After my last post about the workshops I’ll be teaching this year, I’ve been reminded that there was one workshop I failed to mention.  I had thought the membership was more restricted than it was, and so I reckoned a general audience wouldn’t be interested.

I will be teaching a workshop in structure and plotting on the Friday morning of the Nebula Weekend, May 17-20, 2012, in Arlington, VA.

The workshop is open to anyone with a membership for the weekend.  You do not have to be a SFWA member.  The cost is $60, which will also entitle you to the other workshops, tours, and panels on offer.  If you go so far as to buy a $75 banquet ticket, you also get to enjoy my suave toastmaster address, watch me (or maybe John Scalzi) present the Grand Master award to Connie Willis, hear the keynote address from astronaut Mike Fincke, and watch the Nebula winners stammer their way through their acceptance speeches.

Sounds good?  I thought you’d agree.

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I was intrigued when I’d heard that George Lucas believed in this movie so much that he financed it himself.  Apparently the Hollywood studios— staffed of course by all those Hollywood liberals we hear so much about— declined to finance a war epic about black people.

I was very impressed that Lucas was so committed to this movie.  And then I remembered that the last movie he believed in this much was Howard the Duck.

Well, Red Tails is no Howard the Duck.  Unfortunately it’s not Saving Private Ryan, either.

It’s a slightly goofy, old-fashioned war epic, full of patriotism, heroics, swelling music, and good feeling.  It’s the sort of movie where an American pilot might say, “Take that, Mr. Hitler!” and a German might snarl, “Now you die, foolish American!” If it wasn’t for the massive CGI and the complexion of the cast, this could have been a movie released in 1944.

The actors are great.  The actors are having a good time with each other, and we can’t help but enjoy their enjoyment. (And they should be having a good time.  This movie is a reunion for half the cast of The Wire— and of course the director, Anthony Hemingway, was on The Wire, too.)

The air combat scenes are awesome.  It’s all CGI, but it’s so good you can see the rivets on the planes.  And Lucas is ingenious enough to have his computer-generated camera duplicate the sorts of flaws that an actual physical camera might encounter, as for example what happens when it gets pointed into the sun.

I’m not sure I’d consider the air tactics authentic.  I doubt you can actually out-turn a Me-109 with a P-40 . . . but what the hell, I’m sure that happened in movies made in 1944, and that’s the model Lucas is working from.

The problem of the movie is that Lucas is so committed to his feel-good epic that the good vibrations get in the way of any actual drama.

Our two principal heroes are Easy (Nate Parker) and Lightning (David Oyelowo, who I’m encountering for the second time this week, having just heard him doing a terrific job of reading John le Carré’s less-than-brilliant book).  Both Easy and Lightning— whose nicknames are not accidental— have some serious problems.

Easy is an alcoholic who can’t climb into his plane without slamming down half a pint of whiskey first.  But there really aren’t any consequences to his addiction— he never seems impaired, and he never makes any bad decisions.  (Though he does get blamed for a crash that wasn’t his fault.)   So his alcoholism isn’t a tragedy or even a problem, it’s just a quirk.

Lightning is the Angry Guy— didactically, he’s sort of Malcolm X to his superiors’ MLK.  And he’s also Crazy Guy— he’s the maverick who disobeys orders, brilliantly uses unorthodox tactics to shoot up the enemy, and leads his men into extreme danger only to extricate them, and himself, with genius to spare.

Except that there are no consequences to his anger, except for a couple days in the guardhouse for clocking a racist officer.  And he’s only angry when the script calls for it: the rest of the time he’s charming and mellow.  There are no consequences to his disobedience of orders, and nobody ever dies because of his reckless tactics.  Angry and Crazy are quirks, not problems.

As for the guy who crashes, he survives though severely burned.  But we never feel his pain, or his awakening to his new condition . . . he’s just quietly shipped home, and if he’s mad or angry or in pain, it happens somewhere else.

If I’d had a turn at the script, I’d have had Easy screw up while drunk, and I’d have had Lightning getting a bunch of his followers killed, and I’d have had the crashed pilot wake up to the fact that he’s going to be disfigured for the rest of his life.  But Lucas doesn’t do that, because this movie is all about feeling good, and even when characters die, they die triumphantly.

I have no beef with feel-good movies, but I have to wonder why the characters were saddled with these problems when the movie wasn’t going to deal with them.

