Watch Bastards of the Party For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

Don't Believe the Hype

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I was truly gripped by Bastards of The Party as it aired on HBO yesterday evening (2/25/07) and I recommend it highly to those seeking substantive cultural information on the modern history of gangs, inner-city black life, the history of modern los angeles or the role of government and police in all three venues.The greatest thing that can be said about this film from me is that it brought me one or two degrees closer to a non-pejorative, non-dismissive and non-judgemental understanding of a pocket of human life that I would - in fear and racial difference - never want to understand.Even though myself and 190 million other white Americans may never be tainted with the cruelty and death that has gone on in Los Angeles, this film instructs us that the basic concept of American "justice for all" has gone mad here. And perhaps begin to reveal light about how it's gone mad in the overall....certainly at odds with all the nice inscriptions and beatific monuments found in Washington DC.Time does not allow me to categorize some artistic nuances missed (perhaps a follow up later here) but this is a good cinematic jumping-off point for further consideration of the issue.

Bastards of the Party is a new documentary running on HBO that examines the rise of gangs in the Los Angeles area. It starts out a little slow and seems to be making excuses for the members - the same tired ones you have heard over and over - but it quickly turns into a fascinating historical piece.From the early days when Compton was an all-white area, through the civil rights movement and rise of the US Party and Black Panther Party - it is compelling stuff. The real eye-opening stuff involves the actual demise of the BPP and USP orchestrated by Hoover's FBI. The information about the FBI's CoIntelPro and their efforts to undermine these groups is now public record, what surprised me was the details about how the program started these groups fighting each other.The legacy of the FBI's destruction of the black cohesiveness still survives with the black-on-black crime that is still rampant between these gangs nearly 40 years later. The only downside of the film other than the apologetic start is the left-wing politico-speak that summarizes the film. It is a good history that does an excellent job of giving the facts, when it slips into this type of preaching, it loses a lot of credibility.The final point about gang names versus given names is especially poignant. Good stuff.

Having worked with both Bloods and Crips as a volunteer in Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, I found Bastards of the Party to be a gripping and extremely important work -- setting down the historical record about the rise of gangs in South Central L.A. This should be required viewing in all Juvenile Halls and prisons. And important viewing for anyone who lives in Los Angeles as well!What struck me about the movie is its relevance to the current foreign policy of the United States. The policies of the LAPD and the laws in California, such as "Three Strikes," which fill our prisons to overflowing with black and Latino young men, are in place because they are politically expedient: saying that you are tough on crime is the easiest way to get elected in this city and in this state. I personally know a kid who got a 50 year prison sentence because he was in a car when another kid shot a gun at two rival gang members -- and missed. It was his first felony. Ask yourself, does that punishment fit the crime?There is no more ironclad way to get elected in America than by saying you are "tough on defense." George W. Bush gets criticized for lots of things, but when he says that "Islamist extremists" are out to destroy our children for no other reason than that they hate us, no one contradicts him. Middle eastern Muslims have become the preferred "other" to demonize and dehumanize and fear. I don't mean to minimize the point of this film -- that if L.A. gang members become more self aware about their situation, maybe they can start to move past this cycle of violence that they did not initially create.But I'm just saying that it's happening again now on the world stage. The American government is using the same propaganda techniques, the same agent provocateurs in the Middle East. Do you really think it was an Sunni Arab who blew up the Golden Mosque of Samarra and unleashed this huge civil war? Get real. Now, Iraqis are slaughtering each other by the hundreds of thousands, just like gang members have murdered each other here in Los Angeles for decades. And yes, there is growing movement in this country for us to get our troops out of Iraq. But no one talks about the Iraqi-on-Iraqi carnage that we have been party to.In any case, I congratulate Cle on his work, I hope it increases the peace here in L.A. For every single retaliation that it stops, it saves dozens of lives down the line.

I saw a "screening print" of "Bastards of the Party" at the Tribeca Film Festival.It's helpful to understand the full arc of the documentary as a longitudinal exploration of the roots of gang and police violence in Los Angeles in order to get past the opening section to when the theme is finally declared.The first part is a salute to the Black Panther Party in California in the 1960's that is at first repetition of the usual history and then degenerates further into interviews with self-aggrandizing, middle-aged survivors posturing for posterity in an effort to preserve the images of themselves they want to project as a legacy that becomes my-eyes-glaze-over cliché-ridden rhetoric for the viewer.Then director/on screen narrator/participant-witness Cle Shaheed "Bone" Sloan comes on the screen to explain his thesis and the movie really starts getting interesting - that the gangs of L.A. are the titular descendants of the Panthers. He then proceeds to go through the changes in Los Angeles decade by decade, though not strictly chronologically, sociologically, culturally, economically and politically (as well as very personally) to demonstrate how the current volatile racial situation step by step resulted from the destruction of the Party. It serves as chilling non-fiction background to TV series "The Shield," for L.A., and "The Wire," for how applicable it is to many inner cities across the country.This very much comes across as a story about outlets for testosterone as basic as throughout human history, here channeled in the late twentieth century through the police, politicians, the media and the drug and violence dealing gangs they in some sense created.Rather than focusing on the usual truisms about single mother-headed families, though we do hear some ranting about dysfunctional family clichés, we see what happened to the men in the African-American community from childhood on under oppressive economic and political conditions, though no mention is made of whatever impact the welfare system had, laid out as if it is a passionate Ken Burns documentary on Reconstruction.We also don't hear much about nonviolent alternatives rejected or wasted, because the camera focuses on the most charismatic spokesmen -- even if what they are saying is preening bull for the camera. I think that at a certain point even the director realizes the gang members' strenuous comparisons of themselves to the Panthers sound like delusions of grandeur and self-justification. The older gangsters reflecting on the world they want to make now for their children is touching, as it contradicts stereotypes of African-American fathers in the inner city.But we don't even hear from a woman until near the end as a mother cries about the funeral of her son. And then the funerals mount up, as movingly as any film about genocide.The finale, however, weakens the impact of the film as the director appears on screen as a former gang banger (and in excerpts from TV interviews, such as with Larry King) just as self-aggrandizing as the opening subjects so we start questioning his credibility.The film is also weakened when the changes are explained in left-wing jargon, especially as mouthed by white professors (and it's a shame that virtually no non-white academic experts are interviewed for at least visual balance), though a Senate staffer is very convincing about conspiracies by just factually summarizing a report.The astounding archival photos and videos capture the zeitgeist, especially in striking material from individuals as we see hair and fashions authentically change.The film was executive produced by Antoine Fuque, for whom the director acted in "Training Day," but other credits were missing in the print and I assume some music as the lack of much hip hop on the soundtrack was inexplicable otherwise, particularly as rap gets zero mention in the film as any kind of influence.With the extreme language and images in the film, PBS is not an option as a future outlet.