Red Tails (2012)

Director: Anthony Hemingway                            Writers: John Ridley & Aaron McGruder
Film Score: Terence Blanchard                          Cinematography: John B. Aaronson
Starring: Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Brian Cranston and Gerald McRaney

Wow, this film is so incredibly disappointing that I’m almost beside myself. It’s one thing to besmirch the memory of citizen soldiers who gave their lives by mining World War II for video game films like Company of Heroes, but to do the same to men who not only fought the Germans but had to fight their own white, racist comrades as well unconscionable. George Lucas should be ashamed of himself for allowing this script, and this director to produce something this horrible. How you read this script and say “okay,” here’s 60 million, go and make it is difficult to believe, but how can you watch the dailies and not pull the plug on it in the first week? It’s embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t have to be this way. There have been great films about blacks in war, Glory and A Soldier’s Story among them. I have no tolerance for this kind of trash. Red Tails is the worst kind of bad film.

Right from the beginning you know you’re in for something bad. The opening has a mass of American bombers flying a mission and as soon as a few German fighters fly through the formation all--that’s right, all--of the American escorts go chasing after them, leaving the bombers unprotected. This, of course, allows the next wave of German fighters to come through and strafe the hell out of the bombers. From there we cut to the black squadron of clichéd blacks blowing up a train like they’re the Harlem Globetrotters taking down the Washington Generals. Flying back home, one of them sees an Italian woman hanging out laundry, blows her a kiss, then shows up at her door the next day. Cuba Gooding Jr., smokes a pipe and winks at their lack of discipline, while Terrence Howard is in Washington begging Brian Cranston to let them fight in combat or pull the plug on the whole operation and gets them an air cover mission for a landing.

Almost everything in the script is bad. There’s no angst among the pilots. They’re glib braggarts who care more about how many planes they shoot down than the success of the soldiers they’re supporting at the landing. When the German planes approach, the one German bad guy talks into his mic and tells his flyers that the American pilots are rookies. How the hell could he possibly guess that? And speaking of the mics, no one wears their oxygen masks and so they have to use their free hand to hold the mic up to their mouths when they speak. The fight scenes are so completely done with digital effects that it looks like a video came. None of it looks realistic. The blacks disobey orders whenever they feel like it and leave the landing sight to follow a shot up German plane. That’s right, they abandon their mission! And if that wasn’t enough, all of them call the Germans “Jerries.” Now that’s the British name for the Germans and I can believe that Americans used the term once in a while, but ALL the time, by ALL the blacks? It makes no sense at all.

And this is just in the first forty minutes of the film. There are, literally, hundreds of things wrong with this film, unbelievable things, insulting things, racist things, historically inaccurate things. The genre reached its zenith with Saving Private Ryan and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers over a decade ago. Since then there have been films like The Great Raid which, while not necessarily great, are at least interesting. But films like Company of Heroes and Red Tails are not just bad by comparison, they are bad in their own right and should not be allowed to proliferate. To not even make a cursory attempt at historical accuracy is one thing, but to simply overlay a modern sensibility onto an important time in our country’s history and an important struggle for a large part of our population and treat it all like a joke, is insulting. By that definition, Red Tails is the quintessential bad movie.

Forrest Gump (1994)

Director: Robert Zemeckis                                 Writer: Eric Roth
Film Score: Alan Silvestri                                  Cinematography: Don Burgess
Starring: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise and Sally Field

I hate this film. Hate, as an emotion, is by definition irrational but this actually makes sense. The first few times I saw Forrest Gump on cable I actively disliked it but couldn’t figure out exactly why. It was this huge blockbuster success and won six Academy Awards, but there was something wrong about the whole thing for me. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I figured out why when I read the awkwardly titled but incredibly insightful essay by Joseph E. Green, “Reality and the Moving Image: The Paranoid Style in American Cinema.” In his essay he calls Forrest Gump “one of the most insidious films ever made. To postulate that utopian societal reconciliation is depicted in the relationship between a mental deficient and a suicidal drug addict is lunacy. The fact that Forrest learns nothing, is in fact incapable of learning, never made a dent in the fantasy-seeking audience. Gump is the perfect soldier and the perfect citizen, one who is happy and content in a world of meaningless symbols, following the orders of authorities and reveling in the wisdom of convention.”

But this is only the start of the problem for me. Of course everyone is familiar with the story. Gump starts out life both physically and mentally disabled, and while he overcomes the physical challenge nothing changes the mental. He’s in love with his childhood friend, Jenny, but she goes her own way. They cross paths many times during the decades, with Gump conforming to society’s expectations and Jenny doing the opposite. Director Robert Zemeckis manages to insert Gump digitally into some famous scenes and fans simply ate it up. But Green’s point can be taken another step further. Gump is obviously the ultimate conformist, doing whatever society expects of him. What is less obvious, and far more insidious to use Green’s word, is the role that Jenny plays in the film. The reality is that she is just as much under the sway of society as he is. She is a reactionary, plain and simple. Every action she takes is a direct attempt to go against society’s expectations and in that way she is every bit as much a conformist as Gump. This is a concept that was articulated by Lionel Trilling back in 1965:

         Even when a person rejects his culture (as the phrase goes) and rebels against it, he does so in
         a culturally determined way: we identify the substance and style of his rebellion as having been
         provided by the culture against which it is directed. (Trilling 1965, iv)

Mykelti Williamson’s role as Bubba is far from “touching,” and felt insultingly racist to me, while Sally Fields’ Mama is trite and clichéd. The only character that I felt was real in any way was Lieutenant Dan. The anger and frustration Gary Sinise displayed in the film was at least honest, and made the one-dimensional conformist characters that inhabit the rest of the film all the more transparently meaningless. And yet Lieutenant Dan is written as a joke in the film, the guy who doesn’t “get it.” But it’s the audience that didn’t get it, and winds up being just as lemming-like as the characters they love in the film. In the end, that is the most telling thing about the popularity of Forrest Gump: the joke is on the audience. They love Forrest and Jenny because they’re just like them, going along with the crowd or reacting against it, totally controlled by what others do and not even realizing it. And then paying millions of dollars for the privilege . As the great Somerset Maugham put it: “If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.” So I won’t lie to you. I hate Forrest Gump.