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This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Jerry Bruckheimer is a quiet man who produces the loudest movies in the world. Early, arty Jerry was the fixer who put together 1980’s slight neo-noir American Gigolo. Thrusting mid-period Jerry, happily partnered with the 1980s zeitgeist and fellow producer Don Simpson, made the classics Flashdance, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop. Don died a truly maximal Hollywood death in 1996 — they found 21 different substances inside him — but Jerry, always the sober one, kept going bigger, faster, louder: The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Laramie, Wyoming ‘It’s pretty, but is it art?’ Rudyard Kipling asked in 1890. In those days the modernist movement across the Beaux Arts was gaining a grip on the western world that it maintains in the 21st century and is likely to hold into the 22nd, if there is one. One hundred and thirty years later, Kipling’s question calls for a plain response: ‘If it’s ugly, it has to be art.’ Aquinas defined art as ‘right reason in action’; reason in making. Right reason depends upon a man’s knowing what he ought to believe, desire and do. The modern artist is ignorant of all of these things.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.New York City The singer and saxophonist Ray Gelato opens his set at Birdland with a cover of ‘That’s Amore’. But this isn’t the sleepy send-up of Neapolitan street waltzes that Dean Martin recorded in 1953. Gelato raises the tempo and swings it four to the bar. As he sprints his way through the verses, Philadelphia’s City Rhythm Orchestra drives the pace, piano, bass and drums holding down the shuffle while the four-piece horn section plays call-and-response to each other and his vocals. It’s the start of a fun, high- energy set, the two hours of which feel as if they pass in half the time. You don’t tap your feet to this music: you stomp.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What have they done to Jack Ryan? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way: he’s been captured by a crack team of Ivy League majors in Race, Gender and Weaponized Resentment Studies — probably the same guys who wrote the Washington Post headline calling Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi an ‘austere religious scholar’ — and they’ve reengineered him as a beta-cuck pantywaist woke dork for the Age of Snowflakes. To be fair, Jack did slightly show these tendencies in the first season of his Amazon adventures.