George Lucas retires.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/george-lucas-red-tails.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Cool.

Good news, in a way.

But it's kind of like a crazed dictator saying "I'll disarm" after they've launched nukes all over the world.

Now he can sit in a corner and think about what he's done. Or more ways to fuck up STAR WARS.

New York Times wrote:

He was careful to leave himself an out clause for a fifth “Indiana Jones” film.

It's not over.

Don't worry, he'll come out of retirement once he remembers that it was part of his original vision that Luke Skywalker would have a massive cock sticking out of his head.

He retired ages ago, let's be serious. Of the projects he's done since 1989, only Red Tails and Radioland Murders haven't been rehashes/rereleases/prequels/sequels/spin-offs of shit he'd already done.

It makes me sad a little because I remember an interview he did around the time REVENGE OF THE SITH came out where he said that now that he was done telling his story (Star Wars) he could get back to making small, arty films that no one would like, like THX 1138 -- and I really wanted to see that George Lucas come back. Sort've doing what Coppola is doing now.

Oh well. It's hard to feel sorry for someone worth something like forty billion dollars.

hey Georgie, you still owe us 3 Star Wars movies and a huge apology for screwing up Episode 1-3 and butchering the video releases of Episode 4-6

It will return.

Makeshift Python wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/george-lucas-red-tails.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Cool.

Great article. The "retiring from blockbusters" bit in the article is actually the least interesting part of that write-up, especially since it's not likely to be true. What is more fascinating about that article is Lucas' expressed commitment to a kind of hokey, naive, popcorn cinema.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7395771n&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cbsnews%2Ffeed+%28CBSNews.com%29

Two jackasses talking about STAR WARS and democracy.

Makeshift Python wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/george-lucas-red-tails.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Cool.

In his latest rounds of interviews he blamed the fans for his decision not to make any more Star Wars movies (and took absolutely none of the blame for how lousy the first one was, PHANTOM MENACE).

He's also laying the groundwork for the failure of RED TAILS by blaming Hollywood studios for being racist and for white Americans not caring enough about black people or their contributions to saving us from Hitler.

I might have been interested in a World War 2 movie had it not been produced by George Lucas and had I any reason to believe that there might be even the slightest chance that the contributions of The Tuskegee Airmen weren't going to be exaggerated and blown out of proportion. According to the poster for this 1995 movie, The Tuskegee Airmen were apparently responsible for single-handedly winning the war.

I think this is actually a pretty insightful reason into why this film is as big a failure as it has turned out to be: Lucas's involvement, which appears to be even more substantial than previously thought.

Capone's review of an early contender for Worst Film of 2012: RED TAILS!!!

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/52815

Selected quotes:

For those of you who have heard the stories of how much of RED TAILS executive producer George Lucas may or may not have directed/re-shot personally, try to put such thoughts out of your head as you attempt to watch this story of the first-ever squadron of African-American pilots to fly in combat. It's better if you hate this film on its own merits rather than because Lucas may have pushed aside credited director Anthony Hemingway and put his hands all over this worthy story, turning it into a horribly written, trite adventure film that cares more about aerial battles than it does about telling the glorious but often heartbreaking account of the segregated Tuskegee airmen of World War II.


But with Lucas and fellow Star Wars producer Rick McCallum guiding the ship, what RED TAILS really cares about are the aerial battles, which occur only as a last-ditch effort when the Army Air Corps loses too many bombers when their escort fighters stop protecting them to chase glory by shooting down enemy planes rather than sticking next to the bombers.

By the time the film is over, you will hate Ne-Yo's character Smoky as much as you did Jar Jar Binks because they're cut from the same stereotypical cloth.

And it should come as no surprise that the in-the-air dialogue isn't much better. "How you like that, Mr. Hitler?!" may go down as the "Release the Kraken!" of 2012. And no, not even a moving score by Terrence Blanchard saves any part of Red Tails, nor do the aforementioned aerial effects sequences, which are shot almost exactly like every X-Wing battle in a STAR WARS movie.

The bottom line is that RED TAILS fails every time a character opens his mouth. There's a love story that bogs down the movie, a resoundingly dumb focus by the airmen on one particular German fighter pilot (nicknamed Pretty-Boy and played by Lars van Riesen), and an unexplainable commitment to having these men spout useless, predictable words as if their lives depended on it.

I still want to see Red Tails though.

Critics ussualy don't impress me to much.