Word: panthers
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...Panther" opens with a barrage of news clips showing us documentary footage of racial violence from the '60s. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks, and is silenced by a shot. Malcolm X surfaces with his declaration, "We are nonviolent with anyone who is nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us." He, too, is silenced by a shot. In this climate, Huey Newton (Marcus Chong) and Bobby Seale (Courtney B. Vance) found the Black Panther Party for Self Defense...
...actors later to advance the plot, Van Peebles jeopardizes his credibility as an historian. Already treading a tightrope between fiction and reality, this method of "historicizing fiction" puts the viewer on guard. Although the fictional documentary footage is noncontroversial and works well as a device to sum up Panther activities, its contribution to the effect of a documentary is somewhat duplicitous...
Contradictory to the vague popular idea that the Panthers were an outcropping of the Black Muslims, "Panther" portrays the Oakland Muslims as an indolent group of pretentious pseudo-Africans who have trouble accepting that they're not in Africa. Soon the women of the Black Muslims, led by the independent Alma (Nefertiti) tire of being asked to "bring more libations" to these self-important neo-old-worlders and join the Panthers...
Although the Panthers are soon de-armed by the Mulford Gun Control Bill, Hoover's pressure to eradicate them leads the FBI to seek the aid of informants and, finally, drug dealers. And therein lies the downfall of the Panthers. Like Van Peebles' earlier work, "New Jack City," "Panther" ends with a lament about drugs, whose ravaging effects spread from the hood and into the rest of America, devastating us all. In this new fight, we are all united against a common enemy...
Although many messages surface during "Panther," they are absorbed in a story line that adeptly navigates a course between various issues: empowerment, activism, feminism, integrationism vs. separatism, toleration, and finally, the perils of drug abuse. Rather than being distracting, the voices of these divergent view points add depth to the film...