I 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 enough to buy the Blu-ray, despite it being a little overlong. How often do you see black people in actual roles in World War II pictures? Too rarely. I’m willing to support efforts like this, because they’re what I want to see more of. Black director, black screenwriter, majority black cast… I like this.

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?