Word: baadasssss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Panther, the new film directed by Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City) from a screenplay by his father Melvin (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song), is indeed a movie: an earnest, naive, fitfully engrossing film with urgent performances and a final plot twist that stretches credulity to the snapping point. But because the subject is the Black Panther Party for Self Defense-the notorious cadre of black radicals that incited and attracted much of the '60s edgiest violence-Panther is more than a movie. It's the cause of raucous dispute, a chance for opening and licking old wounds about...
...Lincoln, a film portraying the difficulties of family life in the segregated South. The well-developed characters showed that stories about African-Americans could be done without reducing the complexity of their lives to easy formulas. As the glitter-ridden elevator-shoed '70s dawned, the seminal "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" sparked what would become the Blaxploitation era of filmmaking. Since then, Black film has gone on to be characterized by mainstream stars such as Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and more recently by independent filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, Spike Lee, Ernest Dickerson, Julie Dash, John Singleton...
Harvard Film Archive--Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song directed by Melvin Van Peebles at 7 p.m. $6.50. Paths of Glory directed by Stanley Kubrick...
...Baadasssss, as in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which Melvin Van Peebles (Mario's father) made in 1971. Sex-sated and X-rated, Sweetback trumpeted the bustling era of blaxploitation films. Their heroes were no lilies of the field. They dealt drugs (Super Fly) or tracked down drug dealers (Shaft). Short on artistry but long on verve, these violent epics were significant for the same reason they remained, in every sense, a minority entertainment: they were movies made not only for blacks but, often, by them. African-American filmmakers had kicked their foot through the industry's back door...