On the Allocation of Resources

Red Tails
Starring
 Cuba Gooding, Jr.
 Terence Howard
 Nate Parker
 David Oyelowo
Directed by
 Anthony Hemingway

I saw a trailer for this movie some months ago, and formed the preliminary opinion that it was a film I wanted to see. Then I saw George Lucas on the Daily Show, telling Jon Stewart how he had wanted for oh, so long to make this movie, and thought maybe I wouldn't like it after all, that it would be simply too preciously cloying in its "courage has no colour" sensibilities, and heavy-handed in its We-Are-All-Americans message.

Well, as is usual for my prejudices (in the literal sense of "judgement before the facts"), the kernel of accuracy was borne out, but that's all.

It actually is an enjoyable movie, in the Saturday-Afternoon-Matinee-serial style that Lucas seems so indelibly smitten with. There is plenty of action of the war-movie variety, and, as one would expect from the people that gave us Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the special effects are so convincing that we wonder at times how it's possible they could be anything other than real. The plot is straightforward, as is the love-story subplot involving one of the pilots; though I thought the subplot involving another pilot who is captured by the Germans could have been left out. It seemed to serve no real purpose except to (a) give the actor playing that character something to do for his pay, and (b) give us a small happy moment near the end. 

The movie (based on a true story, meaning they took bare facts and made up a lot of stuff) is about the Tuskegee Airmen, the group of black pilots got up as an experiment during World War II. It begins with them flying routine patrols behind the front lines in Italy and ends with them doing more exciting stuff. That part of the story is true, and very well told.

The race-relations undertone of the movie was embodied by the white characters, some of whom were Klan types with nice uniforms, and some of whom were Radar O'Reilly types who, yes, see no blacks or whites but only Americans. Throw in the stereotypical blond Aryan Nazi villain, and you complete the roster of cardboard cut-outs masquerading as characters. The black characters were the focus of the movie, so their characters were more developed, though none very fully. The performers do well enough with what they were given, but, as is so often the case with George Lucas productions, the dialog sounds like it's being read off the back of a cereal box, or the pages of a comic book.

All in all, I think that if Mr Lucas is strapped for cash to invest in his films, he should spend a little more on good writers, even if it means he has less available to make the smoke look real.

And Worst of All, It's Full of Parisians

Midnight in Paris

starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and Marion Cotillard

directed by Woody Allen

Sometimes it's a good thing to re-state something we all know.

In this film, a gratifyingly intelligent exploration of the yearning we all feel at one time or another, Owen Wilson plays Gil, a somewhat successful "hack Hollywood screenwriter" with literary ambitions and the draft of a first novel. Visiting Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her loathsome parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), we are immediately struck by the incompatibility of the romantic Gil and the pragmatic Inez. He idolizes jazz-age Paris; she wants a house in Malibu.

Invited to go dancing with a couple from back home, Gil wants instead to walk the mystical streets of the French capital. Inez, though, wants to party, so they go their separate ways that night, and, increasingly, in life. We follow Gil, who gets lost in the dark streets and finds himself swept up by a limousine containing Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and the delightful Allison Pill). He becomes, from the stroke of midnight, a part of his idealized life. He meets Hemingway (Corey Stoll), he discusses literature with Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates, an inspired casting choice), he pours out his heart to Salvadore Dalí (Adrien Brody), he encounters all the leading artistic personalities of Paris after the First World War. He even falls in love, with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a student of haute-couture who is the object of desire for every artist in Paris. She, though, finds jazz-age Paris boring: she wishes she lived in la belle époque, Paris in the 1890s.

The theme of the movie lies not far beneath the surface, but that doesn't matter. In the richness and artistry of Woody Allen's still fertile imagination, it becomes a magical tale: the surreal made real, more real than life itself, until Gil embraces it, and re-makes his own reality. He does what we all wish we could do.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, and as Gil discovers before he returns to the present, the Golden Age ain't all it's cracked up to be. The co-operation of the Parisian authorities and the budget of a major motion picture can make 21st-Century Paris, jazz-age Paris, and belle-époque Paris all look a pretty nice place. But it's just a movie. Watching this film, I recalled the last time I was there, sitting in a sidewalk café and wishing Paris was as beautiful, romantic and charming as it is in this movie. But Paris today, despite the architecture, the money, the culture, the history, is as loud, dirty, crass and impersonal as any modern city, just with nicer shoes. The romance of the place lies in our own hearts, and the romance Gil finds at last on the Pont Neuf, I can find with no great effort on Houston Street or Main Plaza.