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Someday, perhaps even in my lifetime, there will be a feature film about the Tuskegee Airmen where the triumph of African American pilots proving themselves in combat will be attentively offset by the absurdity of making them prove themselves in the first place. Such a movie likewise won’t need to “prove” anything to skeptical bean-counters or rouse audiences from their plush seats with gaudy rhetoric, adamant sincerity or noisy anthems. With the foxy humanism of a Jean Renoir and the informed passion of a Nicholas Ray, such a film would vividly display how these men weren’t just colored-people-in-khakis but the bright, bold vanguard of a generation that would, over time, help invent bebop and the civil rights movement. I have, so to speak, a dream. And such dreams don’t cost me anything.

But dreams are much more than a dime-a-dozen when they’re mass-produced in factories. Because it’s the toy-makers and not the humanists who now more than ever command Hollywood’s ever-wavering attention span, Red Tails is quite likely the best possible Tuskegee Airmen epic we can expect at the millennial hinge. Viewed solely as a product packaged with gleaming action figures, sleek machinery and keen visual effects, this George Lucas production turns out to be – let’s say – not unworthy of its (relatively) widespread publicity campaign or its ($19 million, as of this writing) respectable box-office take. Just as the original 332^nd Fighter Group had to settle for bomber escort duty to gain even minimum appreciation, so do those of us awaiting a serious, nuanced Tuskegee Airmen movie have to settle for a gung-ho, by-the-numbers genre picture.

Granted, a gung-ho, by-the-numbers genre picture about black World War II aces is long overdue by about fifty to sixty years; this would be roughly about the time when the great American drive-in rotated such motley guts-and-glory fare as Attack, Battle Cry, Pork Chop Hill, The Steel Helmet, Flying Leathernecks, Hell is for Heroes and Red Ball Express, a 1952 Budd Boetticher film featuring a 25-year-old Sidney Poitier in just his third film role. These days, guts-and-glory WWII movies, as with the Western, tend to be put through the irony shaker after which they come out as Inglorius Basterds.  African-American-oriented commercial films tend to have all or most irony sifted out, unless it’s unintentional or so-over-the-top-it’s-campy. Red Tails isn’t immune to the latter tendency, especially with its snarling, scar-faced Nazi villains and the grandiloquent things the movie makes Terrence Howard say to white and black officers alike. (At one point, he even tells one of the brothers to “man up,” which is so NOT 1945 it stings your ears.)

I refuse to believe that such excesses can be attributed to the sophisticated keyboards of screenwriters John Ridley (“Undercover Brother”) and Aaron McGruder (“The Boondocks”), though I imagine that both understand the dynamics of classic pulp to keep some “Terry and the Pirates”-style brashness out front. Nor can I quite bring myself to blame director Anthony Hemingway, whose hand I can detect more indelibly in those scenes where the guys are just hanging loose and trading quips, much like those deceptively languid interludes in the project courtyards one remembers from The Wire, where Hemingway and some of the movie’s actors plied their trade.  (Hey, Bubbles, aint no skag in that fuselage! So what you doon messin’ with those planes?)

It’s possible that Hemingway may lack some compositional chops, but I still believe it’s Lucas who’s basically the command pilot for this mission, keeping the plot elements flying in tight formation, brushing aside as many wood chips in the dialogue as he wants to, but concerned mostly with keeping things simple and sweet enough for your nine-year-old to retain. In publicizing the film, Lucas even assumed the role usually reserved for aggrieved minority filmmakers by calling out the suits who refused right up till the movie’s release to consider its commercial potential. Some accused Lucas of using a cynical ploy. Whether it was or not, his grievance managed to mobilize minority moviegoers for whom the carpet-bombing of glossy trailers for Red Tails during the NFL playoffs weren’t enough of an incentive. So far it’s working. And besides, who among the studio elite would dare chide the Baron of Skywalker Ranch for being a whiny and/or uppity black man?

Other grievances, of course, have emerged, mostly from African American women who not only feel underrepresented in this mostly male enclave, but are insulted that the movie’s sole romance involves the squadron’s ace (David Oyelowo) with an Italian local (Daniela Ruah). I understand the feeling — and am especially charmed a reference in a review by my old friend Esther Iverem  where she notes that the woman’s photo and a picture of a black Christ are the only decorations in the pilots’ cockpits: “Makes it seem like the Tuskegee Airmen were fighting for Jesus and white women. I don’t know whether to laugh or sigh.”

Other critics have chided Lucas and company for not emphasizing the racism enough. And on some level, it may only double the inequity that the great Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad has limited screen time as the lone surrogate for all the brass hats openly cheering for theTuskegee experiment to crash on takeoff. On the other hand, who needs to hear all those dreary tapes over and over again?  Howard’s Colonel A.J. Bullard (really Benjamin O. Davis Jr., but you already knew that, right?) speaks for all of us in the Age of Obama when he says to theCranston character that (in essence) he doesn’t give a fuck what the palefaces think of his men.

So now that’s over with, we can just let the fellas fly. And as you’ve probably heard by now, the movie soars highest when the planes do. Though there isn’t anything here that matches the best set pieces in any of the six films in Lucas’ Skywalker Chronicles, it’s as gratifying as it is thrilling to watch black pilots carrying out barrel rolls, loops and dogfights without thinking of them as victims first. They’re not quite characters either. They’re more archetypes with quirks and foibles writ large (The One Who Drinks Too Much, The One Who Nods Sagely & Smokes a Pipe, The One Who Drawls Down-Home Jokes and so forth.) Once again, old genre conventions, like Massa’s old hand-me-downs, are presented to African Americans as fresh togs with the challenge to make them look brand new. As always, the talent manages to do just that, though not quite enough to make you forget that you’re watching action figures in a comic book. But that’s what movies are, mostly because of George Lucas. So we’ll settle for Red Tails until it’s time for the movies to grow up again.

Among the questions I used to get asked a lot on the back-nine of my newspaper days, “Who’s the best film critic working today?” didn’t pop up as frequently as, say, “What’s the best way to get into jazz?” or “What’s your all-time favorite movie?” or “What’s that on your shirt?” Nevertheless, I was always prepared with an answer – and very careful of whom I gave it to. After all, I was colleague to all these critics and friendly with most of them and if their egos were anything like mine, they would bruise like ripe peaches. And, no, I never answered with my name – as I remain certain that none of my aforementioned colleagues did either.

But throughout the time I worked as a full-time film reviewer, the answer I gave most often to that question was J. Hoberman of the Village Voice. I say “most often,” because on some occasions I would say Stuart Klawans of The Nation. Pinned to the mat, I might say that Jim — for that is what the “J” stands for — was number one and Stuart was one-A. It was that close. You will have a long wait for numbers two-through-fifteen. I’m still good friends with a lot of those people – though I’d be surprised if any of them would disagree with my numbers one and one-A, even if they didn’t always agree with their opinions. I didn’t either. But I always learned something from their reviews I hadn’t before, saw things differently enough to, if not change my mind, at least broaden my field of vision for the next movie. If I gave a slight edge to Jim, it may have been only because the Voice ran his reviews every week while The Nation runs Stuart’s less regularly.

Note the tense shift in that last sentence. Because, at least for the time being, only one of those guys is still in business.

The Village Voice announced yesterday it was laying Jim Hoberman off after almost 20 years as a staff writer. The once-proud weekly has already lost such longtime distinctive voices as Gary Giddins, Robert Christgau, Dennis Lim, Wayne Barrett, Deborah Jowett and Nat Hentoff (though he still contributes as a non-staffer) and I always thought it was a miracle that Jim lasted as long as he did after the corporation formerly known as New Times (now Village Voice Media) became the paper’s owners five years ago.

Jim said he was “shocked, but not surprised” by the decision and that pretty much sums up everyone else’s reaction, except mine. Nothing about this avaricious, crabbed, chronically short-sighted period in corporate publishing surprises OR shocks me anymore. As noted, I’m more surprised when someone like Hoberman survives in the prevailing atmosphere of perpetual cutbacks in both personnel and writing space. I’m even more surprised when people persist in seeing such upheaval and uncertainty as a relatively recent phenomenon. Wiser, larger heads than mine date the decline from the mid-1970s, when journalism was supposedly basking in post-Watergate glory. Someday, when we’ve touched the ocean floor on this era, we’ll be better able to look up and see precisely when we started tumbling.

I’m not too worried about Hoberman. His reputation should carry him to better places than the one he’s leaving, though I should hope it’s someplace where I could read him regularly. Maybe I shouldn’t hope. There aren’t many venues around where someone who thinks as deeply about movies as Jim will be given a platform. Nor am I optimistic that the exquisite sense of history with which Jim frames everything he writes will be seen as anything other than excess baggage in a media world, on- and off-line, where snark and knee-jerk contrarianism are better situated to grab the peanut galleries illegally downloading the latest 3D Hollywood product. When people wonder if I miss (or don’t) professional movie-going, I can now at least bring up this latest egregious insult to whatever’s left of said profession, though I admit it’s still amazing that these same people even bother to ask whether I miss it.

And I still don’t have a clear answer yet. Soon. Maybe.

I’m guessing this happened when I was 15 — or 16 at the latest. It had to be one of those years when I was still too young to be allowed (or invited) anyplace on New Year’s Eve, but was nonetheless given permission to stay up as late as I wanted while looking after my younger sibs, both of whom were dead asleep at that wee hour. I don’t suppose Channel 8 in New Haven keeps records for whatever movie they were broadcasting that far back, whatever year it was. But I do know it was New Year’s Eve. I know it was late. And I know it was Citizen Kane.

The reception wasn’t so hot; a little snow on the screen, possibly a lot more outside, the weather being whatever it was in central Connecticut that time of year. I’m bluffing. I don’t remember what it was doing outside because I didn’t care. If someone had broken into the house that night to take everything but the TV, I wouldn’t have noticed. Orson Welles’s greatest magic act had transfixed another unwary spectator. By the time the movie was over, my face was so close to the screen that it was ready and, likely, willing to push through the tube.

As has been the case with just about everyone else’s first encounter with Citizen Kane, I had never before suspected that a movie, any movie, was capable of doing the things with light, shadow and sound that Welles had done. All I asked from movies before that night was a story long enough to keep me occupied for a couple hours. Every once in a while, I’d get more than that. Alfred Hitchcock, that other supreme magician of light and shadow, had mesmerized me plenty of times by my teens. But the tension and menace were always out front in his movies with the big man’s gentle, but firm touch applying gradual pressure upon the viscera to see how much you could stand.

Welles’s movie didn’t press; it seeped, slithered like a dream with sounds that seemed both haphazard and orchestrated. It was as if the movie were another, larger room with the door opened a crack and I couldn’t keep myself from eavesdropping on the chattering ghosts inside. And there were these stark images coming at me at angles and perspectives I’d never seen before.

All of which sorcery was concocted to make me care about a man I wouldn’t have spent more than five minutes with in real life unless forced against my will. What movie could make anyone do that? What kind of movie could make you want to go through such dark mischief again? And again and again and again…?

I plan to put myself through it tonight — or early tomorrow at the latest. It’s an annual ritual that began more than ten years ago when, having become by that time a full-time movie reviewer for Newsday, I would get the inevitable “what’s-your-all-time-favorite-movie” question from civilians and found myself explaining (or trying to) my ongoing fascination with Citizen Kane. More often than not, the answer seemed to disappoint, even among those old enough to remember when Orson Welles was alive. (“’Citizen What?’” “Who’s in that?” “And that’s the story? Hmmm…”) All of which responses were variations on “Why didn’t you pick something I like?” Or, in most cases, have at least heard of.
Just the other day, a cousin living here in DC said, when I told her of my New Year’s plans, “I don’t know that one.” Then, after a pause, asked, “Is it a sad story?” If you’ve seen Citizen Kane at least once, you should have enough sense to immediately say, “Yes.” If you’ve seen it more than once and become enraptured enough with it to read (or watch) accounts of the comparably legendary back story of Citizen Kane’s making, you could even go to the trouble of saying that, it, too, is a sad story; some might say, even sadder than the movie itself.

And yet, even if one knows about Welles’s life story; the meteoric rise that led him to Hollywood, the crash-and-burn that followed Kane, the desultory decades of hit-and-miss movies, work-for-hire, commercials and talk-show appearances that marked his career ever afterwards, it becomes harder think of Kane the same way one thinks of other pictures. Is Charles Foster Kane’s life story a downer? Well, yes. Is the movie a downer? Absolutely not. Huh? What? Why?

OK, here goes: Because watching the movie is like hearing great bebop or rock-and-roll for the first time. Because of the brash exhilaration emitted by the movie itself, its willingness to go-for-broke at practically every bend and turn, to blend sounds and dialogue as no one tried to blend them before, to point the camera upwards where one wouldn’t expect it and aim it deeper than one is prepared for. As I’ve tried to explain to generations of friends and family mystified by my devotion to Kane, it’s not the story that matters as much as its execution, its infectious grasp of unchecked possibility.

I don’t think I’m saying anything new here.  It’s just that for at least as long as I’ve been writing professionally about movies, people want – and expect – less from them than they once did. They still want magic. But do they want Orson Welles’s impudent genius? I suspect it would scare them or put them off as much as it did in 1941. I’m also not sure people are in the mood these days to be reminded, as they watch a movie, that they’re watching a movie, much less watch a movie reinvent itself from within as audaciously as Citizen Kane.

And yet, if last year’s dismal domestic box-office returns are any indication, people aren’t that inclined to go out and see what passes for theatrical film these days. Maybe they don’t know – or haven’t been shown emphatically enough – what movies are capable of. Certainly, no one will ever be allowed to show them the way Welles did, almost by accident, seventy years ago. Still, the movie exists to prove that miracles are indeed possible, if not probable. Which is why I’ll be setting aside some time over the next forty-eight hours to feel — or, at least, simulate – that long-ago rush. Again.

It’s been a while since anyone asked me for a Ten-Best movie list and if I were still regularly paid for going to movies, I would have one piping hot. It’s been a peripatetic year, however, and I’ve been a peripatetic sorta person lately. So I haven’t been as up-to-date on new stuff as I used to be.
Do I wish I still were? Another question for another time. I’m dying to definitively answer that one to myself. Definitively, that is.
Nevertheless, people still ask me what I’ve seen & whether I liked it or not. Clock’s ticking on the end of 2011 & as I note below, I still haven’t seen everything I’ve needed/wanted to see. So I shall reply in the following manner. (This is as of Dec. 27, 2011, by the by):

MOVIES I WOULD PAIR IN A HYPOTHETICAL DOUBLE-FEATURE IN A HYPTOTHETICAL REPERTORY THEATER SHOWING HOW THINGS GOT SO MESSED UP & HOW WE FEEL ABOUT IT NOW:

“Margin Call” & “Take Shelter”

MOVIES THAT WERE BETTER THAN I EXPECTED:

“Melancholia,” “Submarine,” “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “Beginners,” “The Adventures of Tintin”

MOVIES THAT WEREN’T QUITE AS GOOD AS ADVERTISED (OR REVIEWED):

“Bridesmaids,” “Tabloid,” “The Ides of March,” “Drive” (but Albert Brooks made up for a lot), “J. Edgar” (Did NOT know until now that Hoover had a Massachusetts accent…Whoda thunk?)

MOVIES THAT FULFILLED ADVANCE HOPES; SOME MORE SO THAN OTHERS:

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy,” “Moneyball”, “The Trip”, “The Descendants,” “Super 8”

ODDLY UNDERRATED BLOCKBUSTERS:

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,” “Captain America: The First Avenger,” “Thor,” “Midnight in Paris” (longtime – as in jaded – Woody watchers think he got lucky, at best.)

ODDBALL WONDERS PEOPLE AREN’T TALKING ENOUGH ABOUT:

“Cold Weather,” “Poetry,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “The Arbors”

MY FAVORITE SUBGENRE OF THE YEAR: THE RETRO DOC:

“George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” “The Black Power Mixtape,” “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest”

HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT…(?!):

“Uncle Boomie Who Can Recall His Past Lives”

NOT AS BAD AS I ANTICIPATED, BUT STILL PROBLEMATIC:

“The Help”

I’M STILL NOT SURE ABOUT (BUT CAN’T BRING MYSELF TO DISMISS):

“The Tree of Life,” “Nostalgia for the Light”

AND I STILL HAVEN’T SEEN (BUT WILL SOON, I PROMISE):

“Hugo,” “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” “Margaret,” “Pina,” “Le Havre,”