Sorry to Bother You (2018) Reviews

• Not everybody's cuppa

  rk63142018-09-02

  Wow, there are a lot of people who don't like this movie, and moreover, seem to mad that others like it. Some samples: "I think people who are giving it high praise believe that's just what their supposed to do but the fact is it's just a dumpster fire of a movie." " I RARELY write movie reviews but had to inform people of the facts on this one." "The positive reviews are from movie snobs who think they are smarter than everyone else and recognize brilliance in pure garbage." You get the point. It's almost like we're all supposed to like all the same things now. (In fairness, there were plenty of other reviewers who didn't like it, but said they're glad others enjoyed it. I'm not a movie snob. I'm not a film executive and I have nothing to do with the film except I paid 6 bucks to see it last Tuesday. This is a very surreal satire. It won't be to everyone's liking, but it seems to me that we are getting more and more confused about the difference between fact and opinion. It's not a fact that this movie sucks, any more than it's a fact that this movie is great. These are classically opinions. Me, I like movies that start sort of pseudo-normal and go into bizarre. This is right up my alley. It's a Repo Man for our generation. Genetic engineering, dead end call center jobs, megalomaniacal Bay Area billionaires trying to save the world, race relations and post-postmodern art commentary. It's all painted in a crazy, bigger-than-life science fiction brush. Yeah, it's weird as hell, and maybe ends a little weakly (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, anyone?) but has a method in its madness. If you don't like absurdist humor, or if you don't like movies that are at least semi-overt political statements (especially if the political statement is opposed to yours. Anti-union, pro-business capitalists with short fuses be warned! You should give it a miss and just read the National Review's Ross Douthat's review. He saved you a lot of time worrying your beautiful mind about it.), and if you don't like a dollop of science fiction every now and then, yeah, you're going to probably hate it. But your opinion is still not fact. I liked it. That's my OPINION. Get over it.

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• The WTF Movie of the Year

  Jared_Andrews2018-07-18

  Sorry to Bother You is a strange, surreal, hilarious satire guided by the intentionally unsteady hand of rapper-activist turned debut director, Boots Riley. It dabbles in commentary on media, society, race and working-class issues-so many poignant messages, some more successfully delivered than others. The fearless absurdism will likely distract some viewers from a couple of these messages, but I'm okay with that. I take this wonderful creation much more for its entertainment value than anything else. The messages that do resonate should come through clearly. Riley's story doesn't shroud itself in murky metaphors. It tells us exactly how to interpret the bizarre world he has created. Rising star LaKeith Stanfield plays Cassius 'Cash' Green, a deep-thinker who lives in his uncle's garage with his artistic girlfriend named Detroit (the invaluable Tessa Thompson). It comes as no surprise that a man who goes by Boots would opt to give his characters unusual names. These two are just the beginning. To collect enough scratch to keep up with his rent and put gas in the rusty bucket he drives, he takes a job as a telemarketer. When a wise elder advises him to use "white voice" to improve his sales, Cash starts to rake in the green. After he rises the ranks of the telemarketing world, ascending to the divine status of power caller, he attracts the attention of an eccentric, drug-fueled CEO, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer). His company, WorryFree (a place where employees feel anything but) hides a dark new idea. But when the secret leaks to the public, his stock unexpectedly skyrockets, and Lift is declared a pioneering genius. The rational-minded public undoubtedly opposed Lift's plan, but big business carried on. As union organizer Squeeze (Steve Yuen) explains to Cassius, "if you show people a problem, but they don't know what to do about it, they just learn to get used to it." If you think you have any of this plot figured out, think again. It makes a radical left turn in the third act that will tempt some viewers to jump ship. My advice: stay on board. Even if you don't want to totally buy in, just hang around to see where this new direction leads. The film flies along with such easy energy early, then hits turbulence when trying to figure out how to end this thing. Riley introduces so much psychedelic madness that by the end it's nearly impossible to wrap up the story. But at some point, one must come down from every trip. Even with as jarringly fantastical as it is, in many ways this movie also feels incredibly real. As Riley puts it, he strives to "break down reality to help us better understand it." Mission accomplished.

