Real Time with Bill Maher (TV Series)

Episode #14.35 (2016)

Andrew Sullivan: Self - Panelist

Quotes 

• Bill Maher - Host : Folks, blowing up the world is something that could actually happen. If you don't think so, you haven't seen enough movies. Movies always foresee the future. Flip phones in "Star Trek". Touch screens in "Minority Report". Ipads in "2001: A Space Odyssey". Black presidents before Obama. Spectacular terrorist attacks on American soil before 9/11. "Network", in 1976, predicted Fox News and reality TV. And "Blade Runner" showed a future Los Angeles where life is bleak, overcrowded, and dehumanizing, and that's just on the 405.

  [laughter and applause] 

  Bill Maher - Host : And of course, "Forrest Gump" came out in 1994, years before we elected George W. Bush.

  [laughter] 

  Bill Maher - Host : And what scenario... what scenario has Hollywood... what has Hollywood been envisioning lately?

  [to a laughing Andrew] 

  Bill Maher - Host : I'm making a serious point here.

  Andrew Sullivan - Panelist : I'm sorry.

  Bill Maher - Host : Earth after an apocalypse. "Hunger Games", "Divergent", "Mad Max", "V for Vendetta", "Maze Runner", "Matrix", "Interstellar", "The Postman", "The Book of Eli", "The Road", even little "WALL-E". And how did Earth reach this point in these movies? Always because we did it to ourselves. In "The Day the Earth Stood Still", Keanu Reeves plays an alien sent to Earth to exterminate mankind because stupid, selfish humans are destroying a perfectly good planet. He gets talked out of it, but it's not like he didn't have a point.

  [laughter and applause] 

  Bill Maher - Host : In... in half of these movies, it starts with "After humanity destroyed itself in the great war, what was left of government decided human passions needed to be controlled." Controlled by Kate Winslet in "Divergent", Julianne Moore in "Hunger Games", Jodie Foster in "Elysium", Tilda Swinton in "Snowpiercer", Meryl Streep in "The Giver", who says, quote, "When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong." I know that makes her the bad guy, but did you watch the Republican primaries? I think I'm with Meryl on this one. If it's between letting these people...

  [showing a picture of average Americans] 

  Bill Maher - Host : ...decide things or a cold, technocratic boss lady in a pantsuit, I'll take the lady in the pantsuit.