians want to claim that the late 18th century men who created the united states or morally compromised in all sorts of ways. of course, they were. everyone was morally compromised. these were among the greatest men that ever lived in the history of the world decorated the greatest political experiment that has ever been seen. they are giants beyond our reckoning. mr. lamb: more from the historians, a professor with this brief comment. i want to get your reaction. >> i do not think some of the folks celebrated musical realize how much it wall street view hamilton has. mr. lamb: he has written a book on john d rockefeller and warburg's. mr. podhoretz: she is a financial historian. his biography of hamilton which is the source material for the and is a celebration of hamilton, unquestionably a look at how he helped structure the financial, create the basis of the financial structure of the united states, which was a very complex thing and did not for conclude firming up another 120, 130 years. the idea that that is a wall street view, and again, such a parody of a left-wing academics academics -- hamilton is a very complicated person who was dealing with the afficulties of creating democratic-republican system. a system of the people, for the people, by the people in which direct democracy was viewed as problematic because it would be too chaotic and to structurally impossible. mr. lamb: one more on this. an lsu professor at historian. here is her view from the same conference, a different perspective on historians better academics and the more popular historians. >> it is important to understand the founders with all of their flaws, not just remembering what we want to remember or shooting at the way we want to highlight because they become a symbol, and they have been icons, symbols, and that is historically true. it is not that this is new in terms of making hamilton into the new symbol. he is a new flavor of the month. we had john adams before. now we have moved on and that is going to keep happening. we cannot stop that. we have to engage and we have to teach the lessons that are distinguished, what real historians do as opposed to popular culture. our knowledge matters and we have to defend it. mr. podhoretz: of course knowledge matters, and of course the portrait of alexander hamilton in a broadway musical should not be the last word on alexander hamilton. david mccullough's biography on john adams should not be the last word on john adams. having read her book, it is to defame the founding of the united states and act as though the founding of the united , then her a giant con view, academic or not is incorrect, in their view of celebratory is correct. i have no amount of shading in detail that is going to take away from the fact that americans have responded to the portrait of alexander hamilton and this musical because it is positive, because they are hungry for a portrayal of the united states that it does not treat the united states is a great evil, but rather as a great experiment and good. reason hamilton is the new flavor of the month, and her terminology, is precisely because he sets a more liberal-modern liberal anti-trump view. he is portrayed as the immigrant. came here, goes to college, teams up with lafayette and the two of them together, at some point say in the middle of the show, immigrants, we get the job done. the audience of reps and applause because we are at a moment in which there's a big debate in the united states about whether or not we are a nation of immigrants or whether we need to tighten our immigration system, and that most people that are going to go to a broadway theater or liberal and they are excited to see this. they are also excited to see of a, i am just like my country, young, scrappy, hungry and i'm not giving away my shot. that is hamilton's first portrayal of himself in the show. this notion that the united states is a great thing and an experiment that we are all still participating in, something that is desperately needed in this .ountry in another piece about about hamilton after i saw it, i said that i had gone to mount vernon with my kids, this was in february, freezing cold, walking through washington's house and i'm thinking about the 2016 election and the rise of donald trump, for whom i have very dark, negative feelings in the rise of hillary clinton for whom i have dark, negative feelings and how both the election had gotten at that point and a love the debates were particularly in the republican party. i found myself dissolving into tears at the thought that we are walking through washington's house and this is how we have treated the country 240 years later. 240 years after the declaration of independence, that this is what we have presented ourselves with and have been presented with. mr. lamb: back to the removing reviewer in the weekly stick -- back to the movie reviewer in the weekly standard. this is from 1995. anthony hopkins playing richard nixon. [video clip] >> i suppose you are unhappy because i have not implemented to our intelligence plan. >> that is correct. i am concerned the students are funded by foreign interests, whether they know whether or not. the fbi is useless in this area and of which are full attention on this matter. >> of course, we have tried to so far we have come up with nothing. >> well, find something. i want these leaks stopped. jack anderson, the state department, i want to know who is talking. >> i am sure you realize, mr. president, this is a very tricky area given the congressional oversight committee. well going back to the 1950's, this agency reports what it wants. mr. podhoretz: that is a terrible