Still, you can’t feel bad about this film.  It’s fun to watch, it’s like all those old black-and-white movies like Dawn Patrol and Flying Tigers and Flying Leathernecks on which it was obviously modeled.  The CGI is great.  The cast is obviously having a good time.

And while the box office hasn’t been spectacular, it’s likely that George Lucas will earn his money back.

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During the time that Newt Gingrich has been out of office, I’ve completely forgotten what a special joy it is to listen to the guy.  He’s like the Creature from the Id.  He absolutely can’t suppress himself, and sees no reason why he should.  I’m almost as fascinated by Newt as Newt himself.

So now he wants to wage a campaign of assassination against Iran (assassination not only being an act of war, but the sort of thing we criticize when Iran does it).  He also says he’ll do this with “full deniability,” which is kinda hard to do when you announce your assassination campaign on national TV.

He also said that, if elected, he would not tolerate another four years of Castro.  (So that’s two wars.)  Initially he plans to drop thousands of satphones into Cuba in hopes of starting a Cuban Spring, and otherwise toughen up sanctions and whatnot on Cuba.  (Because, boys and girls, sanctions have worked so well in the past.)

(It’s not like the other candidates are less bellicose.  Romney pretty much agrees with Newt on Iran and Cuba, and Santorum says he’ll flat-out bomb Iran and has talked about a Jihadist Axis of Evil involving evil Iranian mullahs influencing the policies of Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, etc.  Umm, how many wars are we up to, now?)

Quick.  Name any other American presidential election where major candidates promised to go to war if elected.  Can’t name one?  I didn’t think so.

Yesterday the Newtster attacked college students as lazy, because they took too long to graduate and won’t get work-study jobs.  Surely Newt would only make such an attack from a position of strength, having worked his own way through college?

Well, no.  Newt didn’t work a single day, not from his first day in college all the way to his PhD.  Newt Wife One, along with his family,  put him through school.

I’m not sure whether he’s still attacking capitalism or not.   If so, the papers haven’t mentioned it lately.

In 2009 the Newtster supported Obama’s health care initiative, and took a lot of heat from the conservative base for it.  Now he’s against “Obamacare.”  And of course it was Romneycare before it was anything.

In 2006, Newt stated that current campaign finance rules have moved the U.S. “dangerously closer to a plutocracy where the highest bidder can buy a seat.”  Now, he’s got his personal billionaire.

In 2008 Newt appeared in a commercial with Nancy Pelosi supporting action against climate change.  Now he says that climate change isn’t caused by human action.

(I think he’s missing an opportunity here.  What he should do is admit that climate change exists and then blame the liberals for it.  “If it wasn’t for socialists and their big-government initiatives, private enterprise would have solved the climate problem years ago!”  Someone whisper this to Newt, okay?)

He used to be in favor of carbon cap-and-trade legislation.  Now he’s against it.

Okay, some of these flip-flops are necessary in order to be considered seriously as a Republican candidate.   The base will never support anyone who thinks that humans might jeopardize the environment, or who won’t promote school prayer, or that Wall Street should be regulated, or that there shouldn’t be a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay people from marrying each other.

But still, you get the impression that every day’s a new day on the Good Ship Newt.  Whatever he thinks today is what he thinks today.  If he thought something different yesterday, you should forget that, because he has, too.  And when it’s time to decide what he’s going to think tomorrow, he’ll decide that, whatever it is, without reference to anything he’s thinking now.

He’s making this stuff up as he goes along.  And it’s fascinating to watch.

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2011 Toolbox grad (and computer legend) Jeff Dunteman has written a totally unsolicited (by me, anyway) description of Taos Toolbox over on Inkpunks.

Walter and Nancy are both superb teachers and are not to be missed. I was startled, though, at how much I learned from my thirteen student colleagues, not solely through their critique of my own work, but also by seeing how they themselves create and manage the many moving parts in a novel-length story . . . I might describe my colleagues as un-seasoned professionals, trying hard to master that seasoning but always as professionals. There was not a poseur in the bunch, and while we’ve been in only sparse touch since the workshop, I am proud to call them all friends.

Which brings up a point that maybe I haven’t stressed enough.  Taos Toolbox isn’t about lone writers jumping through hoops laid out by a couple of instructors— it’s about a group of writers trying to make their own, and each other’s, fiction better.  It’s about building a cadre, a karass, a posse.  A team.

We’re on the mountain for two weeks for a reason.  Because we’re on the mountain together.

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