Class is in session. Sadly, legions of kids know this to be true, as they begin to head back to school for another year of filling their brains with knowledge.
Last summer’s Jason Bourne may be 2016’s biggest movie we‘ve all already forgotten about. The franchise‘s revival put Matt Damon back in the driver’s seat after trying a legacyquel with Jeremy Renner, and the crowd responded in kind with a princely $164 million box-office take in the U.S. alone. But even as the Jason Bourne formula continues to yield fiscal gains for all parties involved, Matt Damon appears to have grown unsure about the franchise’s continued viability. In a new interview with the Toronto Sun, he expressed his doubts about the future of the secret agent that made him a bona fide movie star.
We’ve likely not finished the fallout of Sunday’s big Oscar snafu, though few would place any blame at the feet of host Jimmy Kimmel, who wandered out to bring some humor to the La La Land error. In all the chaos, however, Kimmel’s final bit with Matt Damon ended up lost to time, as the host now explains how the show was meant to end.
The Great Wall has garnered controversy for its white savior narrative that finds Matt Damon, a white dude, saving an ancient Chinese dynasty from mythical monsters. But the most offensive thing about The Great Wall isn’t even the racial dynamic, or Damon’s painfully bad Irish/Scottish accent; it’s that Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed Chinese filmmaker behind Hero and House of Flying Daggers, has managed to make a movie this ugly.
From the time that the first images of Zhang Yimou’s upcoming historical epic The Great Wall came to light, the thorny matter of identity politics has hounded the film. In the period piece, confirmed white man Matt Damon portrays a heroic warrior that protects the Middle Kingdom’s greatest architectural and strategic achievement from an encroaching menace, and many frustrated online commentators have questioned the place of a non-Asian actor in a wholly Asian film. The term “whitewashing” cropped up all over, referring to the continued practice in the film industry of casting Caucasian actors in roles that could (or should) have otherwise gone to non-white performers. With a problematic pall still cast over the production and the February 17 release fast approaching, Damon spoke out on the issue in a new interview with the Associated Press, via The Hollywood Reporter, and attempted to assuage some of the public’s misgivings.
Jason Bourne, the latest installment in the popular Bourne Identity series of espionage films, approaches its home video release next week on December 6. That film, released this past summer, raked in a grand total of $415.2 million at the global box office.