movie, one of the worst movies ever made. hopkins was a great actor by gives one of the worst performances. you watch that, it is almost like a parody. i thought when the music comes up behind them, i started giggling because it is so over-the-top ridiculous. oliver stone who made that movie is a movie coming out in september about edward snowden called "snowden," which i basically think, having gone to this litany of anti-american movies about how jfk was killed n ishe government and nixo the worst person ever, although he was pretty bad, bush and every american feels horrible, basically he has made this movie about snowden which is effectively a tool of russian intelligence. so, so, i have not seen the yet but based on what i am reading in the articles, reading about it in the new york times, how it was made, we have gone from 1995 two sort of ridiculous movie with richard nixon, a person home at you could make 10,000 really good movies about how terrible he was, but this one n is controlledo by the same texas rich guys by controlled lyndon johnson and jfk which is preposterous. he had its own set of rich guys in california were not the type of guys with jfk. now, he is basically making in'sputthat appear intelligence. mr. lamb: a movie called primary colors withdrawn travolta. primary colors was written by john kline and was anonymous until he was discovered. you have written about this. let's watch a clip of that. [video clip] >> what i'm going to do? i am going to do something really outrageous. i am going to tell the truth. [applause] >> i know what you are thinking. you must be thinking he must be really be desperate to do that. if you had to swallow enough garbage. [laughter] >> all right. here is the truth. back thecian can bring shipyard jobs or make your union strong again. no politician can make it the way it used to be because we are living in a new world, a world without economic borders. a guy can push a button in new york and move a billion dollars in the blink of an eye. in the world, muscle jobs go to muscle labor where it is cheap and that is not here. mr. lamb: what kind of a job to job people to do playing bill clinton? mr. podhoretz: not very good. he can hear every second how is trying to get the accent together. fact, thecing, and in portrayal of clinton during 1992, that was a totally fraudulent view. clinton had a far more stiff and robotic person then you see there. the clinton we know after his presidency, although this was rain, 1998, so it was made during his presidency. the kind of loose, funny guy that ended up being a standup, that was not the clinton of 1992 he was very focused. he was not the kind of person that let it all hang out. try to tell the truth, that was not him at all. the book is much better than the movie. the movie had a real problem , these it did not know writer of the script and mike nichols did not know what they thought of clinton. in the end, if you see the movie, you do not know whether they liked him or disliked him whether he is good or bad. you do not really have a few on whether or not hillary and him have a loving marriage or a bad marriage. you are left as an audience member, it is like seeing something, seeing his sketch of something that keeps getting blurry and then coming into focus and getting blurry again. you do not know if what you are seen you are supposed to say, it's not really clinton, so it is a different story, but everything was a total parallel to clinton, and so it was very jarring to watch because it was neither an attack nor a celebration nor praise or anything. he did not really come across as anything. mr. lamb: curious the movie field andth sally lois playing the part of lincoln back in 2012. [video clip] >> you wake up ignorant of what you're up to. >> onto one want to be leaving big, muddy footprints all over town. with one has ever lived the proper placement. [indiscernible] steven spielberg, did he do the job you expected? mr. podhoretz: it is a complicated movie because the movie is daniel day-lewis and he gives one of the greatest performances ever committed to film in the movie, and he does when hundred 50 unexpected things that make it so memorable. the key thing is the voice he found himself speaking and for lincoln. and matthew an 6'4" brady photographed him, and he has this kind of tenor with a slightly backwards accent. it is startling at first, because you would think lincoln --tones towns like this like this, and by doing that he becomes a much more intimate portrait, for capturing that, forgiving end of day lewis that room to do this astonishing performance, the movie is a success. it is a very interesting perspective of the passage of the 13th amendment which is an unexpected way to tell the story of abraham lincoln. you think the 13th amendment as key. tony kushner wrote the screenplay and it was an interesting way of going at lincoln, portraying him as a successful politician who knew how to create alliances and get legislation through congress. but it is also a little stiff and wooden. to haveelberg decided the last 15 minutes be the assassination in the aftermath of the funeral and all of that, it just becomes a kind of wooden pageant. i think that was unfortunate. sally field kinds of eads the scenery there. --eats the scenery there. mr. lamb: would you rather write a negative or positive review? mr. podhoretz: negative. a really negative review, some think he's up for you and you can just make fun of it. mr. lamb: where was the last ticket of review that you remember where you were really ticked off? mr. podhoretz: i reviewed a movie called "spring breakers" a source of enduring interplay on twitter