It's wonderful
when you get to have the
privilege of experiencing art
that is so unapologetically itself!
And wonderful to watch the dawning of
a new, powerful, wholly original voice
in American filmmaking.
If you wanna have that kind of experience today,
you should go out and buy a ticket for Sorry to Bother You.
There's a precarity inherent to filmmaking, especially when we're talking about more
experimental or unconventional filmmaking, where there's so many elements that have to align
for a movie to be this good, and work this well,
while also retaining so much honesty and so much weirdness.
A lot of films with this strong of an ideological push and with this sort of message
try to coast on it and go for easy jokes, or an easy stock narrative;
or refuse to indict anyone except for a central villain.
This film does not take any of those well-worn paths.
Like, don't read about this movie's plot.
A black man goes to work for a telemarketing company.
" - You were a telemarketer years ago; - Oh, yeah.
- what did you draw from that, I'd like to hear the - Oh, yeah.
- pitch you give as a telemarketer. - Well I sat in my cubicle and
vowed revenge, and so, this is part of it."
"I like to tell stories about...
folks in jobs that we take for granted.
And about how those worlds have the same amount of drama
and the same amount of adventure
as other worlds that we glamourize in film."
And feels pressured to affect a "white voice" in order to succeed there.
"There is no white voice. All of this stuff that we're doing
is a performance of some sort. And the mythical idea of the white voice
is this one where there are no problems – where you got your bills paid,
you never get fired you just get laid off. And that's like
the performance of whiteness for some folks is like <
I'm middle class.>> - (chuckles) yeah.
That sort of a thing that is almost the opposite of the racist tropes of black folks
which are that we're savage and all our problems – our poverty
comes from bad choices that we make. So the opposite of that
- is this mythical white voice we - Right.
sometimes have to put on, in order to survive."
That's the basic premise. That's all you need to know.
This movie is wild and my experience would have been diminished
if I'd had more than the memory of seeing a trailer months back,
or the encouragement of a bunch of people I know, who loved it,
in my head when I watched it.
"I don't wanna tell you too much about the film, because
a lot of it are things that will take people by surprise.
I would rather them only knowing that and going in."
Know that Sorry to Bother You does have the skeleton of the movie you have
in your head when I talk about telemarketing and code switching,
but it's expressed in such a fun, creative, explosive way
that also doesn't hold back at all politically, or in how dark the film's sense of humour gets,
or how strange the plot gets.
I don't know when the last time I left a theater, this energized and high on the experience, was.
I felt a lot with Hereditary, but that was a downer and,
while it was perfectly made, it didn't have the wild experiments
with film form this movie has. Or the ingenuity, or creativity.
Sorry to Bother You is also fiercely unapologetically leftist.
"How does Sorry to Bother You fit into that picture of organizing.
I mean, it must be very interesting for you as a well-known, anticapitalist
- artist and organizer, to na- - Communist.
- ..., communist-marxist, to- - I don't know, Marx didn't he say
- ..., communist-marxist, to- - something like <>?
- (snickers) - something like <>?
- (snickers) - Yeah, so...
It's so brutal
and unusual
in its satire. Especially satire of racism
and of class exploitation in a way that I don't know if I've ever
seen in a film before.
If you care about daring experiments in film form; if you care about art
that examines racial oppression; if you care about capitalist exploitation;
if you want to laugh a whole lot and if you want to see a movie that somehow
handles very current, very serious topics yet doesn't go for cliches or for
dour humourlessness and leaves room for surreal experimentation and brilliant slapstick,
then you should go check this out.
"The background, the life that I've lead outside of art
has not really been allowed to be a big influence on film in the last,
you know, bunch of decades, so I've felt that telling a story that,
infused some of those ideas of struggle and movement-building
into a film would be great and I've got a strange sense of humour
and I like to force people to listen to me."
"And it's funny because movies don't usually deal with that,
even though its something that... They don't usually deal with the stuggle
that's happening; rebellion is edited out of the worlds that we create with our movies,
Unless it's like 300 years from now in some world we can't relate to.
But what's happening now is the product of us ignoring what's been going on for
a long time and that's us living in this system – it comes from the economic system that we're under.
And this film does deal with race, but it deals with race as it intersects
with the economic system we're in."
Very very slight spoilers here, but the key complaint I've had with
Sorry to Bother You was that the "white voice" ADR at times could have been done better.
I know it's called attention to in the film and obviously a lot of the film's humour
is derived from the incongruity of the white voice and the character's
actual normal speaking voice, but there are a couple of moments where
the way the actor's head was positioned, or their body language, or whatever
didn't match the ADR well, to the extend that it was kinda distracting.
And I know it's not supposed to match 100% and I'm sure they were fighting a bunch of
technical limitations and, again, I know a character says another sounds
overdubbed as a metajoke, but with so much attention to detail
and so much work put into this film, I wish there had been a little more time
spent on this specifically.
That's a small technical complaint though, in the face of a film that's fun and
biting, and daring. and with a first-time feature director,
and on a budget of only about 3 million dollars.
"I started out in film school,
before I did music,
and having so many strange ideas that I though would be hard to get funded.
I actually finished writing it in 2012. Then, I did an album inbetween that
so I set it down.
December 2014 - I ran into Dave Eggers from McSweeney's and
I let him read the script and he published it as its own paperback book.
So, since then I've been trying to get the movie made."
It's really incredible what writer-director Boots Riley accomplished here.
"I'm ambitious in the sense that I want to make great film,
so I have some fear that it's just a film.
Had I known how much work this movie would have been,
I would have written a movie about two people
sitting on a couch and breaking up. You know?"
I was cackling at a lot of the jokes and references
and I felt so invigorated by the ingenuity on display.
Without any details, there's a scene where a character moves
from one living situation to another. And the way that the move is communicated
kind of stunned me in its creativity.
Not to mention a ton of other small moments told in fun and creative ways.
It's such a unique aesthetic experience;
It's a challenging and engaging experience formally and intellectually.
And it's weird, and gross, and brutal, and funny.
"What do you think people are gonna walk away from this movie with?
- They're gonna walk away with about 18 less dollars. -
- They're gonna walk away with about 18 less dollars. - I was just thinking that (laughs).
But you will have thoroughly enjoyed yourself and, perhaps, if you're the thinking type,
you may reflect, but it's not required."
" - I mean, I think there's an optimism - Yup.
that comes throught this movie:
- that, even though the world is messed up, - Yup.
that there is a way to change it. There's an analysis that shows that
the people can do things like withold their labour
and, you know, take hold of things and there's an optimism that comes from that."
If you in any way tend to enjoy the works that I tend to enjoy
or if you just generally want something new
and something different and something leftist
definitely go check it out.
Thank you for watching!
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Thanks!