I watched this on our local On Demand, from what I understand its supposed to come out in theaters this Friday. I had never heard of the movie until I happened to click on a banner on the side of the page, I believe on the AV Club. In some ways this is an old story: a man, Marcus Washington, played by Anthony Mackie, comes back to Philadelphia in 1976 after a number of years. He returned for his father's funeral. He left because he was a part of the city's Black Panther movement, he was eventually arrested, and the people he left behind, believe him to be a snitch, whose snitching led to one of the local leaders of the Panthers to be killed by Federal agents . Basically he comes back and has to face people and events from his past, and the still open wounds from back then. Like I said, plotwise its nothing you haven't seen before. But it looks nice, and its well acted. This seems to be Tanya Hamilton's featur debut and it shows a lot of promise. Also nice to see are castmembers from The Wire: Wendell Pierce (bunk) as a detective (big stretch) and Jamie Hector (Marlo Stanfield) as a former panther turned sort-of local kingpin. The Roots do a great job with the score too. It being Philadelphia and all, of course they were called upon. But whats interesting is that, and I am not sure if this is done intentionally, but they cover old soul and r&b songs in instrumental, but they also choose songs that became samples for Wu Tang songs. From what I remember they did covers for songs that ended up sampled in "C.R.E.A.M.", "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'" and Raekwon's, "Criminology" Sadly I only recognized them as the samples, and was too lazy to go and check out what the actual songs were. (Perhaps if Tina reads this she can enlighten us.)
-K
No comments:
Post a Comment