Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part Two

Blooger's Note:  Don't forget to check out Part One if you haven't already.

Last time we took at quick look at Lincoln, The Shootist, Army of Crime, Four Christmases, and The Ox-Bow Incident.  Let's dive into part two.  Once again, these are in no particular order.

Tree of Life (2011 - Terrence Malick) - About a month ago I wrote up a full blown review of Tree of Life on my phone, only to have it inexplicably erased for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me.  I have no idea what life lessons Malick was trying to convey in Tree of Life, but he is indirectly responsible for teaching me one valuable lesson:  don't compose posts on your phone unless you are prepared to save every two minutes.  As the movie actually goes, if you've seen a Terrence Malick movie before you know what you're going to get, more or less.  If you haven't here's what you're going to get:  a non-linear, amorphous "plot", lots of shots of the sun and leaves and hands running through tall grass, and possibly dinosaurs.  The movie is "about" the life and times of a 1950's family in Waco, Texas.  Growing up and domineering fathers (Brad Pitt), and childhood and loss and Sean Penn wandering around looking like he's got IBS and...dinosaurs.  It's not for everybody, but it's worth seeing if for nothing else then its incredible visual beauty.  Just don't expect to have any idea of what's going on for at least the first hour.  Then the dinosaurs show up.

The Old Man and the Sea (1958 - John Sturges) - A straight forward visual retelling of Ernest Hemmingway's famous novella.  Spencer Tracy stars as the Old Man.  Not really much else to say about it.  Considering the vast majority of the movie is the Old Man sitting alone in a boat thinking to himself, Tracy does a good enough job of keeping you interested, but the movie doesn't really add anything to the story and the book is, of course, much better.

Gone with the Wind (1939 - Victor Fleming) - I had never seen Gone with the Wind before, but as an amateur film buff had always wanted to.  However, it's quite a commitment at 238 minutes.  I could watch a few other movies I'd also like to see in that same time frame.  But, when you're laid up on the couch with the flu you've got nothing but time on your hands.  Such was the case this past Thanksgiving weekend.  Like a lot of classic movies, it's one I'm glad I saw and can certainly appreciate it's achievements, but it's not a movie I see myself watching again for a very long time.  It's romantic celebration of the Old South seems juuuuust a touch out of step with today's sensibilities.  Slavery is actually mentioned very little, which might seem odd for a movie set in and around the Civil War.  And though it isn't really meant to be about slavery, it is about the antebellum South and to sort of whitewash the peculiar institution almost completely out of the picture, some may find of-putting.  I didn't, only because it should be viewed as a product of it's time (which is not the same as saying the attitudes of that time are ok just because they were the attitudes of that time, if that makes any sense at all).  I imagine a sort of parallel study of slavery as seen through the history of film making with Gone with the Wind and modern films such as, oh I don't know,say, Django Unchained, would be pretty interesting.  Again, worth seeing for it's place in movie history, and because it is a good movie, but also because you'll recognize a lot of well known lines that have been repeated, copied, and spoofed that you never knew originated from the mouths of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

The Dust Bowl (2012 - Ken Burns) - As a history buff, I'm a huge Ken Burns fan.  His latest offering chronicles the experiences of those who lived in a few small towns in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, right in the heart of the dust bowl during the Depression.  If you're unfamiliar with what the dust bowl was, see this movie.  But in a nutshell, for a good part of the 1930's the Great Plains were struck by an ecological catastrophe, caused both by man and by nature.  The combination of drought and over exuberant plowing, left the land barren and windswept.  Giant dust storms became the norm, blowing mountainous clouds of dirt into the air and causing "black blizzards."  You know in dry, dusty areas when you get those nasty black boogers in your nose?  Imagine having that experience for half a decade or so.  In typical Ken Burns style, The Dust Bowl comes to life through photographs, interviews with the regular folks who survived it, and letters and correspondence from those who have since passed away.  Another edutaining look at American history from Mr. Burns.  This Mr. Burns, not this one.

Red Tails (2012 - Anthony Hemmingway) - I gave this plane wreck a full scale review several months ago.  It still makes me angry that the Tuskegee Airmen might not ever get the film treatment their story deserves thanks to this debacle.  Sigh.

***TRAILER REDACTED***

Stay tuned for Part Three.

