gawd, i hope not. i ***still ***can’t get through pearl harbor - despite having been to the 'mo and pearl harbor in person.
i’ve tried three times to watch that movie - and failed to get through it. and i adore beckinsale.
Was there CGI in Dogfight? They made Lili Taylor look a little frumpy, but I thought that was just a bad haircut and clothes…
I assure you, there is no effort in making Lili Taylor look frumpy.
You know what I…
…eh, maybe not.
Didn’t see this thread until now, when I did a search after reading an extensive story about Lucas and the movie in the NY Times.
I have to say, everything Lucas says about it makes me cringe – he hits pretty much every wrong note there is to hit in describing it. There’s a description on the original script Lucas commissions, which was a broad sweep of the story, from pre-war to the vets returning home to face the same old Jim Crow bullshit.
And then there’s this:
Then there is his imagined conversation about it with a studio exec:
And when the director finished shooting the bulk of the film, Lucas kept shooting more scenes and hired a comic strip writer to… punch it up some, I guess. So I’d also guess that we’re going to see a Lucas film on the screen, not an Anthony Hemingway film – who by the way, is mostly known for his work on The Wire. And Lucas certainly has that right, but… eewwwww.
Maybe some of you who go see this will write about it so enthusiastically that I will feel compelled to go see it in a theater, but right now I’m thinking I’m gonna wait until it shows up on TV,
It’s opening in three days, and not a single review has appeared on Rotten Tomatoes.
This film is going to suck.
I’m sure it already sucks – how much it sucks just hasn’t been revealed yet. 
It’s a pity. That subject deserves a good movie, not some Lucas-“naive”-self-aggrandizing rubbish.
33 on RT, 46 on Metacritic
Don’t know if I’m that masochistic…
I have completely given up on Lucas since Indy 4. He really is out of touch and terribly clueless these days when it comes to entertainment.
It would almost have to be intentional to create a film like Red Tails and have it score only a 33%.
It’s The Tuskegee Airmen II, The New Class. I still intend to watch it.
[QUOTE=Mahaloth]
Thank the movie-gods he didn’t write the screenplay or direct it.
[/QUOTE]
I think he just attached his name to the project without any production responsibilities. And yes, thank the movie gods.
Lucas is a hack who’s reputation is built on a set of movies with a mediocre narrative that succeeded mostly due to its visual effects. Lucas is a bad writer (see: his prose translation of the A New Hope screen play) who tells very uninteresting stories using very simple language and concepts. He’s a slightly better director, or, at least used to be. The atrocity that was IJ4 demonstrated that Lucas’ artistic reputation was greatly inflated. I don’t trust him anymore and probably would not see Red Tails if he had written or directed it.
This is all IMHO, of course.
Well I have had a Facebook friend (acquaintance from high school) announce that it is now her favorite movie of all time.
Mince: The original THX-1188 (I haven’t seen the remake) was great. So was American Graffiti. Star Wars was also a great film. Sure, the dialogue was hokey; but at the time it was a groundbreaking film whose visual aspect more than made up for the 1930s serial-style dialogue. (And it was intended to be a modern ‘19830s Science Fiction Serial’.) The Empire Strikes Back had some rough spots writing-wise, but was the best of the series.
IMO Lucas lost it about halfway through Return Of The Jedi. I couldn’t stand the Fighting Teddy Bears. After a good beginning, the film turned into a Saturday morning cartoon. I respect a filmmaker who makes the films he wants to make, even if people hate the films. A lot of people don’t like Jim Jarmusch films. But Jarmusch does what he wants, and they are (IMO) good films. Lucas has a right to his ‘vision’.
But I also expect a director to stand by his films. If sensibilities change, he should not try to cover up what he thinks was a ‘mistake’. It wasn’t a mistake when the film was shot. It was what he wanted to do. Want to add more scenes? Want to do some things you couldn’t before? Go for it, and release a ‘Special Edition’. But don’t change fundamental things. Han Solo shot first. It’s who he was. Does that make him a murderer? Sure, technically. But it’s who he was. 30 years after the fact is too late to try to change a character.
So the question is this: Did George Lucas become more juvenile as he got old? Are the prequels the films he really wanted to make? Or was he pandering to a demographic so that he could grab all the money he can? Or is he just out of touch, and doesn’t know that the most rabid Science Fiction fans tend to like films that are not Saturday morning cartoons?
He’s not looking at rabid science fiction fans, hes trying to attract 10 year old boys with thrilling adventure stories. The science fiction is just a device to allow the stories and characters to be more exotic and mysterious.
No doubt. Just saying that he used to make much better films before he started doing that.
To get back on track, Lucas is probably one of the worst people to make an aviation film. (Well, aviation-themed film.) There aren’t that many as it is, and the people who make them recently keep doing them wrong. Compare Tora! Tora! Tora! and Pearl Harbor. One was pretty accurate and used real planes, and the other could have been set any time, any place, and used CGI that created ludicrous images. As I said earlier, they really need to find people who know how airplanes move to make the effects.
