Simply A Masterpiece

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

i must have seen a different film!!

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Review: This is an extremely deep documentary about the rise and fall of the Black Panthers in America, and I must admit, I did find some of it slightly boring. Don't get me wrong, I did find the subject matter very interesting and the various interviews with fellow members and witnesses to the terrible police brutality towards them, was very touching but it does drag a bit and I personally don't find watching Black people getting treated like animals, that entertaining. I was left feeling extremely bitter when this graphic documentary had finished but I still learnt a lot about this powerful movement. The different scenarios which are highlighted throughout the movie, were quite shocking, especially the corruption with the law, but it was still good to see how far a radical group can go, when they pull together to fight for there rights. I will say this though, you really have to be in the right frame of mind to watch it because there are some scenes which are pretty upsetting but it's still worth a watch. Anyway, if your into your black history films, then this is definitely the movie for you, because it's an important part of history which will never be forgotten. Watchable!Round-Up: This documentary was written and directed by Stanley Nelson, 60, who has brought you various documentaries, like The Black Press, Marcus Garvey, Beyond Brown, A Place Of Our Own, Jonestown, Wounded Knee and Freedom Summer, which are all based around important periods in black history. He certainly done well to get interviews with different Black Panther members and officers of the law but it really didn't have to be nearly 2 hours long.Budget: N/A Worldwide Gross: $600,000I recommend this movie to people who are into their documentaries about the rise and fall of the Black Panthers. 5/10

What can you do when the system is biased against you? You can resist. Who is drawn to resistance? The young, the restless, those not yet powerful even by the standards of their own communities. What good does violent resistance do? Maybe not much directly, but it helps re-frame a debate in which otherwise the powerless are ignored. The Black Panther Party was a movement established to protect the interests of black Americans in the 1960s. On one hand, they were terrorists whose mandate was self-given; on the other, they really inspired the communities in which they were embedded, to whom the police were just the mightiest local mafia. They combined a message of self-help, pride, the demand for justice, protection and revolutionary fervour; at their worst, they advocated murder (and in return, members were literally murdered by the cops) and (near the end) raised money from drug dealing. Their charismatic leaders ultimately fell out with one another; their eloquent speeches remain compelling today. This documentary, featuring interviews with many surviving Panthers, is a bit one-sided; we don't hear from those within the community who did not approve (there surely must have been some), or (say) from the families of police officers hurt by Panther violence (only from those cops who still take pride in the violence they dealt out). But the sense of anger at the everyday injustice perpetrated on black Americans that drove the Panthers' formation is clear. Ultimately the Panthers had nowhere to go; their last significant act was in electoral politics, both admirable and yet strangely unambitious for an organisation that had been committed to the overthrow of the government of the United States. Of the Panthers' three most famous members, two are dead, one having become addicted to drugs and the other having become a Republican. But Bobby Seale still lives as a community activist in the Bay Area. And for all the problems, this documentary leaves one (mostly) impressed by what he tried to do.

This is the story of the revolutionary group, The Black Panthers. Formed in the late 60's, they were an anti-capitalist, left wing militant group formed by disenfranchised black citizens originally in Oakland, California. Their formation was a result of the continued harassment and police brutality their people suffered in American cities at that time. It was a separate incarnation from the Civil Rights movement which had been specifically about redressing the actual lack of equal rights for black people in the American southern states. The Black Panthers were formed to stand up for blacks in the more 'equal' urban areas who were still put upon by the white authorities and who still suffered much racism. They famously had an image of openly bearing arms and their overall approach was of a more confrontational style than that preached by Martin Luther King. Just as important, their look became very chic, dressed all in black, wearing berets, leather jackets and shades, they also sported afro haircuts in an unashamed way for the first time in contemporary America. The idea was to visually show that black was beautiful in its natural form. The look certainly resonated with images of the group making the front covers of various magazines; it remains iconic to this day.The film is made up by a combination of extensive archive footage from the time and current interviews with past members of the group. It tries to understand some of the motivations and ambitions of the group, while looking at some of their opponents such as the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover who seemed quite obsessed with eradicating the group. In one telling clip he even states that he doesn't consider the concept of justice as being all that important and that law and order was what he was all about. So it's perhaps not so surprising that this philosophy led to an infamous incident where a prominent member of the Black Panthers was murdered by the Chicago police, an event that is thought to be related to the FBI chief in some way. For some reason though, despite the very interesting subject matter and the dramatic backdrop that the late 60's / early 70's America provides, I felt something lacked from this telling of the story. It never seemed to be as dynamic as it should be and while I learned a few things, it never felt as engaging as it should be and so I left a bit disappointed on the whole. This is certainly an interesting subject though and it does cover quite a lot of ground but I felt it could have been more dynamically told.

