Tweet
Up to this point the only thing that I knew about the Black Panther Party is that it was a black terrorist outfit that was active in the 60's and 70's. I remember reading newspaper articles that mentioned them once in a while but that's about it.
This movie is the story of a rather unwilling informant who is infiltrated into the Black Panthers in Chicago in the 60's to take down their charismatic leader, Fred Hampton, before the movement that he was promoting spread even more widely than it had already.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The point of view of the movie is that the police and federal law enforcement are definitely the bad guys and the Panthers are definitely the good guys. I doubt that it was really quite that black and white in real life. (No pun intended there, really.)
I can't vouch for the historical accuracy or lack thereof, but the story is really interesting and I like this movie a lot more than I expected to. Learned some stuff, too!
The only issue that I have (and this is on me personally, not the filmmakers) is that I have a difficult time following the dialogue due to the fact that almost everyone talks with an urban Black accent. They speak so quickly that I miss a fair amount of what they say. As the movie went on I got so I could understand a bit more of the dialogue so I guess that I was starting to get tuned into it more than before. It certainly made me sit up and pay attention, though. This isn't a complaint, because of course it is how it is. It's just an observation that this is a more challenging movie to follow along with than most are because nobody around here talks that way. I'm sure that if I lived in Chicago I wouldn't have any trouble with that accent at all.
This is a movie that I would never have played in normal times, but now that I've got it here I'm quite glad that I did. I wonder if anyone will actually come to see it over the course of the next week, though. It's a good one but it's not anything like the stuff that I usually have in my theatre.
This movie is the story of a rather unwilling informant who is infiltrated into the Black Panthers in Chicago in the 60's to take down their charismatic leader, Fred Hampton, before the movement that he was promoting spread even more widely than it had already.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The point of view of the movie is that the police and federal law enforcement are definitely the bad guys and the Panthers are definitely the good guys. I doubt that it was really quite that black and white in real life. (No pun intended there, really.)
I can't vouch for the historical accuracy or lack thereof, but the story is really interesting and I like this movie a lot more than I expected to. Learned some stuff, too!
The only issue that I have (and this is on me personally, not the filmmakers) is that I have a difficult time following the dialogue due to the fact that almost everyone talks with an urban Black accent. They speak so quickly that I miss a fair amount of what they say. As the movie went on I got so I could understand a bit more of the dialogue so I guess that I was starting to get tuned into it more than before. It certainly made me sit up and pay attention, though. This isn't a complaint, because of course it is how it is. It's just an observation that this is a more challenging movie to follow along with than most are because nobody around here talks that way. I'm sure that if I lived in Chicago I wouldn't have any trouble with that accent at all.
This is a movie that I would never have played in normal times, but now that I've got it here I'm quite glad that I did. I wonder if anyone will actually come to see it over the course of the next week, though. It's a good one but it's not anything like the stuff that I usually have in my theatre.