“i can think of nothing heavier than an airplane” [Red Tails]
January 12th, 2012 by david brothers | Tags: george lucas, moviesI grew up on or around Air Force bases. Shepherd, Langley, and most of all, Robins AFB. A grip of my family members served, and I gave some real thought to enlisting while I was in high school. A side effect of being surrounded by the USAF is that I love airplanes. I built a bunch of models as a kid. The SR-71 Blackbird was my favorite, probably because that was where the X-Men and the Air Force venn diagrams intersected, but I built bombers, fighters, whatever I could find. I actually built an F-14 model late last year when I got a model kit as a gift from a client. It was weird, exercising those muscles again, but sorta comforting, too. I remember killing like five hours on a lazy Saturday with the TV off, music on, and laser-focused on my task.
I like the stories surrounding planes, too. I remember really liking the story of the Tuskegee Airmen. It’s a great story, kinda the flipside of the Tuskegee Experiments, but it’s inspirational. It’s “The sky’s the limit” translated to real life. They were just one of several inspirational black figures people pointed out to me, from high level cats like Martin and Malcolm to less famous people like Ben Carson. I didn’t learn any of this in school, I don’t think. It came from family and church more than anything. It was a tonic. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and was too honorable to lie about it, but Ben Carson separated conjoined twins.
Red Tails, produced by George Lucas, drops 01/20. It’s about the Tuskegee Airmen, and despite my love of the subject matter, I was a little skeptical. I don’t hate George Lucas (I definitely like him better than modern-era Spielberg, for whatever that’s worth), so him producing wasn’t really a downside. Cuba Gooding Jr and Terrence Howard, two of my least favorite actors. Gooding has a history of starring in movies that I loathe (save for American Gangster, where he played Nicky Barnes to the hilt) and Howard is… that dude grates man, I couldn’t even tell you. There’s just something about that guy.
They were enough for me to feel some kinda way about Red Tails. My thinking was that if they put these dudes into the flick, then the rest of it was somehow compromised or tainted. I don’t know that I had any defensible train of thought about it, to be perfectly frank, just a gut feeling. What turned me around was George Lucas on the Daily Show.
While some of what he says is bunk (by what metric is Red Tails the first black anything? Wouldn’t Three the Hard Way count for something? At the very least, Bad Boys did gangbusters), he’s got a lot of interesting things going on. He talks about how studios wouldn’t fund it, and how he’s been trying to get it made for the past twenty-some years.
What got me were two things. First: he financed the movie himself. He believed in it enough to chip in more money than I will ever make in my entire life to get it done. Second: he said that “[t]his is not a movie about victims. This is a movie about heroes.” Which is basically exactly the approach I want to see. I don’t need more stories about how terrible racism is. I know how bad it was. The story of blacks and racism and being held back is, no joke, the one story I have heard the most over the course of my entire life. It is old.
The fact that Lucas and them approached this movie like an action film first, and Rosewood sixteenth or lower, goes real far with me. So I’m probably going to get over my big crybaby complaints about a couple of actors and check it out on opening weekend. The approach feels true, and Lucas says he has sequels planned, and I’d kinda like to see them. I doubt if it’ll take off the way I’d like it to, but I wouldn’t mind owning a gang of movies of black dudes in amazing mid-air dogfights. It’s one of those things I’ve imagined since I was a kid. It’ll be nice to see them realized.
I liked Spike Lee’s Miracle At St. Anna
I just hope it’s good. The trailer is pretty straight, and the cast actually has a gang of people whose work I enjoy (Bryan Cranston, Method Man, Andre Royo, couple others). Fingers crossed, right?
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It’s never a good sign when a film produced by George Lucas is dropped off in January. If it was good enough, they would have released it during december. I still hope I’m wrong and Red Tails turns out to be a good film.
RED TAILS looks like it might be terrific.
Lucas knows what he is doing with dog-fight sequences. Those were some of the best bits in the original STAR WARS. It would shock me if he had lost his mojo in that department. The story is interesting and is certainly dramatic enough. Cuba Gooding, Jr. is (if nothing else) extremely likable. That warm, open quality in an actor is something that Lucas has historically known how to maximize.
Terrance Howard is … very different, so that dynamic might be interesting.
Big Hollywood is already shitting themselves over this Lucas interview, so I think I may see this in the hopes it will give John Nolte a stroke.
Terence Howard has, or used to have, a residence not far from where I live. Ran into him at a gas station one night years ago. Polite enough, but… he has this look in his eye, you know?
@Brothers: Curious if you ever saw the ’95 Tuskegee Airmen movie HBO did. Which also has Cuba Gooding Jr in it…
@Randy: Seems likely it’s being released close to the end of January because of Black History Month.
“Second: he said that “[t]his is not a movie about victims. This is a movie about heroes.” Which is basically exactly the approach I want to see. I don’t need more stories about how terrible racism is. I know how bad it was. The story of blacks and racism and being held back is, no joke, the one story I have heard the most over the course of my entire life. It is old.
The fact that Lucas and them approached this movie like an action film first, and Rosewood sixteenth or lower, goes real far with me.”
—————————————————————————–
This really made me go full-stop and think for a bit. Why? Because on the one hand, I get in a snit that blacks hardly ever get to be the hero in a movie, let alone being the hero while being themselves and not some caricatured version of us. So I get (and agree with) the “Lucas approached it like a good action flick instead of Rosewood” comment.
On the other, how do you balance things that actually happened in the context of story without it overpowering it? I’m asking because I’m working on a story that has a main character that’s been old enough (at least half a thousand years) to have seen a lot of stuff and I’ve really struggled with how much is too much. Because if I ignore racism then it’s like I’m being dishonest or worst, whitewashing. But then on the flipside, I don’t want the story to be that heavy because for the most part, it is a light action fantasy and the times of the world really isn’t the focus of the character/story, more the amazing things he’s seen and done and will do. I almost took out his earlier years altogether and shifted that entire part of the story into the future and have it start after that because I was worried that I’d offend/piss off someone because I didn’t get the 225th real life fact right.
And thanks for the vid. I searched all of Youtube and elsewhere trying to find that Lucas Daily Show interview.
Lurker: I thought that was genius casting linking the two movies with Cuba.. but knowing Hollywood, it was more dumb luck than anything else.
By the way, once again online commenters in various have let me down with their responses to this. MSN.com comments for example had a bunch of ‘fans’ who ripped this for being yet another black WW2 film designed to make the white audience feel ashamed. Ok besides Tuskegee Airmen from HBO and “St. Anna”, when were the other mostly black WWII films? Yeahhhhh……
And I say this as a guy who hates WWII and is tired of the tropes that every movie uses in regards to it but some people need to have a little subjectivity to go with their racism…. :effort:
I applaud Lucas for doing this because I know plenty of big timers that would have even given the project a second glance much less put any of their own capital behind it…
my bad..that last sentence should have read “would have never given”… whipped through the comment too fast…. :rolleyes:
Joe Kubert did a pretty boss poster for NYCC that captures the pulp avtion feel nicely http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/red-tails-kubert.jpg
My friend John and I first got to know each other because of our mutual love of comics, but we would also talk about the Tuskeegee Airmen from time to time. He had a small collection of Airmen memorabilia on the shelf he kept his action figures on, and he held them up as an example of the sort of men he hoped his sons would grow into.
It kills me that he’s not around anymore to see this movie hit the theatres, so when I go on Friday I’m buying two tickets. I miss you, man.
@Cameron A: That’s seriously great.