When was the last time a state legislature infringed on the right guaranteeing a citizen's right to openly carrying a gun? Well, Stanley Nelson's excellent documentary The Black Panthers answers that question. Imagine then governor Ronald Reagan and the conservatives in the California legislature, won over temporarily, to the idea of gun control by the sight of the Black Panther Party marching into the statehouse in Sacramento, carrying loaded shotguns and rifle, as state law and the Constitution allowed. Challenging political order and mayhem, who were this new breed of "Negroes," dressed from head to foot in black? Why did they did they project an image of militancy and armed purpose? Today's headline grabbing evidence of police brutality and racial injustice to black people have not spawned the same response that gave birth to the BPP in response to oppression and marginalization, as #-tag Black Lives matter. Why? Nelson has recovered through use of newsreel, take, take outs from Eye on the Prize and interviews with aging ex-Panthers, to dust off 50 years of ignorance. We are transported to another galaxy of time. It was an age of war and revolution. Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam. It was also an age of turmoil that broke the back of colonial domination and smashed in the chains of vote denial in the American South, albeit through non-violence, as Ava DuVernay's striking film Selma serves as clear evidence. But what worked in the South couldn't and wouldn't in the North because voting rights were not the issue. Racial injustice and the ever-present violence and brutality of the police were. (Chester Himes' "Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones" mysteries, recreate life in urban ghettos.) The Black Panthers gives body to the logic of a society that marginalized and trivialized and isolated a third of its citizens through naked violence. And, as such, it birthed the BPP in Oakland, California in 1966. The choice of the symbol of the Black Panther is significant. In Mayan culture, the animal, a fierce fighter, is a totem of aggressiveness and power. It does roar. It won't strike unless provoked. The outbreak of the Panthers on the scene was merely an acceleration of a process of political awakening that had been building for some time at home and abroad. Stokley Carmichael had called for Black Power in the heart of Mississippi. And James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time, according to the Negro Spiritual, promised a conflagration as the wide range of injustices morphed into a call for political action. Furthermore, the BPP saw itself in the vanguard of sweeping change. To exploit the fever of heated times, it harnessed revolutionary gestures and emotions. So, six young men began organizing activists to confront the local police with guns. They spurned the appeal of Nation of Islam that preached self-segregation. They also rejected the belief that society could be made better by the change of the human heart. The zeitgeist of revolution had taken hold. If the US was fighting for "democracy and freedom and liberation from Communism" in Vietnam, the BPP figured that they were going to protect and fight for the interests of their own people that Washington sorely neglected. So, they took up the gun; they didn't confront the police but stayed at a respectful distance, to see that blacks weren't abused. Like their namesake, they remained vigilant unless otherwise provoked. The adoption of the powerful image of a gun had a revolutionary source: after all Mao did affirm "power grows out of the barrel of a gun?" The Party had an all-embracing slogan Power to the People. It had an ideology--and a 10-point program What We Want Now! It had a newspaper; it had revolutionary art; it had a "military force," and above all, it had what Carlyle called: beginners, men who had qualities to serve its ideas and ideals in the persons of Bobby Seale, Hotspur-like Huey P. Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver. Government repression and internal backstabbing over who upheld the purity of the BPP helped destroy the party is this gripping film.