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
Among people who cover movies for a living, kissing Steven Spielberg’s ass and bashing George Lucas are almost equally popular. So it’s not that surprising that when people talk about Indiana Jones 4, they tend to blame all the worst stuff on George Lucas, even though Spielberg has sole directing credit. (Personally, I blame everyone from the grips down to craft services for not jumping in to stop that piece of sh*t. That whole crew are like Anne Frank’s neighbors, if you ask me.). But according to Spielberg, who recently sat down with Empire, the moment people frequently point to as the worst of the film — the nuke the fridge scene — was actually his idea.
“I’m very happy with the movie. I always have been… I sympathise with people who didn’t like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin. George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in – even if I don’t believe in it – I’m going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it. I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.”
“The gopher was good. I have the stand-in one at home. What people really jumped at was Indy climbing into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb blast. Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying “jump the shark”. They now say, “nuked the fridge”. I’m proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.”
“I sympathise with the MacGuffin people, but y’all gopher haters kin kiss mah ass, nah mean?”
People picked up on the nuke the fridge thing because it was a catchy phrase, but I wouldn’t even consider that worthy of being in the top five dumbest moments of Indy 4. There was the scene where Shia LaBeouf flies into a tree and ends up swinging through the treetops with his monkey army, there was the moment when Indy got stuck in quick sand and they threw him a snake for a rope, there were the fire ants, the raft that went over the waterfall like six times with an 80-year-old man in it with no consequences other than wet hair, etc. etc. Trying to assign blame to Lucas over Spielberg is like arguing about whether Himmler was worse than Goering. I’m still pissed that everyone accepts that it was a terrible movie now with no acknowledgement of the fact that it’s still tracking 77% recommended on RottenTomatoes. SEVENTY-SEVEN F*CKING PERCENT! Among people who review films for a living! All this means is that you won’t be able to trust the reviews for War Horse in the next few months, because a person who couldn’t recognize that Indy 4 was a terrible film when it came out has lost all credibility in regard to Spielberg. TO THE QUICKSAND WITH ALL OF YOU! REMOVE THEIR SNAKE ROPES!
By now you’ve no doubt heard that the upcoming Blu-ray release of the Star Wars movies will feature a few alterations to the original trilogy, including blinking Ewoks, a new door to Jabba’s lair, and worst of all, Darth Vader shouting “NO!” as he throws Emperor Palpatine to his death in Return of the Jedi, instead of being all silent and Vader-like. (*takes deep breath, puffs inhaler*)
Now, the site SaveStarWars has dug up an old speech George Lucas made before congress in 1988 arguing for cinematic preservation. In it, the old George Lucas basically calls 2011 George Lucas a barbarian. It’s an impassioned speech, but sadly, 2011 George Lucas just laughed and stuffed handfuls of money into his slavering neck pouch, ordering his boy servants to bring him more cats for breakfast. “CHOMF CHOMF CHOMF!” he belched, poking at a bikini-clad boy with his slimy tentacle.
[Quoth the Lucas, circa 1988]
American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history.
People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society.
These current defacements are just the beginning. Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with “fresher faces,” or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor’s lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new “original” negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires. The copyright holders, so far, have not been completely diligent in preserving the original negatives of films they control. In order to reconstruct old negatives, many archivists have had to go to Eastern bloc countries where American films have been better preserved.
In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be “replaced” by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten. There is nothing to stop American films, records, books, and paintings from being sold to a foreign entity or egotistical gangsters and having them change our cultural heritage to suit their personal taste.
I accuse the companies and groups, who say that American law is sufficient, of misleading the Congress and the People for their own economic self-interest.
I accuse the corporations, who oppose the moral rights of the artist, of being dishonest and insensitive to American cultural heritage and of being interested only in their quarterly bottom line, and not in the long-term interest of the Nation.
The public’s interest is ultimately dominant over all other interests. And the proof of that is that even a copyright law only permits the creators and their estate a limited amount of time to enjoy the economic fruits of that work.
There are those who say American law is sufficient. That’s an outrage! It’s not sufficient! If it were sufficient, why would I be here? Why would John Houston have been so studiously ignored when he protested the colorization of “The Maltese Falcon?” Why are films cut up and butchered?
I hope you have the courage to lead America in acknowledging the importance of American art to the human race, and accord the proper protection for the creators of that art–as it is accorded them in much of the rest of the world communities.”
Well said. Unfortunately, Lucas owns the Star Wars copyright (even though, technically, he only directed the first film in the original trilogy) and can alter his films as he sees fit. Knowing what we know now, it seems like a lot of what people loved about the original Star Wars were created out of decisions made over Lucas’s head that he fought the whole way. It’d be like if a group of guys were trying to build a house, and one of them kept saying stuff like, “No, we should put the foundation on the roof!” And the other guys ignored him but still let him put his name on it. And then thirty years later the guy was like, “Well it’s my house now, and I’m going to put the foundation on the roof. And windows in the basement, and a big playhouse in the living room for my kitties… And rabbits, millions of ‘em! Purple ones, yellow ones, pink ones! And we’ll all live off the fatta the land…”
Yesterday, news hit that actress and filthy rich woman Gwyneth Paltrow had saved a woman’s life on 9/11 because she almost hit her with her Mercedes, causing the woman to miss her train that would have taken her to the World Trade Center, where she worked on the 77th floor. So because of a complete coincidence and terrible female stereotype reinforcement, Paltrow gets to pat herself on the back while idiots call her a hero. I bring this story up because now George Lucas can do the same.
Last weekend, Janice Harms of Clara City, Minnesota was answering nature’s call, when her house exploded, sending her flying from the bathroom to the kitchen. Surrounded by flames and imminent death, Harms crawled into her refrigerator and hid there until she was discovered by rescue workers.
This trailer for Red Tails is very important as it was produced by the famous cat thief George Lucas. However, it doesn’t seem to have any reaction shots from families of squirrels or characters swinging through the trees with monkeys, so it’s possible George just cut a check and went back to playing Hot Wheels on his racecar bed and shoving fistfuls of money into his stretchy neck pouch. Instead, Red Tails, directed by Anthony Hemingway, tells the story of the Tuskeegee Airmen, a squadron of negro pilots during WWII whose rambunctious jungle planing at first terrified the white establishment, until it eventually captivated the youth and swept the country, going on to “influence” white pilots from Elvis to John Travolta. Some people say black guys make better pilots because of the extra muscle in their throttle arm, but science has already disproven this theory.
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