Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Milton Green Not only is this a great glimpse into the life of an extraordinary complex black revolutionary, but this is was masterfully written and played. Roger Smith gives a performance of a lifetime. I amazes me how is Roger Smith is able to portray Newton as a charismatic yet derelict leader, author, and theorist. It is a shame that Smith isn't being more recognized for his hard work and talent. For one man to possess this much talent and not be a mainstay in the entertainment industry is beyond me. Kudos to Spike Lee for bring this play to the small screen. Spike brings many visual elements to a stage play with one man sitting primary in one stop the entire time. It can be easy to become board when watching a performance with a stationary figure, but Lee is able to capture the viewers attention with vivid images and camera angles.

jzappa A chain-smoking Huey P. Newton lights one cigarette after another, his mouth so dry that you can hear the sound of his tongue hitting the roof of his mouth. The film is one extended monologue of Huey's inner mind, concluding with an entrancing shadow boxing dance by Smith to Ballad of a Thin Man. Something really is happening, even if we don't know what it is. Identity and difference propel the "narrative," as per director Spike Lee's usual, given his desire to represent the real.To be sure information is imparted about Huey as if he were still alive, with allusions to President George W. Bush. Looking back, he passes judgment on Eric Clapton's '80s cover of Bob Marley's hit I Shot the Sheriff but today likes rap, and loves Vincent Price. With his thigh-shaking, cigarette-puffing manner, Smith cultivates Dr. Huey P. Newton who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Black Panthers at UC Santa Cruz and was killed in 1989. It's helmed by the first filmmaker that would come to anyone's mind to direct this material, Lee, the relentlessly socially conscious filmmaker known for tackling issues of Black American identity and racial politics as well as autobiographical themes. But in the grouping of New Territories, the film's well-placed in terms of subject but as a film it's a filmed staged production and fails to be ground-breaking.Were we fearful of having our bourgeois advantages taken away? Was it unfounded fear? Were they gun-toting terrorists or just one of several collective, anti-capitalist, anti-racist movements? Or was the left-wing politics simply window dressing for a colossal, radical trend-propelled deception? Well, you won't hit upon resolutions to many of these questions in this TV adaptation of Smith's one-man show, but you will get an impressive illustration of a man every trace as complicated and multifaceted as the movement he co-established. As depicted by Smith, Newton is at first withdrawn and tenderly soft-spoken. But as he loosens up, the words come out in a hurried, capriciously connected deluge. Newton seems incapable of standing from his chair, but he's like a restless child and can hardly stay seated. Assured in his cleverness and with a flair for poetry, he's inclined to overstatement and blatant BS, using to excess and squandering terms like "existentialism," trying to make an impression, sweet-talk or alarm his audience into worshipping him, then slipping into bizarre, droll asides on race, politics, philosophy, Shakespeare, mythology and music.Researchers have found that TV programs that feature black characters can influence both how young black viewers see themselves and how others view them. And Huey's clever, time and again rather uncanny, and undoubtedly distressed. He's somewhere between the most profoundly sharp underachiever you've ever met and that guy talking to himself at the bus stop. Smith gives an extremely impressive, tremendously physical performance entailing the severest, most persistent cigarette smoking I've ever seen.Regardless, Spike Lee uses whatever tools he can to make this more than a plain transcript of a stage play, including blue screen effects and documentary footage. The prison-like set further underscores the acute remoteness of Huey Newton, who spent years in solitary confinement. In contrast, Lee's tendency for extreme close-ups that cut off parts of his subject's face and body merely functions to dissociates us from this enigmatic character. In the end, I'm not sure I know where the stage ends and the real Newton begins. But maybe that's the point.

healnghanz I have never seen a performance of such rich intensity in a one man show. The actor became Huey P Newton, brought back to life, became him, alive and living as him now, not as a history of him, but actually is him. You are challenged by him, and in his interaction with the audience, you see people being moved, no shocked out of their lethargy, and back to the essence of the dream that the black power movement represented. The black power movement that I was never allowed to see. Through the filtered media, in which we are spoon fed half a dozen stories a day that fit some kind of prescription for complacency and helpless outrage designed to keep us watching but doing nothing, Huey sucked on a Kool, chain smoking them as he spits out bullets of truth like tears and laughter. You feel the tragedy of his loss, which is our loss. And its an outrage that I never got to know him. He talks about the fact that the FBI felt that it wasn't the guns that were the main problem with the black panther party, but when they started to feed the poor, that was when they were really considered to be really dangerous. That had to be stopped. this show contains a thousand of these stories, that tickle and lacerate you, they revise your history. he slaps you in your face and you are so grateful to be awake and alive. when he cries you cry for him, for you and for everyone that missed out on what was trying to be accomplished. Martin Luther King wasn't the whole story of the civil rights movement. If it were, then how come his death was followed by the mass incarceration of black people in this country, and the crack epidemic, and the implosion of the inner city and its schools. Whoever shot Huey , it wasn't a drug dealer, no you know who it was. You know. The waited, they bided their time and they took him out. WE took him out because he was right, and when he became right and true it became intolerable. In our society, the truth needs to be destroyed because the truth ushers in change, and when change comes in, and the lights go on, the people making billions and trillions off of the misery of others will do anything to prevent that change from happening. Thats why we are looking to burn oil at the moment we understand global warming. Thats why we are pretending to create democracy in Iraq. We wont tackle the real issue of finding alternative energy. We don't have the courage to create full employment and the result is that we have given our destiny over to countries like china who makes deals to provide slave labor to transnational corporation's like walmart so that we lose all our jobs in exchange for cheaper and cheaper good. Our lives are disintegrating, and our politicians are as morally bankrupt as they are expert in manipulating our fears. We have replaced our factories with prisons. Higher efficiency means cheaper goods but meaningless service jobs at MacDonald's. We are in a state of perpetual undeclared war so that there is a rationale for watching everyone. We are turning, imperceptibly, into what the soviet union was. We live in gated communities that are not unlike versions of feudalistic states back in the middle ages. soon walled cities will be back with us. 40 million people have no insurance while doctors make half a million dollars a year. hospitals are going broke but they pay their executives half a million dollars a year. we spend 63 billion dollars to fix up new Orleans but the people are still living in the dark while halliburton fixes pipes, not people. the black homeless people from that disaster cant get jobs rebuilding their city because the clean up companies will only hire illegal aliens who are dirt cheap. Huey P Newton is not dead. He lives on. He lives on every time we get outraged at what is happening here in America. Wake up, the walls are crumbling around you. Huey! Huey!We are Huey! Remember what the old African said. You is We.

arkman The most enlightening work I have ever seen on the era. I now have insight into the revolution. Never before did I even come close to understanding the dynamics of the conflict or the leader of the Black Panthers. Every american must see this to begin to understand one of the most major problems this country has. I could not peel my eyes from the screen. Unbelievable performance by Roger Smith. Spike Lee has a knack for finding these incredibly draining performances and bringing them to you in a way that makes you run the gamet of emotion as well. This as well as FREAK! by John Leguizamo, both present two VERY different performances with VERY different meanings, both pull you through a full gauntlet of emotion. Incredible works.Do the tighten-up Make it mellow