Where everything is bad, it must be good to know the worst. The British philosopher F.H. Bradley wrote that, and while he was surely not referring to the relative glut of bad movies that American distributor dump into theaters during the six-to-eight week winter/awards season lull at the beginning of each year, such is the state of things that while it may indeed be good to know the worst, it s kind of difficult to tell. There s also a kind of inverse correlative possible: with so much bad, how can you tell what s good?
Advertisement
On the face of things, a studio reboot of the late writer Tom Clancy s Jack Ryan character, a sort of American James Bond for the neocon/family values set, seems like an opportunistic and banal idea. And for the first minutes of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which rewrites the Ryan origin story by placing the young character in the London School of Economics for the terror attack of 9/11, opportunism and banality go hand in hand with nary a care in t
I want to precede this post by saying I, unlike a lot of critics, have enjoyed woke films. In 2016, The Legend of Tarzan was released. Despite having a disappointing box office reception, the film accurately depicted the reality of colonial Africa at the time Edgar Rice Borroughs set his character. (With a budget of $180 million, it did $356.7 million at the box office.)
Within the film was the real life figure of George Washington Williams, played by Samuel L. Jackson, a former Civil War soldier who was active in drawing attention to Belgian colonial exploitation in Congo. When Belgium colonized the Congo, they claimed initially that they were combating the Arab slave trade and Williams put significant effort in to trying to publicize the reality - that Belgians, like other colonial powers, were simply using pre-existing forms of oppression to excessively exploit Africa.
Why Hollywood Stays Woke dagblog.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dagblog.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.