Jackie Jay, wow.

Chris Tucker, Rush Hour.

But so the movie with the backdrop of the, you know, Hong Kong changeover,

and the competent Hong Kong cop constantly upstaging the hapless FBI and LAPD,

made me realize what a quintessentially 90s movie this is and how it would never be made today. On the face of it, you kind of feel like

this is a movie where China gets the last laugh because, you know, they're reclaiming their

artifacts. You know, all the white cops are really bad at their jobs and they're disrespectful to

the Chinese characters. And all of that's true. But I think my reading of the movie is that you could make a

film like this in the 1990s when American hegemony culturally and politically and militarily

was just so overwhelming that really the movie is just a reflection of kind of that

zeitgeist where there's only really one culture, even the international cosmopolitan culture of globalization

that, you know, we're going to ring in the new millennium with that. It includes, you know,

China and other countries as sort of junior partners. But it's, it's all under the auspices of this

kind of American-led order and this monoculture that's like emanating out from the United States.

And yeah, so within that, America can afford to be charitable.

It can afford to depict the Chinese as righteous in the context of this story.

That's right, because America is a new kind of superpower.

It's not a colonial superpower, unlike the old world superpower, the British,

who are having their last gasp at the beginning of the

movie when Hong Kong is changing over it.

Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

Yeah, he would come on talk shows, and he would really lean into the stereotypical side

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