Red Tails @ Fox Little Theatre 2
The Movie: 1 of Five Kernels
This Tuskegee airmen retread wastes the talents of a great
cast of black actors in service to a script that would’ve felt corny during
WWII.
The Pop: N/A
The Film
Diminshed
returns, it’s the best way to describe George Lucas’s film career. His first
feature film THX-1138 adapted from his very ambiguous short, showed a stylish
vision of a dystopic future in a progressive cinematic language. After it bomed
at the box office Lucas mined his childhood for warm feelings which gave him
the clout to make Star Wars. Now I like Star Wars, but while its ambitious in
its technical scope, its storytelling is rote, solid, but rote. After that
Lucas wisely stepped away from the directors chair and the writers quill and he
served as an enabler. He facilitated grand visions, that were fleshed out by
superior story tellers. Unfortunatley Lucas hasn’t been content to remain a
producer and we end up with films whos lofty ambitions are dashed by a lack of prowess.
The
tale of the Tuskegee Airmen, the only black pilots in WW II, is a sad epic
deserving big screen treatment. Originally it was envisioned by Lucas as a
potential trilogy, but he ended up focusing on this single film to encapsulate
the vaunted group of pilots who defended a nation who treated them like second
class citizens. HBO several years ago made a great film which barely covered
the actually aerial combat aspects, but focused on the social issues back in
America. Lucas argued that studios balked at financing a film of this scope with
an all black cast, I admit that global markets definitely do not react as well
to black casts, but the career of Tyler Perry testifies to the fact that there
is definitely a market for those kind of films. The real mis-step though is at
the script level. The corny script pervades the rest of the film and sucks the
life out of it.
The
story revolves mainly around two pilots and two officers all of them struggling
with being black in a white man’s army. The officers are trying to secure the
pilots better assignments, higher value targets. The pilots are busy chasing
after any glory they can find in front of their gun scopes, while struggling
with alcoholism, and love on the ground. There are also some other pilots and a
mechanic who have a fair amount of banter, but could’ve easily been named comedic
sidekick 1 & 2 or cannon fodder. There is also the one pilot (Michael from “The
Wire”) who ends up basically in Billy Wilders Stalag 17. These pilots though prove themselves in the air enough
to earn a mission protecting bombers. Their mission is to stay with the bombers
and make sure they’re safe, because the Nazi’s (George Lucas’s mortal enemies)
have been sending in diversionary planes to draw the fighters off and attack
the slow moving bombers. The airmen do great at their new mission and earn the
respect of their white counterparts. Now though the Germans have JET POWER, and
the airmen have to do the best they can do in their older, slower planes to win
the war.
At
its core if you carve out a ton of the trite bullshit forced into the script,
it’s a solid story about black pilots succeeding where their white counterparts
failed. About overcoming not just racism but feelings of inferiority, and how
it would shape the future of the civil rights movement. It hits a great laundry
list of issues, but it never manages to make you care about any of it.
The
films cast is great, there are several young actors from “The Wire” as pilots,
Bubbles is the mechanic, the two leads deliver solid performances as well.
Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr as the officers both seem to be half asleep
through their performances, maybe aware of how shitty the a script they’re
working on. The actors do their best, and their rapport works well enough to
keep you vaguely interested, but as the film gets more and more convoluted
nothing can save it from irrelevance.
The
one place the film does soar is its aerial combat. It should come as no
surprise that the magicians at ILM did a great job at bring to life WWII dog-fights.
The company was ostensibly created to recreate WWII dog fights as space
battles, so they’ve ironically returned to recreating the original material
with much more high tech toys. That being said I’m a big fan of aerial combat,
I will happily watch documentaries with crude recreations of dog fights, but I
cared so little about the consequences or the fate of the characters that the
footage was less than thrilling. Also, the editing of the sequences left
something to be desired. Oddly enough if you look at the recent Aviator and Flyboys you’ll see far superior aerial sequences.
Flyboys, is important in my view to
bring up. It’s a recent film about aviators in a world war that while also
stymied by a mediocre script ended up being MUCH better then Red Tails. Both were films that studios
didn’t want to finance and both could’ve been better. It’s odd though to hear
Lucas play the race card when a similar film, with similar themes and a similar
idea can’t get financed either. However when Flyboys failed to fly, no one blamed the audiences for being
racist, nor did anyone decry the quality of the film, it wasn’t praised or
panned really. The built it audience for these films though is razor thin, and
to expand that, you have to bring something special to the table, which Red Tails definitely failed at.
For
all of the films technical prowess is both a help and a hindrance. Sure the
script was corny, but great performances might’ve warmed you up to it. However
it’s a lot to ask actor to work around a bad script and bad direction. The film
reeks of green screen and is filled with bad composites. You can tell the
actors have no context for their situation, they don’t feel immersed in the
action, and so the audience doesn’t either. That’s one of the lessons Lucas
never cared to learn, actors are the real special effects in a film.
The Pop:
I got to see this at a screening on the Fox Lot, its kind of
fun to go out there and walk past the building holding the Simpons writers, but
also a bit of a hassle.
0 comments:
Post a Comment