Quentin Tarantino Loves Jerry Seinfeld’s ‘Bee Movie’
After spending the entirety of last week’s show condescending to a lineup of confused children, Bill Maher’s most recent episode of Club Random featured an actual adult as a guest: Quentin Tarantino. This meant that Maher could once again spend the entire interview smoking pot and distractingly fiddling with liquor bottles as if his show were an elementary school production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Maher and Tarantino, the first return guest to Maher’s YouTube show/cry for help, ping-ponged through a headache-inducing assortment of topics, including the success of Taylor Swift, whether or not HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey was gay and why Kamala Harris will end up losing the presidential election (hint: it’s because she won’t appear on Maher’s HBO show).
But perhaps the most eyebrow-raising moment in the whole episode came when the subject of Jerry Seinfeld’s 2007 animated film Bee Movie came up. Maher suggested that Tarantino wouldn’t really stick to his highly-publicized plan to make just one more movie then retire from filmmaking forever. Why? Because he’s going to want to make a movie for his young son to see, not unlike another famous creative.
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“I saw Jerry Seinfeld do the same thing,” Maher argued. “Jerry Seinfeld made a movie called Bee Movie—”
“It’s a good movie,” Tarantino interrupted.
“Very good movie,” Maher corrected.
Okay, on the one hand, it’s not that strange that Tarantino would praise an unquestionably ridiculous movie (he once proclaimed that The Lone Ranger was the best film of 2013), but what is surprising is that anyone would praise Bee Movie, which we probably don’t have to remind you, is a film in which a human woman comes very close to hooking up with a talking bumble bee.
Maher’s suggestion that Bee Movie is “very good” may be the most baffling part of all of this considering that earlier in the same interview, Tarantino brought up the Toy Story franchise, and Maher was entirely dismissive of it. The filmmaker heaped praise on the first Toy Story three films, calling Toy Story 3 “one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.” He went on to say that he never even saw Toy Story 4 because the third movie served as such a perfect ending.
Maher, on the other hand, claimed that he’s “agnostic” on the Pixar films, and bragged that he “never saw them.” At one point he asked Tarantino, “Is it a cartoon?” — possibly because Maher thinks that toys can actually come to life.
So Maher refuses to watch the widely-adored, critically-beloved Toy Story series, but he’ll go to bat for Bee Movie? We haven’t even mentioned the fact that the movie ends with Seinfeld’s bee character cross-examining Ray Liotta and accusing Sting of appropriating bee culture.
The episode, which is nearly two hours in length, is somehow only part one of a two-parter, kind of like Kill Bill, only longer. I’m not joking; Kill Bill Vol. 1 was three minutes shorter than part one of this interview.
And neither of the Kill Bill movies contain a scene in which the star of Pizza Man pitches a movie called The Three Stooges Go to the Fyre Festival.
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