I heard that it is pretty blatant in it's historical revisionism vis a vis the political inclination of the black panther party, but I haven't seen it to corroborate that.
Edit: okay, after reading the directors interview with GQ and reading some other comments it seems like i might have been completely wrong lol. Very excited to watch it now
Literally just turned it on 10 min ago.
They've already used the "we don't fight capitalism with black capitalism" video of Fred Hampton. They had Sheen (playing Hoover) say the Panthers are the biggest threat to the US, not the Soviets or the Chinese (which I think he did say in a letter). Kaluuya's (Hampton) first time on screen he gave a speech about reform not doing anything and revolution coming from the barrel of a gun.
They showed the educational classes and talk about them setting up breakfast programs and hospitals and their goals of feeding every child in Chicago. I'm not far in but they've nailed them so far.
Edit: just finished and there was 0 flattening of Hampton or the party's politics imo. I thought it was a great movie and the best depiction of an actual revolutionary that I have maybe ever seen. Def in a movie that big.
2nd and last edit: I think the real test will be two of my friends who are watching it tonight. One is left-ish and the other is pretty ideologically incoherent. So if they can tell hes a communist/anti-capitalist revolutionary I think it won't just be the background knowledge I had that made it good.
Sounds to me like sometimes the online left just wants to hate everything. We are getting a major film where the hero is a black socialist revolutionary and the bad guy is the US government.
I'll watch it for myself this weekend but I am pumped.
tbf aaron sorkin just destroyed that chicago 7 film like last year
It all filters down from Matt and Will who have a type of movie they really like, usually a gritty crime movie or a dumb action movie from the 80s. Don't think I've seen Matt say a movie was good since he started the cushvlogs
Early returns were super positive. Gonna try and call them or zoom with them this weekend to talk about it more.
That is great! I watched it myself and gonna recommend it to a couple of friends. I think I'm gonna try to talk with them about the US's fascism.
Hoover said the panthers were the greatest internal threat to the United States in a letter like you mentioned.
I am scared to watch it because I get extremely inspired by Hampton
I'm going to watch it tomorrow, but this interview with the director makes me hopeful.
This part of the interview seems particularly relevant to this thread:
There's a moment early in the film where Hampton famously mentions socialism being the answer to capitalism rather than Black capitalism—which he calls a stopgap tactic, but not the solution. There’s a longstanding debate between people who lean into capitalism versus others who embrace socialism. What do you want people on both sides to take away from this film with regards to that specific conversation?
I don't believe in Black capitalism. I don't think it works at all. All it does is empower a very minute percentage of Black people, which makes it useless. Capitalism is just self-serving, ultimately. And that's why we put that line at the top, just to let you know: "Nah." I know people assume, because it's a movie being distributed by Warner Bros., that we're going to make Fred Hampton a liberal or something. But I just wanted people to know, up front, that's not this movie. In terms of what we want people to take from it, I really do think Fred and the Panthers had the answers. So ideally, these are the heroes of our film. I want people to come away from this movie and learn about them and what they stood for and, hopefully, be as affected by their ideology as I have been.
It's not strong revolutionary propaganda, but it is somewhat effective. It's also a pretty decent movie, as far as being an entertaining couple hours.
I'm not sure what you expected, but this movie shows the Black Panther movement as being explicitly marxist, and that the FBI fully assassinated Fred Hampton. Sure it could have gone further, but for mainstream Hollywood this is good stuff.
The Black Panthers were largely Maoist in ideology and used Mao's little red book as a reference. If you watch Agnes Varda's short documentary on the Black Panthers you see them a lot. I was wondering how much the movie would should that they were Maoists.
The film has them reference Mao once if I remember correctly but definitely doesn't go into the group's ideology much.
Really? Thats disappointing cause the trailer looked so good and I was kinda hyped for this one.
In case you need a notification to revisit this thread, OP was completely wrong, this movie is definitely worth your time and you should be hyped.
I've seen a few good reviews, and one from vulture that was super negative.
