George Lucas’s black guilt campaign failed over the weekend, as Red Tails‘ “foolish Africans” were no match for Kate Beckinsale’s hot ass fighting werewolves (or is it vampires?) in Underworld: Awakening. Underworld and Red Tails went one and two, while Marky Mark once again stopped 9/11, with Contraband beating out Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for the three spot (“HOW YOU LIKE THOSE WAHLBURGAHS, LOOZAH! GO PATS!”). Meanwhile, poor Gina Carano and Haywire opened lower than even Tom Hanks’ 9/11 film. It’s okay, baby, you still explode my tower, if you know what I mean. (I am so, so very sorry for that).

Red Tails rated 33% among critics, but received an A grade from audiences (via cinemascore), almost the inverse of Haywire‘s 82% among critics and D+ on cinemascore. Audiences apparently were so happy to see black war heroes that they ignored lines like “Die, you foolish African,” and “I guess there’s more to you coloreds than I thought!”, while critics failed to recognize that a movie that isn’t bad isn’t the same thing as one that’s good. Red Tails did an incredible job convincing black people that it was their duty to see a crappy movie because it had black people in it, while MMA fans tried to do the same with Haywire.

I’m not a black dude, so I can’t really speak to the Red Tails guilt campaign, but I’m pretty sure there were black movies before this, and there will be plenty after it, whether or not we give George Lucas our money for his uncredited remake of The Tuskeegee Airmen. But as a die-hard MMA fan, I can tell you that if I was in the habit of seeing movies just because MMA stars were in them, there are plenty of Hector Echavarria movies I could rent.

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SHOOT HIM DOWN, MIKE! THAT'S THE GERMAN WHO MOLESTED YOU! /Wire joke

Corny movies are a civil right!

If you want to see a movie that tells the inspiring true story of the Tuskeegee Airmen, go rent The Tuskeegee Airmen. If you want to see a remake of that with Anakin Skywalker dialog, CGI explosions, and a nameless bad guy with a scar on his face who says things like “Die, you foolish African!” go see Red Tails.

There isn’t that much to say about Red Tails, really. It’s the identical plot of Tuskeegee Airmen but worse on every level. But it isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, either. The protagonist isn’t a horse, for example. It’s nice to look at, the war scenes are decent enough, and every ten minutes or so, Terrence Howard shows up to read an uplifting speech directly into the camera in the voice of Maya Angelou.

The two main characters are Lightning (David Oyelowo) and Easy (Nate Parker), the Malcolm and Martin, the Maverick and Ice Man, the Magneto and Professor X of the airborne civil rights movement. Easy drinks too much (though we never see it actually affect him) and Lightning is a hothead, the most talented pilot in the squadron, but goes off half-cocked every time someone calls him chicken. Wait, no, I’m thinking of Marty Mcfly. By “chicken” I meant the N-word. Lightning gets the love interest in the film, an Italian girl he meets when, no joke, she blows him a kiss as he’s flying over her house. He can spot beauty from thousands of feet up, so he goes to her house and takes her on a whirlwind courtship that takes place exclusively on “Italian countryside” b-roll from Olive Garden commercials. He asks for her hand in marriage while men in mustaches play the accordion and grey-haired grandmama’s in half-shawls wring their hands and everyone’s cool with it because Italians are notoriously open-minded about interracial dating.

But enough about-a the story. MAMMA MIA, SHE’S GOT-A SOME A-SPICY DIALOG!

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"Look at the kitty over there, George, do you see the kitty? If you're a good boy you can go pet the kitty, George."

George Lucas is currently busy traveling across the country as part of his it’s-okay-to-see-me-as-a-human-being tour, which is actually a brilliant PR move, but we’ll get to that later. First, a bit of pointless minutiae about Indy 4. A few years back, the internet quickly swooped on “nuke the fridge” as an easy shorthand for everything that was wrong with Indy 4, even though that scene wasn’t even the tenth dumbest that happened in that movie. Previously, Spielberg had said it was his idea, telling Empire “Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea.” Now, in a lengthy NY Times profile, George Lucas says the idea was his, and I believe him, because slug people aren’t capable of guile:

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”

In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.

