The Black Panthers - 2015, Stanley Nelson

The Black Panthers - Vanguard of the Revolution 

2015 - Stanley Nelson

I was just on time for the 8PM show in Chicago on the 26th.  The director, Stanley Nelson, was not going to be on hand for tonight's showing, that was the next night.  Two wonderful black ladies came and sat in a couple of the only seats left right next to me. I was one of only a couple of Anglos in the audience. There were moments of recognition, head nodding all around, chuckles and real laughter at many of the comments of the interviewees. This film had a non-stop type of feel, an urgency, and didn't let up.

The movement of the militarization of inner city black youth in 1967 through 1971, emanating from Oakland CA and quickly catching fire on both coasts and most cities, was short-lived, as could have been predicted by all historical markers, and also could not have come to a good end considering the climate of the times, and the methods employed by its leaders.  The Black Panthers - Vanguard of the Revolution film succinctly, within its 2 hours, gives an accurate timeline of the development of this movement, stunningly real and telling interviews with actual participants and commentators that were involved with it, and overall the best historical overview to date.  It is biased in its viewpoint, as along with every documentary that claims to be a documentary of course must be, but that bias does not really interfere with itself in the telling.  While it is sympathetic bias, yes, it is also real, and self-effacing, and telling all, despite the obvious pain it brings its maker. While there is a sense that this is black "cheerleading" and playing to the dark audience, it cannot be simply dismissed as sentimental reminiscing. This is good filmmaking. 

In example: The truth of the breakfast program’s good was juxtaposed against words later in the film, “just another breakfast program club”, spoken by the critic Eldridge Cleaver from Algeria, but a well-spoken and inside critic that was making a valid point.  The breaking apart of the Panthers, the split, is revealed in just the same stripe as the coming together.  Well-balanced.

What was most revealing to me in this rendition of the Panther story, and a part that had not stood out to me before, was the motivation of J. Edgar Hoover in creating the Cointelpro and the intelligence to infiltrate the Panthers to destroy them.  That motivation was fear.  The same fear that was behind the plantation owner’s eyes when he saw the slave quarters going up in flames with unshackled black bodies dancing all around it in the night was the same look behind the eyes of the administration in the creation of the program to douse those flames being born in Oakland.  And not without reason.  Black men with guns, in the open, loaded, and even marching into the State house with those same weapons.

But at this critical juncture, there could have been another way, another approach, other than subterfuge, other than the “war-like” tactic of counterintelligence, surveillance, undermining, oppressive police tactics, outright lies and deceiving of the public.  

The Panthers had a righteous cause, and rightly supported, and it was the failure of the administration and others in a position to provide adequate rhetorical and active response, and activation of law to bring about peace, that was the cause of the disruptive actions that ensued in the first place.  However, it must be also noted that the Panthers did not help their own cause in many ways, aligning themselves with the Vietnamese north, the concurrently hated and feared enemy of an ongoing war.  This alignment is what piqued the interest of the national government power more than anything, to believe that an internal organization was possibly providing sanctuary and assistance to a foreign power that was seen as a direct threat and an enemy of the state, and outspokenly communist.  The Panthers adopted the language of communism, Mao’s little red book, and violent communism, “by any means necessary”, and this was in equivalent terms rhetorically and realistically a physically active threat against the constitutional government. That’s why the gloves came off.

IF…and this is a big if that I draw from the subject….if the language of the movement had stayed closer to home and dealt with the most pressing and true problem of domestic violence and oppression of black people by the police, and other authoritative figures of power, and had combined their efforts earlier with WASP sensitivities, and while blandishing weapons also sought a political solution, the whole picture might have looked very different.  It also might have looked differently if concurrently the white-led governmental system would not have resorted to fear and intimidation, and ruinous underhanded spying, the FBI being the weapon of choice.

If if if…….IF Huey had not done drugs….IF MLK had not been assassinated, IF we would only listen….IF….as Rodney King has said, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

The Visit - 2015 - Movie - M. Night Shyamalan

The Visit

PG-13   94 Min   Comedy, Horror   
Sept. 11th, 2015 (USA)

So, there may be some reason why this film was released on Sept 11th.  It has a definitive moral: don't let hate drive what you do.

Disappointment can lead to disillusionment.  The teen filmmaker, as documentarian (and please note that documentary filmmakers are primarily concerned with recording reality so that it does not get lost but for exposition of the facts into the future) is throwing around complex film terminology, attempting to be grown past her age, and to create from technology a remembrance of her mother's childhood.  She is exposed to her mother's childhood world, the town, the school, the grandparents......well all seems well anyway.  Is that Martha Stuart in her old age?  The farmhouse seems like mid-century preservation or a museum of nostalgia.

M. Night is at his best when hiding the lurking evil underneath a veil of normalcy.  It's akin to the offscreen horror of Alien, except in this case, the off-screen is actually right on the screen, you just can't see it.

Night has taken some heat of late from many critics, and I for one am a bit more disappointed in his later offerings.  You're only as good as you latest film as they say in Hollywood, however, it does look a bit distant from the man who gave us The 6th Sense, Signs, The Village, and Unbreakable.  That streak of films, along with Lady in the Water, marked a new kind of filmmaker and set M. Night Shyamalan apart from some of his peers.  But there was some juvenility and somewhat of an industry-burdened sigh from the films Devil, The Happening, and this one.  There seems to be some pressure here to use cutesy actors like the teens, and slightly more than convenient plot setups to get to our sit-suspense little treat.  Just as the kids were set into a trap, I the viewer also felt like I was set up for a "boo-gotcha", as when the grandmother suddenly looks into the lens at night.  It's fine to have your kidney-jolting moments like that, but it's also expected to some degree.  Nothing surprised me here except (spoiler spoiler spoiler....sorry not gonna tell).

