Word: panthers
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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...
...Daily Variety to support Van Peebles pere et fils: "We laud their efforts and their courage for making a movie that sends a message of strength, dignity and empowerment to the African American community -- especially to our youth." This was in response to an earlier ad, declaring Panther "a two-hour lie," that was placed in Daily Variety by David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a neoconservative outfit in Los Angeles. Horowitz, a reformed leftie who worked for the Panthers in the '70s, now believes that "the overwhelming impact of the Panthers was negative...
...film's main new charge is that with the Mafia's connivance, Hoover sent the Black Revolution a toxic sedative: cheap dope. And it worked too well, enslaving whites as well as blacks. As Panther notes, America has 10 times as many drug addicts now as it did in the '60s. The notion of the fbi's fomenting a domestic opium war is piquant-but preposterous. And what if it's true? Are we to blame aboriginal Americans for introducing tobacco to the Europeans...
...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...
...major flaw in "Panther" is its lack of character development which leaves one side of the conflict utterly without any motivation beyond irrational racism. Still, the film is a thought-provoking and deeply moving story of a movement in Black history whose implications are increasingly relevant to today's youth...