After 17 years, we now live in a world with two movies about the legendary — in reputation, not existence — air group, the Tuskegee Airmen. And, Red Tails, this year’s offering, took over 20 years just to get made.
George Lucas, who had always listed Red Tails as his “next” project as far back as 1988 (so since Willow), claims that he could never get a studio to back an almost entirely black cast in a World War II film. Meanwhile, Fox had no problem pouring an estimated $343 million into each successfully dismal Star Wars prequel. It took his own money to finally put a film on the big screen where these larger-then-life heroes belong.
Written by John Ridley (Undercover Brother and the most excellent Three Kings) and Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder, Red Tails takes a very different storytelling path than the 1995 HBO TV movie, The Tuskegee Airmen. While Tuskegee used an ensemble cast — including Lawrence “Cowboy Larry” Fishburne, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, and John Lithgow — to focus more on the drama of racism in the 1940s and historical context, Red Tails was not hindered by small-screen and budgetary restraints. (more…)
The Mikado in the eponymous Gilbert and Sullivan play sings that, as the most humane Mikado in all of Japanese history, he believes that every punishment should fit its crime. And certainly a no more humane judge did in Florida exist than Judge John Hurley, who recently
