22 January 2012

Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!

I try to keep this little knitting blog on topic most of the time, but every now and then something happens to make me break from the formula and rant about something else.

I have just returned from seeing Red Tails. If you have any inclination to see this movie, let me offer one word of advice: DON'T.

George Lucas keeps getting worse at writing dialogue as he ages. I had hoped, seeing as he's the executive producer, not the screenwriter, that it wouldn't be so bad, but within three lines it was obvious that he got his mitts on the script and completely ruined it. And not only that, but he tried to shoehorn an awkward love story into what is otherwise an action film. At least this time he didn't have the guy snogging a sibling, but it was still pretty contrived.

In an interview on The Daily Show, Lucas said he meant for Red Tails to be B-movie cheesy. I think what actually happened is that he tried to make it spectacular, failed utterly, and then realized he needed to lower everybody's expectations. Bruce Campbell is B-movie cheesy. Red Tails is just bad.

If you have any interest whatsoever in historical accuracy or even scene-to-scene continuity, don't even bother renting this one. The markings on the planes are wrong, the radios are wrong, the guns are wrong, machine gun rounds somehow cause massive explosions on the deck of a destroyer, it's apparently summer in Italy at the same time it's winter in Germany... almost every scene has something seriously wrong with it, and it's painful.

So do yourselves a favor and avoid this movie. Meanwhile, I'm going to drive out to Skywalker Ranch and smack George Lucas upside the head with several history books, a thesaurus, and a restraining order to keep him from making any more movies.

1 comment:

Marion Lily said...

Thanks for the heads up. I think we need mostly women as movie reviewers. Anyway, I recently saw Midnight in Paris which was quite good; The Big Year was very good; Tower Heist (not as funny as it could have been); Johnny English Reborn - very funny.