Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King, February 12, 2021) Movie • Page 5

Great insight into how he prepared for his role as Fred

 

Saw this last night, cried after the movie. Today I cried twice thinking about it, or the events that occurred. It’s fucked up.

 

Has anyone in here read The Jakarta Method? Not directly related to the BPP, but similarly discusses how the US intelligence community worked behind the scenes to shatter lives and movements abroad.

 

yes. as an Indonesian and Socialist i highly recommend.

 

Welp

 

Looking forward to seeing this.

 

By the way, the level of effortless charisma and menace Lil Rel has in his five minutes of screen time is really something.

 

Yeah that was a highlight - extremely dialogue driven whiplash

 

I thought this was pretty good. Not great, but worth a watch.

 

Malcolm X family demands reopening of murder investigation

 

Kaluuya was fantastic in this.

 

Finally watched this last night, blown away.

 

Lakeith was doing career-best work in this. I rewound the safe house scene three times to see him do that forced laugh when Sims talked about killing the rat

 

Got around to it & loved it. Excited to finally read some of the opposing takes, really been holding off

 

This was just okay. I think one of, if not *the* big problem, is that the POV we view everything from is O’Neil. So the core conflict isn’t a political one, it’s an internal conflict of a man snitching for an org he seems to know isn’t actually bad. Yet as the epilogue shows, the real O’Neil seems to be deeply confused and politically incoherent himself, and the filmmakers knew this going in. Did he only ever do it for himself? Did the message of the Panthers come to resonate with him? Did he actually care about Fred on some personal level?

I think the film knows that they don’t have the answers to all of that, and as a result they hesitate to try to really flesh out those internal contradictions in an interesting way. So the fictional O’Neil comes off as a somewhat generic story of a snitch — he had no ideology and got wrapped into something much bigger than himself (two things really - the Panthers and the FBI), and at the end of the day as much as it pained him to hold responsibility for deaths, he did it for his own sake. But then the real O’Neil gets shown talking about how he was out there participating in the movement, as if he wasn’t the one who helped destroy the movement. And it feels like there is a whole aspect to the story that was not properly explored.

Plus at the same time, the film *wants* to spend a lot of time on the political conflict that the Panthers were engaged in and all the notable historical anecdotes of the time, because it is obviously very interesting and the main reason people want to learn about the Panthers lol. So a good deal of the film isn’t much about O’Neil at all. It’s about either the fight between the Panthers and the cops, or about Hampton himself, who is portrayed as a person who has already done all the growing he will ever need to do.

As much as the historical record does show that Hampton had bounds of charisma and talent, the film seems to reflexively buy into that mythos and never comes close to touching the idea that maybe Hampton wasn’t literally a “Black Messiah,” but a human being like anyone else (maybe not like ANYONE else, but I have a hard time believing that someone like Hampton, who so deeply believed in the masses as a force for good, would appreciate being put on the kind of pedestal that this film (and countless leftists throughout the years!) has placed him on). The only times it even tries to touch on this is through his relationship with Johnson, but again the conflict there is entirely within Johnson - she is the one who struggles over how much her and Hampton’s political life endangers their private life. Hampton never has any sort of hesitation there

 

I agree with almost all of the points that you bring up, but I strongly disagree that this was just okay. I don’t see many of the issues you raise as flaws really, which I think is the huge distinction in our different feelings on the film.

In regards to the character of O’Neil, I feel like the filmmakers realized that they couldn’t definitively know for sure the detailed intricacies of where his true loyalties lay, if they were amorphous, if they evolved over the period of time the film was set, or if he was really an opportunist acting simply in his own best interest in each and every moment. I think if he were alive today and you asked him, I’m not 100% sure you could trust the answer he would give. When they show the real O’Neil talking at the end about the movement, you have to remember that was a man who clearly had very complex feelings about what he had done back during that time which had been affecting him for years, he probably wanted to present his actions to the world and himself even in a certain light - whether that accurately reflected how he felt back then or not - and he literally killed himself right after that interview. I also think this ties into one of the other criticisms of the film, in that these actors are all around 30 years old or so, versus their late teens, or 20. In reality, O’Neil was just a kid when all of this happened to him. This situation would have been fucked up for a 29-year-old person like LaKeith Stanfield, but it would have been even worse for a 17-year-old. The film could have provided much more concrete answers in typical Hollywood fashion, but I don’t think that would have necessarily been better. I suppose that could be a cop out on my part, but who knows. The more I reflect on the film’s handling of the O’Neil character, the more I appreciate the extremely difficult needle the filmmakers threaded with the character.

Also, I do much prefer when narrative films involve significant actual historical characters but don’t try to tackle their story head-on as a straight-up biopic, so this was right up my alley. I think it is extremely difficult to do a biopic well as a narrative film – the scope is just too much. Obviously there are examples that prove me wrong, but there are a lot of examples that reinforce this. If this movie tells a good story and gets people interested to learn about the actual real Fred Hampton and the accurate history of this time period from better, more comprehensive sources than a two hour narrative film than it did its job.

 

Yeah this is a huge takeaway for me too. There’s obviously a lot that this movie *didn’t* do, but I love that it doesn’t try to put any of its components into a two hour box like that. Instead, it uses the familiar cop/rat storyline as a more palatable way to shed enough light on its subjects and generate interest in its audience to learn more if they don’t know already. In terms of being a snapshot, it’s pretty effective imo

 

It’s both enraging what the FBI did to O’Neil/him selling out the Black Panthers and profoundly sad the pain he must have been living with for years, living in protection, knowing that he caused the deaths of people close to him.

And just to be clear, I believe he killed himself after the PBS episode aired, not the interview. It was his second suicide attempt that day. I think he knew after doing that that he’d never be able to have a peaceful existence.

 

There are not many movies that show the pure, unadulterated evil of the American State as clearly as this one did. For that alone, I think it rocks.

 

100000000%

 

That’s it’s strength. The character work could be stronger.

 

excited for how weird his campaign is gonna be haha

 

One of the best aspects of the movie is how Plemons’ character just becomes a bigger asshole as the movie continues.

It’s easy to imagine a weaker movie giving him some kind of redemption moment, or even just a moment of him having second thoughts on if he’s really ‘the good guy’ but nope. He just doubles down on being an asshole. It’s perfectly done.