StrucciWatch: Sorry to Bother You Review *re-upload*

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!

If you enjoyed this video,
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keep making videos like this one.

Thanks!