Red Tails

Red Tails, directed by Anthony Hemmingway, is the tale (word play!) of the Tuskeegee Airmen, African-American fighter pilots, who during WWII overcame the racial bigotry of the era to become one of the most celebrated air squadrons of the war.  At the time, most of the Army Air Corps brass considered African-Americans unfit both mentally and physically to be effective aviators.  It literally took an act of Congress for the Air Corps to form an all-black aviation unit.  In an effort to limit the number of acceptable applicants, the Air Corps set the standard for application so incredibly high--higher than it had for white applicants to the Air Corps--that only the university educated or those with previous flight experience were eligible.  Proving the law of unintended consequences, this uber-stringent application process was a major contributing factor to the great success of the Tuskeegee Airmen.

It's a great story and one that deserved to be told.  It just deserved a better movie to tell it.

From the opening titles, Red Tails has the feel of a big-budget TV movie.  It's clear the filmmakers (George Lucas is the executive producer) weren't interested in making a heavy, super serious war movie, a la Saving Private Ryan, and were shooting for something like a throwback to old Hollywood war films.  But the end result falls short of homage and ends up more like ho-hum.  The movie is rife with every possible war movie cliche' imaginable and every downed German plane apparently must be accompanied with a (not so) witty quip.  Example of said quips:  "Take that Mr. Hitler!"  Yikes.

As a pseudo-historian myself, it drives me nuts when filmmakers load up historical dramas with recycled characitures and story lines, more so than in non-historical type films.  Usually, the reason someone wants to make a movie about a historical event is because there is already a great story in place.  And I can guarantee that the actual real life characters involved are a whole lot more interesting than the one-dimensional retread archetypes we've all seen 100 times.  So why add all the fluff?

Example:  not to be too spoilerish, but there are at least two events in Red Tails that are clearly set up just to elicit contrived emotional pay offs down the line.  One is the all too common love story; soldier falls in love with foreign beauty and keeps her picture pinned to his cockpit console.  Guess what happens?  In the other, a downed pilot is captured and locked up, Great Escape style.  Along with his new found compatriots, he escapes, also, in a stroke of creative genius, Great Escape style.  Whether he truly gets away or not is left ambiguous, until one of his fellow escapees arrives at the Tuskeegee base to present his commanding officer with the pilots dog tags.  Both of these plot lines resolve themselves in the last few minutes of the movie at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, and if you've seen more than three movies in your lifetime, you should see the "payoffs" a mile away.

Another example that a great many war movies fall prey to--even good ones--is the cookie cutter cast of war movie characters.  Everyone in the unit has a role to play.  There's the funny guy, the religious guy, the rebel with a heart of gold, the flawed leader (usually a drinker), the one that plays a musical instrument.  Like I said, almost all war movies are guilty of this to some degree, though the good ones are able to add a little nuance within those stereotypes.  And don't even get me started on the scar-faced lead German pilot.  Why not just have Hitler himself flying point?

Ok, enough bashing.  The positives.  The dogfighting scenes are pretty cool.  When making the original Star Wars, George Lucas used actual combat footage of WWII dogfights as a model for the X-wing/Tie-fighter battles of the Death Star attack.  In Red Tails, the dogfights are very much like high-definition versions of those old combat movies and are fun to watch.  They would be even more fun without the corny pilot-to-pilot dialog...wait, this is the positives part of the review!  Uh, yeah, the dogfights are neat.

Also, as a big fan of The Wire, it was nice to see some familiar faces on the big screen, I just wish they had better material to work with.  If it was your first time seeing them in action you wouldn't know how good Tristan Wilds, Michael B. Jordan, and Andre Royo are in The Wire as Michael Lee, Wallace, and Bubbles respectively.

I suppose I should cover at least some of the plot.  The Tuskeegee Airmen, dismissed by their white superior officers as not fit for combat, are relegated to pedestrian patrols and small convoy raids far behind the front lines, and are itching for some real action.  Finally, after much intercession by their commanding officers (Terrance Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr.) the Red Tails (so called, because the tails of their planes are painted red) are given a chance to escort bombers on raids into enemy territory.  They distinguish themselves and soon earn the respect of the white bomber crews.  There's some tension between the flawed leader (Nate Parker) and the rebel with a heart of gold (David Oyelowo), and there's the aforementioned love story and Great Escape redux episodes, but it's a pretty straight forward story.

It's not that I didn't enjoy myself (and it helped that I only paid matinee prices) and seeing the dogfights on the big screen was cool, but the potential was there for a much better movie.  Even without being a heavy handed war drama, there is a good movie in this story, but unfortunately now that this territory has already been mined we're unlikely to see that movie anytime soon.