Transcript: America This Week, Episode 68, "Leave This Movie Behind"

Walter and Matt review the humorously incoherent new conspiratorial comedy on Netflix, produced by the Obamas. Also, say "fistula" three times fast

On this week’s episode, Walter and Matt were Siskel and Ebert as they watched the new Netflix apocalyptic racial comedy, Leave The World Behind, produced by Barack Obama and friends. And, unlike Fox News, they gave it a fair shake (whether or not it deserved one artistically).

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you?

Walter Kirn: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not well. And I’ve got a little story about that. I was on the Greg Gutfeld Show in New York City Monday night and performed wonderfully, I thought, and jetted back here to Las Vegas. And last night I got an email at an email address that’s on my Twitter account so people can contact me. And it was from a dentist in Canada who said, “I watched you on the Greg Gutfeld Show, and I looked at your lower left jaw, and I think you have a fistula.” And I said, “What the hell?” He said, “Yeah, I think you have an infection in your mouth that’s draining to your lower left jaw and creating this bump that we call in dentistry a fistula.” So not having any way to diagnose myself now, and on a very busy schedule, my world is completely rocked by this dentist’s TV diagnosed.

Matt Taibbi: Oh my God.

Walter Kirn: So until I can get to a dentist, Matt, I’m living in a kind of free floating anxiety. I can’t think of a worse word than fistula. And I imagine that the condition itself-

Matt Taibbi: It is a bad thing.

Walter Kirn: The idea that I’ve just been living with it, going on television, doing this podcast, kissing my wife without noticing something that apparently can be diagnosed from hundreds and miles away-

Matt Taibbi: From television.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, from television. And I’m going on television again on Friday night on the Bill Maher Show, or tonight when people see this Friday night, and I have no way to disguise this. So I guess I’ll say to the makeup lady, “Can you minimize the fistula on my left jaw?”

Matt Taibbi: Oh, man. The joke has to go from there, though. You have to get a call from a different kind of specialist after that, right? Like, “Walter, hi, I’m a rheumatologist. I live in South America-

Walter Kirn: Exactly.

Matt Taibbi: I think you’re suffering from a rare autoimmune condition.”

Walter Kirn: I’ve decided though, that this is the ultimate practical joke to play on people who are on television and are stupid enough to let their email be public. Just call in and say, “I’m not sure, but that twitch in your left eye is consistent with a rapidly spreading brain tumor.”

Matt Taibbi: I think you got to make a command decision pretty soon not to accept those phone calls. So we decided to do something a little different this week. There was a thing in the news about a movie that is, what’s the word? I guess you wouldn’t really call it produced by the Obamas.

Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. You would.

Matt Taibbi: Do they have producer credits in this movie?

Walter Kirn: I didn’t see the credits, but they have a production deal at Netflix and it was reported that this is one of their slate of movies. So I don’t think you can call them anything else but producers, they didn’t write it, they didn’t act in it.

Matt Taibbi: I think they gave notes to the director. So just to set the stage, here’s The Daily Beast article from Wednesday. The Daily Beast, by the way, it’s becoming an interesting publication. It’s sort of like a Fox News in reverse, but it’s like a paranoid interpretation of Fox, which is pretty hard to do because Fox is... Anyway. But a lot of what they do is they write about Fox News. So here’s their take on this movie, “Fox News loses its mind over Obama’s ‘anti-white Netflix film.’” Sub-headline, “Sowing racial divide.” “Every single host who ranted about the supposed anti-white bigotry of Leave the World Behind admitted to having not actually watched the movie,” says Justin Baragona.