Red Tails

Yesterday I got to see two movies.  The first one, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, was a weird, but good movie that is hard to blog about.  It is just something to be experienced and I recommend people go see it.

After the movie we stopped off at the store and I picked up Red Tails at the Redbox.  It was a bad movie where the entirety of the film was worth less than the sum of its parts.  At $1.20 to rent I think I paid too much.  The only consolation I have in that regard is that Carolyn and I saw the movie together so it was only sixty cents a viewing.
Parts of the movie were pretty good.  I've recently read reviews of the acting being terrible and I don't think that was an issue.  For me I'm 110% certain that this movie was hacked in editing.  Something tells me this should have been a three to four hour film, but it was chopped up to fit into the final 125 minutes.  As soon as the movie started it seemed like we were popped into the middle of a story.  What I saw wasn't a film about the Tuskegee Airmen, but a film with the Tuskegee Airmen.

The badly edited film mangled the sense of timing and pace, not to mention really screwing up character development.  I think the sense of bad acting comes from the fact that these potentially rich characters come off as hollow and fake because we don't get to see them grow and change.

There was an antagonist that just kind of pops in suddenly, pops up again just as suddenly, and then there is an anti-climatic confrontation that makes the whole thing feel "meh".  Again, I have a feeling that a lot of the film was left on the cutting room floor.

There were great actors, great historical backdrop, awesome setting, and some good action, but if you just throw this all together without a good sense of balance, pacing, and character development you get a whole lot of suck instead of a whole lot of awesome.

I am no a film buff by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to think that if they showed more films like this in film school instead of actual good films, we might not be able to grow as many terrific directors right out of school, but we could probably raise the bottom for those that do come straight out of school.