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