I disliked Memphis Belle when it came out. Having watched the original documentary many times growing up, it irked me that the only thing the drama had in common with history was that there was a B-17 in England that was the first to complete 25 missions, and it was called Memphis Belle. They couldn’t even get the officers’ hats right. I was saddened that there is one less B-17 in the world because of that film. But the flying scenes were generally pretty good. (Generally.)
I saw The Tuskegee Airmen (1995) when it came out. It’s been too long since I’ve seen it to remember anything specific. (I can only recall the scene where the guy lands his shiny AT-6 on a road next to a work gang.) But I remember liking it. I hesitate to make this comparison since I don’t remember the film very well, but ISTM that The Tuskegee Airmen plays Tora! Tora! Tora! to Red Tails’s Pearl Harbor.
But as I said, I’ll see Red Tails simply because I can’t resist an airplane movie.
Lucas is too nostalgic in his film making these days. He is so determined to make either the old fashioned over-the-top serials of the fifties, or in this case an old-fashioned rah rah sell war bonds movie.
I saw it and I loved it.
I thought the aerial scenes were too ‘dense’ compared to photos of actual formations I’ve seen from the era, and the airplanes seemed to maneuver much too tightly, but maybe that’s what it felt like if you were there.
It certainly followed standard movie formulas…you pretty much knew who was going to live and who was going to die, and since it was based on history you knew the ‘experiment’ would succeed.
Having said that, I still loved it.
And I’d vote for Col. Bullard for President.
Saw it last night and I liked it considerably better than I thought I would based on the trailers. It works reasonably well as a straight-up action film, and in this context I thought it was actually the correct decision to start straightaway with the Tuskegee airmen in Italy rather than attempt to detail the stateside origins of the program. The CGI was reasonably effective; in any event, if one is going to have whole squadrons of P-51s and Me-262s duking it out in the midst of massive formations of B-17s, CGI is pretty much the only choice.
As far as miltary accuracy goes, I’d say, probably not so much. The American fighters are apparently armed with magic .50 cal bullets that cause steam locomotives and entire German Destroyers to blow up; others have noted that the physics of some of the aircraft maneuvers are a bit screwy (most of the CGI effects are pretty good, though), and I find it hard to believe that the rank insubordination of some of the characters toward their superior officers (white or otherwise) would have been so readily tolerated. To get even nitpickier, I was under the impression that the Red Tails flew C-model Mustangs, not the -Ds shown in the film (or at least didn’t go straight to -Ds), and I’m likewise pretty sure that US bombers were raiding Berlin long before March '45, although the script seems to state otherwise.
What most lets it down is the teeth-gritting corniness of much of the dialogue and many of the characterizations. I really don’t get the point of the apparent declared intention of emulating a ‘40s-style propaganda film. The Germans are all throwback Nazis from a Sgt Rock comic book (the writers even have one of the German pilots saying “Foolish Americans”, give me an effin’ break) and the characterizations of many of the Americans aren’t much better. I’ll give some of the lead actors (particularly the pilots “Easy” and “Lightning”) some credit for managing to fashion more or less credible characters out of rather thin gruel.
Anyway, great eye candy for a WWII geek like me, but nowhere near a great film.
For some reason, I found it hilarious how the Germans kept calling them Africans.
My main criticism of the movie was that it was anticlimatic. I’m willing to chalk this up to history, but still. I was kind of hoping that for a more suspenseful battle.
Several folks from The Wire turned up in the movie. Someone mentioned Bubbles, but there was also the kid who got shot at the end of Season 1 and the kid who played Michael.
I was shocked by how mediocre it is. Not that it’s not bad, because it’s that too.
But the score? Terrible, with heavy synthesizers out of a Dolph Lundren flick from the 90s. The editing? I’ve never seen so many dissolves in my life–always a big clue that nobody knew quite how to end or transition from one scene to the next. Lazy lazy lazy. In fact, all the production values reeked of TV movie quality; it was like I was seeing a lost episode of the Young Indiana Jones series–which can be good for TV, but for the deep pockets of a Lucasfilm feature? Surprisingly shoddy.
And if I never see another phony baloney CGI fireball, it won’t be too soon. Yeah, some of the aerial stuff is expertly done, but knowing so much of it is just computers is now par for the course. But I expected the whole thing to at least look better than it did.
Not suprisingly, the writing is bad and the acting is perfunctory at best (w/Cuba and his pipe affectation the most embarrassing). But I expected that. I just figured the rest would be better.
And of course when you have the whole sqaudron protecting the bomber group in their maiden sortie to Berlin, do they follow the squadron through what must have been a hair-raising experience? NO!!! Of course not! They choose to follow the loose cannon in his sacrificial side effort, in a way that manages to have zero emotional impact. It’s like shooting a porno and instead of capturing the money shot, you choose to shoot the VCR flashing 12:00 instead. Stupid
Ugh