21 January

Skipped the ’watch with free Covid’ sessions at the cinema and finally saw this yesterday. Great fun movie, amazing flight scenes. A few things: 1) the mission at the centre of the movie is a copy of the destruction of the Death Star mission in Star Wars, flying fighters through tight channels to hit a tiny target at the other end. And hey, it worked there, so if you’re on a good thing… 2) it’s a typical Jerry Bruckheimer production. Lots of stylised Pepsi commercial-type shots, with the underlying Stars and Stripes and God Bless America framing (we mock the North Koreans and Chinese for State propaganda, the US just privatised it), and 3) who rides a motorcycle without a helmet in 2023? Why I used the trailer thumbnail. Part of that same Bruckheimer schtick, a good American ignores the guv’ment and regulation. The usual libertarian wank. A ‘maverick’. Art tells you most things about a culture. That same libertarian rubbish is what’s feeding the freedumb frenzy right now, worldwide.