Was there also a dossier about using a snake for a rope? About surviving six trips down a waterfall in a row? About Shia Labeouf being able to lead an army of monkeys through the trees? Let’s not split hairs, that whole movie was really dumb. But back to the George Lucas world tour. He’s been busy painting himself as an old-fashioned romantic, too naive for this mean, modern world, but determined to keep up the fight for the downtrodden. It’s hard not to admit that he’s been partially successful.

Lucas’s films are relentlessly — and to some, maddeningly — old-fashioned and naïve. “If it’s a popcorn movie,” Lucas told me, “it needs a lot of corn.”

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George Lucas was on The Daily Show the other night, and while it was sad watching Jon Stewart have to pretend that nerds still think of Lucas as the hero who created Star Wars, and not as the villain who keeps trying to retroactively f*ck it up, Lucas (Ol’ Cat Eater, I like to call him) did a wise thing. With his new movie Red Tails coming out (you can watch the first seven minutes after the jump), which he didn’t direct, though he did apparently direct some of the re-shoots, including “small character moments” (a terrifying prospect, like having an autistic kid rewrite your dialog), he talked less about the movie than he did about the difficulty of getting a film with an all-black cast made in Hollywood. Wait, whaaa?

“We’ve been working on it 23 years. I financed it myself, and I figured I could get the prints and ads paid for by the studios, and that they would release it, and I showed it to all of them, and they said noooo. ‘We don’t know how to market a movie like this.’

“It’s because it’s an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first, all-black action pictures ever made.

“It’s a reasonably expensive movie. See, normally black movies, Tyler Perry movies or something, they’re very low budget, and even they won’t release his movies. It goes to one of the lower, not-major distributors, and they do well, but they do a certain amount of money, and they know what that is, and this cost more than what those movies make. And they don’t believe that there’s any foreign market for it. And that’s 60 percent of their profit.”

For a guy I normally ridicule for stuffing endless handfuls of nerd-money into his bulgy neck pouch, this was a brilliant move. Now, it doesn’t matter how corny and derivative it is, you have to go see it just to prove big, racist Hollywood wrong (meanwhile, I like to shout “HOW YOU LIKE THAT, MR. HITLER?!” every time I cut a fart). Already I’ve seen black comics I know talking up Red Tails on Facebook because of this, which is pretty weird for a hokey WWII movie. I can’t even say Lucas is lying (though I will say that I don’t remember Michael Bay ever talking about how hard it was getting Bad Boys made), even though 23 years ago would’ve been just a couple years before Tuskeegee Airmen came out (which got Laurence Fishburne a Golden Globe nomination, so it’s not like people hadn’t heard of it), which is essentially the exact same movie as this, and that could’ve been part of studios not wanting to release it. Because it’s probably mostly true. Studios always have some retarded voodoo math they do, because it keeps up the pretense that you can predict this stuff with numbers, which is far better for your job security than risking having an actual opinion on anything. So now, instead of George Lucas: Cheesy Movie Dork, he gets to be George Lucas: Champion of the Black Man, and no one can fully deny it. And so I guess there’s nothing left to say except well played, you fat overrated hack.

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A lot of people told me about this new Red Tails commercial, but I rarely watch commercials because I have a DVR and don’t live in a cave watching network TV over the air while I cook hunks of coon meat on a fire made of bear poop. Luckily, I was able to find it on YouTube like a human being. Mind you, this is a film George Lucas is producing about the Tuskeegee Airmen, a squadron of black fighter pilots during World War II, about whom a perfectly passable film was already made back in 1995. Judging by this commercial, it seems that the plan is to market it not only as a life-affirming period piece about racial progress (as in the original trailer below), but as an ultra-modern, action-packed thrill flight. At least, that’s my explanation for why it sounds like two Transformers buttf*cking now, what’s yours?

SHOOT HIM DOWN, MIKE! THAT'S THE GERMAN WHO MOLESTED YOU! /Wire joke

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