So this was "fun". It's funny that IMDB listed this as "Comedy, Horror".  Hm, there were some genuinely funny parts, now that I think about it.

Is it worth going out and seeing at the theater?  Well, no, this is a rental I'm afraid.  I'm sorry M!  Sincerely I do love your films, but this is not Shutter Island by Scorsese.  You'll have to take it up a notch to get there.

6 out of 10 stars/points/beans/Depends pads/whatever

Agitatus

Art

So why have I not been writing so many articles as I did in 2013?  What happened to my proliferation of media verbiage?

I've been making my own media:
https://vimeo.com/user4616063

And working on my art:
www.steven-m-curtis.com

Hope you visit my sites.

Best of Enemies film

Best of Enemies2015

R 87 min.
Media Ranch - Motto Pictures - Tremolo Productions

All things 1968 interest me.  It's the year the world split in 2 and we received as it's twin child the birth of 2 cultures, and the answers are still being questioned even now.  In fact, they are working themselves out.... even now, hence my novel that I've been working on for 10 years.  Right, a novel, me.... well, about the film....

Best of Enemies is the recap of the 1968 spectacle that ABC launched in an effort to save its dying influence in the media against the only other 2 players, NBC and CBS who were in bed with the political parties to the teeth, and broadcast a perceived iconoclast of personalities in William F. Buckley Jr. Vs. Gore Vidal.  It was naughty vs. virtuous (you were expecting nice, no, not in this review), basically a new conservative, right wing power vs. the newly empowered left-winged liberal (not libertarian, please don't get those confused) social and political anti-establishment humanism.

The film covers the mood of the period well, with cuts to the surrounding circuses of both National Conventions, in Miami and in Chicago, drawing well on the contrasts in locations, and being honest about the eccentricities of both, capturing the personalities of both parties evenly it seems.  The narration of several key side-commentators of notable interest was spot-on in many cases, such as the observation that the left's characterization of the conservative movement was attempting to draw similarities to that of fascist Nazism in order to demonize it, and create a great wave of negative public opinion against it.  During the debates this is what the "cherry bomb" was referring to, the nasty underpinning that many would not say, but believed.  When it came out in the debates, it was clear that this was the issue that was both a false positive, and yet presciently real, and also.... what made Buckley buckle, and lose his otherwise detached mannerly argumentations.

I felt that here however, is where content was underplayed over the context of that emotional moment, because the film consistently returned to it, time and again, as if it were that moment of defeat for WFB that drove his life ever after, and the issues be damned, that's what he spent the rest of his life dousing the flames of, a sort of dominant defeat that was never recovered.  I disagree.  This is the central focus of the last part of the story that the film portrays that I would have to say ignores the vast evidence to the contrary, that Buckley's life was filled not with vitriol over a single enemy as much as he in fact turned that moment of regret into fuel that powered his ongoing positional rhetoric against the cultural upheaval of idealists into his dying days.  The moment of weakness that seemed to look so ugly for Buckley on the Charlie Rose show sample that was included in the film, and was in fact a moment of personal resignation was paired with the "non-admission" of his regret over that debate moment with Vidal, to make it seem as if that were the driving force of his life, and that the moment of defeat were in fact the "end" of his debate...in effect, he had lost the debate.

This is filmmaking ladies and gentlemen.  The power of the media proves itself once again to be almost indecipherable from the truth, and the power of persuasion still rests with those who wield it, be it ever so benign, or malevolent.  Documentary?  There is no such thing.  The moment you point the camera in any direction, if automatically leaves out at least 2/3 of the whole view.

As much as all things 1968 interest me, and as much as I relate to the content of this film, knowing most of the principle players and parts they have to play, the timeline that I have memorized, from April to Oct (that's from the death of MLK to the raising of the fists at the Olympics), this film did not overwhelm me.  I was delighted at the revelations of the tete a tete between the protagonists, the bantering of the debates themselves, but at the same time was left wanting for more.  It's strange how the film spent so very little time on the actual debates themselves and relied on commentators and narration.  I am particularly biased in this way however, in that if it were me personally, I would have just opened with a few explanatory titles, and then rolled the debates themselves, in entirety.  But of course, out of context, most filmgoers now would not be in the least bit impressed with that, as the knowledge of the 60s wanes, a full 1.3 generations separation between it and the present.

To many of the current generation this film will seem irrelevant, or there may be some separation of the content from the modern context.  A 20-something may regard this film as nostalgic, and completely miss the cultural relevancy of the content of those debates, as passé, as historical, as something to be learned from, but not worried over.  That is, of course, a mistake.  The debates are still raging all around us.  These men are both dead, but the divide they represented still exists as surely as the Mason-Dixon line, and as surely as the Panama Canal, or the poles where one has Polar Bears, and the other has Penguins.  Such debates are still ensuing, and now are in our courts, our schools, and our religious culture, sending one part one way, and one another.  Most recently the debate was resurfaced in the media moment of Ben Stein's "Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed", and David Horowitz's book "ProFessors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America".  These were not created in 1968, but in the last 10 years.

I highly recommend this film for those interested in the subject of the 60s, if you're not schooled in it widely, or if this is of some interest to you, but be forewarned, it is not comprehensive, and I believe gives a...well, biased view of the circumstances under which it's "documentary" feel leads us to believe that it is undivided, unmodified, and consummate truth.  For it's length of course, it is attempting to explore an important moment in history and expose for examination 2 important figures of that moment, and you can't cram all of that surrounding history into 87 minutes, let alone 2.5 hours, so this film ends up being targeted to those of us who already know the context, to some degree as to have it make sense. Please read and watch more widely than this narrow 87 minutes allows.

Agitatus