between me and a funny bunch who was the critic who claims to like this movie, which i thought was literally the worst movie i had ever set through all the way. i went back the other night, because we were jousting about it and read the review and it is basically a joke every other sentence about how bad it is. that is fun. strike the right tone to when you are writing something favorable, which is nice because should reallyou see this. it is really interesting. it is a trickier thing. fl do not want to sound amish. right.t to get the tone there is a bank robbery story seven west texas, and i thought it was really good. i did not think it was great. i thought it was really good. i did not want to over praise it because i did not want to disappoint people that went to see it who would be disappointed because they thought they were seeing something widely exceptional. hitting that -- getting that tone right is hard. mr. lamb: do you know how popular your column is in terms of others? have they ever done a survey? mr. podhoretz: i do not know. i know, word-of-mouth, i have been doing this on and off for 21 years. 1995,rted in september of so 21 years. i was one of the three founders of the magazine. i was there for the first two years of its existence. much thatit is pretty , and as a writer, it is the most enduring feature of the magazine, my movie review in the back, aside from the parity which is the back page which is done by a lot of different people and the scrapbook in the front which is done by a lot of people, it is there and is an anchor of the magazine. mr. lamb: a lot of people can read it online. one last clip before we close it down. explain, after we see this, are. and joel are --jill [video clip] >> as for the religious aspect, does the depiction of christ jesus come to mind? >> the nature is not a simple as you have it. it is not simply that god is christ, christ is god. he was a man. rabbi, all of us have a little bit of god in us. >> crisis most properly refer to as the son of god. it is the son of god who takes the sins of the world upon himself so the rest of god's children, we imperfect beings, through faith, may enter the kingdom of heaven. >> so god is split? >> yes and no. >> there is unity in division and division in unity. >> i am not sure i follow. >> you do not follow for a simple reason. >> god does not have children. he is a bachelor and very angry. mr. lamb: the cone of brothers. explain them? mr. podhoretz: the cone of brothers are the most interesting american filmmakers to have been making movies in the period in which i have been writing moivivie reviews. a write and direct their movies together. 1983, they are the mostliterate, the stylistically interesting and the most challenging american filmmakers. the scene we just saw gives you eir slightlyhie absurdist tone, slightly removed from reality. you have a hollywood executive trying to sell a movie to religious leadership of los angeles so nobody will attack it for being blasphemous. roomguy is sitting in a doing a sales job while , and the movieem combinationbizarre of satire and tribute to hollywood and affectionate parody and kind of savage parody , and i think may be inaccessible to some people. they made movies like the remake of true grit with jeff bridges which is very emotionally powerful. fargo which at the end turns very moral and emotional. they won oscars for old country men inno country for old 1980 and how people deal with a kind of relentless evil. they are remarkable moviemakers. unfortunately one last question, out of 100 movies you see, how many of them would you give an a? mr. podhoretz: four or five, maybe. mr. lamb: how many an f? mr. podhoretz: 20, maybe. , editor: john podhoretz of commentary magazine,, less -- columnist for the new york post, thank you for being with us. mr. podhoretz: thank you, bry an. ♪ announcer: four free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at org." these programs are also available at c-span on podcast. announcer: our q&a program has featured other contributors from the weekly standard. in 2006, we sat down with the magazine founder william kristol and have also spoken with its executive editor fred barnes in senior editor andrew ferguson. you can watch those interviews online at c-span.org. retired general mcdivitt petraeus joins to former u.s. ambassadors to afghanistan for a look at the country's future and security. he let the nato military operations in afghanistan from 2012, 2011. later in the day, agriculture secretary speaking at the national press club about priorities for his department. he is the only member of president obama's original cabinet to still be serving in the administration. watch live 1:00 eastern on c-span. the notion of a private self is no longer science fiction. announcer: on the communicators, we are looking at self driving cars, and monday night we will talk with the head of the national highway traffic administration. david jefferson, a reporter joining the conversation. not even a year ago, six months, when of a going to arrive? >> they are on the roads. really we all need to focus on, how do we make sure they are as safe as possible because they offer us tremendous lifesaving potential. announcer: watch the communicators monday night 8:00 eastern on c-span2. the british parliament is in recess, so the prime minister's questions will not be shown tonight. instead, we will bring you the funeral service for former israeli leader shimon peres, followed by secretary of state john kerry talking about u.s. engagement in the world, and at 11, another chance to see our interview with magazine editor john podhoretz on q&a. announcer: