Once he's finished producing Indiana Jones IV (still no official title, sigh), George Lucas will make a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen ... finally. Apparently, he's been talking about doing this since Howard the Duck (according to Harry Knowles' memory), and it was long assumed to be a dead project. While I don't remember anything from twenty years ago, I do recall Lucas and Rick McCallum mentioning this to IGN back in 2005. At the time, the movie, titled Red Tails, was expected to begin production within the year and the producers were meeting with Tuskegee vets. Two years later, Lucas has just now found his screenwriter: John Ridley. Apparently Ridley has written Spike Lee's L.A. Riots script, Lucas got his hands on a copy, and sees Ridley as the best fit to write about African-American pilots in World War II.

Personally, I'd have already pinned Ridley as perfect for the project by imagining a mix between the screenwriter's past work (Three Kings meets Undercover Brother? Yes!). However, it could be a little more serious than we're used to from him. After recently meeting with Tuskegee vets in Texas, he may want to give the survivors a respectable tribute. It may still be awhile before we get to see Red Tails, which will be overseen by Lucas but produced by McCallum and Charles Floyd Johnson (CBS' Navy NCIS), because Ridley is just getting started on his script. The writer also has his directorial debut in the works, an adaptation of James McManus' Positively Fifth Street. Although viewers have already seen the Tuskegee story in a 1995 made-for-HBO feature (The Tuskegee Airmen, starring Laurence Fishburne and Cuba Gooding, Jr.), Lucasfilm's movie sounds to be a lot bigger, with ILM doing the aerial fight sequences. As long as it doesn't look as cartoony as the WWI-set Flyboys, that could be appealing. Almost like the Star Wars space battles, but with planes!

We're a few hours late with this report -- and when I say "we" I actually mean "me, Scott" -- but Sundance saps a whole lot of strength from even the most ardent movie freak. With apologies we I now offer you this week's big fat DVD titles ... and a few old-school pieces of ultra-cheese.

Catch a Fire -- Philip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence) goes political again and delivers a fast-paced and very efficient thriller that focuses on the ways in which governments often create the very enemies they're trying to thwart. (Governments are ironic that way.) Tim Robbins and Derek Luke contribute some very fine work. Extras include a multi-filmmaker commentary and a few deleted scenes.

Farce of the Penguins -- From what I've been hearing from reliable sources, this simplistic spoof is way too little way too late. But if you simply must see a movie in which Bob Saget, Samuel L. Jackson, Dane Cook, Jim Belushi, Whoopi Goldberg, Jon Lovitz and the rest of the Friar's Club provide raunchy voice-over dialogue for a bunch of innocent penguins, hey, here's your dream come true. Extras include a Saget-track, deleted scenes, featurettes and a bunch of other penguin-related silliness.

Flyboys -- Big-budget derring-do war flick ... that dropped absolutely dead at the box office. (Budget: $60 million / Domestic Gross: $13 million) I've yet to see the movie myself, but I do look forward to giving it a fair shake -- even if that "running across the blimp" sequence looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic anime story. Extras include a Tony Bill / Dean Devlin audio commentary, more than a half-dozen featurettes and some deleted scenes.

Gymkata -- Yes! Mid-'80s kung fu wackiness combined with hardcore Mitch Gaylord gymnastical stuff! I swear this movie's funnier by accident than most comedies are on purpose. Extras include the knowledge that you now on Gymkata on DVD.

I have an issue with year-end best-of lists. Or, I should say I have an issue with making them, myself. Every year I think about giving in to the tradition, but then I stop myself when I realize that I haven't seen enough movies. There are the last-minute releases of late December to wait for. There are films I missed earlier in the year that haven't yet arrived on DVD. And ever since I took a hiatus from reviewing films, it has gotten worse, because I see fewer movies than I normally do. Typically I don't discover my favorite pic of a given year until the following year or later.

So, rather than write up a list that may change tomorrow or the next day or 10 years from now, I've decided to reflect on the bad movies I saw. I've definitely seen more bad movies than good movies, anyway. But rather than make a list of the worst of '06 -- I probably haven't seen the real worst any more than I've seen the best -- I fondly recalled the movies that were crap, but were enjoyable, nonetheless.

Some of the movies on my list are wholly guilty pleasures, while others have one or two specific aspects that I found more guiltily pleasurable than the movie itself.

• 10.) Cobra Starship's 'Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)' video from Snakes on a Plane - Sure, Snakes on a Plane is a guilty pleasure -- it was made to be. But it is just too obvious to mention it as a whole, and anyway it really wasn't as enjoyable as it should have been or was meant to be. The music video during the movie's credits, though, is another story. In my opinion it overshadows the actual movie by a long shot. It may be as self-consciously intent on producing irony and camp, but it succeeds where SOAP doesn't. Maybe because it is catchy, maybe because the band looks like a parody of contemporary hipster bands, or maybe because it is shorter -- I am far more likely to return to the video for a good laugh than to the movie (not that I'll turn off the movie on a lazy Sunday with nothing better to do; it is still a guilty pleasure, itself).

It was a good year for much of Hollywood, but a bad year for A Good Year. The Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe team-up only grossed $7 million domestically, and has been labeled a flop. Variety has listed the major box office disappointments for 2006, and interestingly enough, a few of them have to do with water. The appropriately bad way to describe their fate, then, is to say that they drowned. Flushed Away, The Lady in the Water, Poseidon and The Fountain (okay, I didn't see it, but I don't think there's an actual water-type fountain), just couldn't swim. Here's some more bad puns: Sharon Stone didn't have the Basic Instict 2 stay away from a dumb sequel; Producer Dean Devin said, "Flyboys," to his new movie but it crashed and burned; All the King's Men stayed away from this remake, and so did everyone else; Audiences let their Freedomland in other activities besides seeing a movie starring Julianne Moore and Samuel L. Jackson. There's no pun needed for The Wicker Man; it just sucked.

Unlike the biggest flops of all time, none of these movies from 2006 broke a studio or likely ended a career. Ridley Scott and Wolfgang Petersen (director of Poseidon) have had flops before, but they can be forgiven for "flukes" every once in awhile since they usually turn out successful work. Plus, their films did okay business overseas. International box office saves more flops these days than back in the times of the really big bombs. Most of the other filmmakers represented are also probable to bounce back, or at least fall back on their other talents. Joe Roth (Freedomland) has already returned to producing. Steve Zaillian (All the King's Men) is back to writing. Tony Bill (Flyboys) may continue acting. Michael Caton-Jones (Basic Instinct 2) will eventually make another crappy film. M. Night Shyamalan (Lady in the Water) might need to be forced to work on somebody else's script for once, but he isn't going to disappear anytime soon, unfortunately.

The Washington Post had an interesting piece up the other day about Flyboys, which opened this weekend. Now, I have to admit, when the trailers for Flyboys started popping up on TV, my initial reaction was, "What the hell is this film, and why do I not know anything about it?" quickly followed by "God I hope this doesn't have Ben Affleck and a song by Aerosmith anywhere in it." After reading William Booth's interview in the Post with the film's director, Tony Bill, though, I'm considerably more intrigued, or at the very least, impressed with what it took to get the film made -- not to mention with Booth, who gamely strapped himself into a Marchetti SF 260 ("the Ferrari of the skies") for the interview.

Flyboys, about World War One fighter pilots, is one of the costliest independent films ever made. It took over two years, at a cost of $85 million, to make and market the film, which was completed without studio backing. Bill, who won an Oscar in 1973 as a producer of The Sting, hadn't directed a feature in seven years when he was tapped by producer Dean Devlin (Independence Day, The Patriot) to direct Flyboys. Devlin pegged Bill for the gig because he wanted a real pilot behind the camera of Flyboys, and Bill, an expert aerobatic pilot, has been flying since he was 14.

I haven't seen Flyboys, but in reading the Post interview, the one thing that comes through is Bill's passion for planes and his knowledge of the subject matter. In explaining why the film uses modern special effects to bring audiences into what it felt like to be a WWI fighter pilot, Bill notes they couldn't film real planes doing what fighter pilots really did back then because "It's too dangerous." The life expectancy of a pilot in 1917, he notes, was three to six weeks. Many of the reviews I've read on the film, though, seem to be deploring the use of CGI as taking away from the authenticity of the flying scenes. So the question is, when does CGI work to enhance a film, and when does it detract from the overall effect? Here's where you get to weigh in, Cinematical readers. If you've seen Flyboys, let us know what you think of the CGI-enhanced dogfight scenes. Do they do justice to the real pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, the real-life American fighter squadron on whom the film is loosely based? Or would you rather have seen less "cool" and more authenticity?

[ Via Moovy Boovy ]

Those familiar with the comic-strip Peanuts will recall that Snoopy often fantasized about being a World War I flying ace. Sitting atop his doghouse as if it were a Sopwith Camel biplane, he dreamed of being in dogfight combat with his arch nemesis The Red Baron, a real German ace (never actually depicted in the strip) who would riddle the doghouse with bullet holes. It is probably our generation's greatest association with that war, seeing as how Hollywood has pretty much ignored it for decades.

Ever since Howard Hughes lost both money and lives attempting to recreate the war's aerial combat on screen for 1930's Hell's Angels, the cost of showing another realistic dogfight just couldn't have been worth it for producers in the subsequent 75 years. The closest thing to a dogfight at the movies has been Star Wars, which modeled its space battles after WWI footage -- not using real spaceships, of course. Now, finally, there is Flyboys, a film that uses computer effects for the dogfights, making for a much safer production, and also a more artificial one.

I'm not exactly sure what it is, but there's something special about male bonding. Some of the greatest times of my life have been spent sharing a pitcher of beer with my best buddies, telling stories and poking fun at one another's stupidity. Unlike women, while guys are extremely competitive in nature, they rarely let it get too personal. If a man is upset with another man, they tend to confront one another and lay all the cards out on the table, instead of pretending and whispering behind each others' back. But that's guys. And that's what guys do.

This is not to say that male bonding is better or more fulfilling than female bonding. The two are just different. Probably because men are less emotional than women. They don't need as much. Guys tend to connect through their history together and not over a similar taste in shoes. Heck, I wouldn't even wear shoes if the ground weren't so dirty.

The following films all feature the different ways in which men bond -- whether on the battlefield or the playing field, inside the home or outside at the bar. The characters here are all men being men, sharing their hopes, their dreams and bonding just like one of the guys. Welcome to this week's Trailer Park: 

Mmm ... odds and ends:

• Electric Entertainment has signed a distribution deal with MGM which, while it normally wouldn't matter to anyone at all, is worth mentioning because it means that MGM will distribute Flyboys, an oddly under-the-radar, $60 million WWI flick that stars Jean Reno and the prettiest bad actor around, James Franco. Thanks to the deal, the movie should be in theaters this fall.
• Everyone is very excited this morning about the news that David Krumholtz (aka one of the guys in Numb3rs who isn't Rob Morrow) has signed on to appear in Woody Allen's next movie. You remember that one -- it's got Michelle Williams in it, and doesn't have a name or a plot. Rest assured, however, that Krumholtz will be doing whatever it is Allen tells him to do in Paris. This much we know.
• Since they're actually building a cast for it, it's starting to look like third-time lucky for Paramount's Shooter. After it failed to get off the ground the two times they tried before (with Keanu Reeves and then Robert Redford each in line to star - I bet they were never cast in the role before or since), the studio announced it again last month, this time as a collaboration for Mark Wahlberg and Antoine Fuqua. Variety reports today that Kate Mara has joined the cast, playing the love interest of Wahlberg's pissed off ex-sniper; production is due to begin this summer.
• Tyrese Gibson just isn't getting the scripts he wants, apparently. To correct matters, he threw together a spec called To Each his Own and, what do you know, sold it to Screen Gems. Gibson will star in the film (It's about "two friends in conflict" -- could that not be the summary of say, 86% of all the movies ever made?), and also co-produce it through his HQ Pictures.