Word: mario
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Panther, the new film directed by Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City) from a screenplay by his father Melvin (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song), is indeed a movie: an earnest, naive, fitfully engrossing film with urgent performances and a final plot twist that stretches credulity to the snapping point. But because the subject is the Black Panther Party for Self Defense-the notorious cadre of black radicals that incited and attracted much of the '60s edgiest violence-Panther is more than a movie. It's the cause of raucous dispute, a chance for opening and licking old wounds about...
...Mario Van Peebles demurs: "The kids don't see this movie as a call to arms but as a call to consciousness." In this Molotov cocktail of fact and fancy, the party's founders, Huey Newton (Marcus Chong) and Bobby Seale (Courtney B. Vance), are two streetwise dreamers from Oakland, California, who live their slogan: "Power to the People." They arm themselves and talk instructive trash to the pig cops-but within the letter of the law. They also serve food to kids and educate them in Afro awareness...
...filmmakers stress that Panther is fiction; some of those who were there see it as flawed fact. "In part, Mario and his father have done a very good job of showing our history," says David Hilliard, former Panther chief of staff. "But the characterization of Bobby Seale being dominant over Huey Newton is certainly a reversal of history. Unfortunately, most of the people in the party leadership who could have helped are on my project." Hilliard, you see, is working with Seale on their own film for Warner Bros. These days Panther adversaries don't have shootouts, they have rival...
directed by Mario Van Peebles...
...Director Mario Van Peebles seeks to round out the persisting image of the Panthers as gun-toting militants, but gives only fleeting recognition to the community services they provided. The film's true focus is on the empowerment that the Black Panthers found by defying their oppressors with arms...