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• A sharp satire that runs a little too long and takes a bizarre left-turn that will alienate many

  Bertaut2018-12-24

  A paean to the proletariat. A pro-union battle cry. An ideological evisceration of late capitalism. A deconstruction of corporate greed and the concomitant commercialisation of self-worth necessary to succeed. A critique of identity politics. An allegory of institutional racism in big business. A lampooning of Silicon Valley bro culture. Sorry to Bother You, the debut feature of writer/director , is all this, and more. Very much in the key of absurdist fiction such as 's Il deserto dei Tartari (1940) and 's Invisible Man (1952), as well as race-conscious satirical cinema such as and , the film draws more direct inspiration from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (c.1806-1831), , and the work of , , and, bizarrely, . A black comedy/Juvenalian satire/science fiction/horror/magic realist/allegorical character study, it's impossible to classify. Dealing with the obstacles facing African Americans in a white-dominated corporate milieu, and positing that the experience of workers is determined by both labour conditions and race, the film examines labour relations, wage issues, worker solidarity, unionism, mass media, and the dangers of betraying oneself and choosing corporate advancement over friendships, relationships, and personal integrity. Although it's a beat or two too long, and although the spectacularly bizarre left-turn at the end of the second act will surely alienate a lot of viewers, the deconstruction and comic appropriation of code-switching results in a film that is constantly inventive, highly confrontational, and extremely funny. Set in Oakland, California in an "alternate present", the company WorryFree offers food and lodging in exchange for a lifetime labour contract with no wages, a practice which the Supreme Court has deemed legal and not equivalent to slavery. Standing against WorryFree is the radical group "Left Eye", who organise protests and vandalise WorryFree's billboards. Meanwhile, Cash Green ( ) is a telemarketer working for RegalView, who, upon the advice of a veteran co-worker ( ), discovers his "white voice" and rises to the top of the company's food chain. Gradually, however, he learns that RegalView is selling slave labour to WorryFree. Torn between exposing WorryFree and his substantial earnings, Cash's dilemma is exacerbated when WorryFree CEO, Steve Lift (a spectacular ) offers him a $1 million a year contract. However, Cash then makes a discovery that changes everything, not just for himself, but potentially for all of humanity. At its heart, Sorry to Bother is an anti-corporate, proletarian rally cry, something with which Riley has been engaged for decades as lead vocalist for The Coup and Sweet Sweeper Social Club. However, unlike the recent satire , Sorry to Bother You is not especially interested in politics per se, certainly not in the explicit sense of films such as , , or . This is not to say that the film ignores politics completely, rather it approaches the subject obliquely. For example, the country's most popular TV show, I Got the S--t Kicked Out of Me, involves people being violently assaulted by family and friends and then dunked in a vat of faeces, with Riley providing little to no contextualisation (think It's Not My Problem! from , where Bixby Snyder's ( ) catchphrase, "I'd buy that for a dollar", is used as a one-size-fits-all response to every situation). This mindless consumption of meaningless and morally questionable content indicates the passivity of the masses, their critical faculties either dormant or absent entirely (an inverse verfremdungseffekt, if you will). Clips of the show feature prominently throughout the film, allowing Riley to depict a milieu where popular entertainment has reached an unimaginable low. Another example of a pseudo-political aspect of the film are the ubiquitous billboards and TV commercials advertising WorryFree, suggesting the corruption or co-opting of mass media. Riley's focus is very much on economic issues, with a lot of the humour derived from pecuniary-based situations. One of the easiest ways to parse the film is to approach it as a parable about selling out, equal parts polemic and acknowledgement that it's next to impossible not to sell out in some way. Indeed, the last act of the film explicitly deals with the literal dehumanisation of the workforce (and I do mean "literal"). RegalView and WorryFree exist in an economic system built upon impoverishing the many for the benefit of the few, with Riley attempting to expose the importance of a poverty line for the continued functioning of late capitalism. Within such a system, he suggests, it is exceptionally difficult for African Americans to succeed unless they are willing to code-switch. In this sense, although the concept of "white voice" does have a practical function within the narrative, its most salient characteristic is as an object of allegorical satire, a hyperbolic caricature of what African Americans need to do to survive in the Caucasian bro-culture corporate ranks of Silicon Valley; they must literally relinquish part of the self and pretend to be something Other. Aesthetically, the film adopts a visual style obviously influenced by Michel Gondry, and, to a lesser extent, . An especially interesting aesthetic device, as anyone who has seen the trailer can attest, is how white voice is handled - rather than having the actors simply speak in a different voice, Riley instead has the white actors' voices overdubbed; when Cash's friend Salvador ( ) first hears Cash's white voice, he literally tells him "you sound overdubbed". However, the lip syncing is, presumably intentionally, far from perfect, with the voice not quite aligning with the actors' mouth movements. This throws the scenes "off" ever so slightly, creating an extra layer of surreality, and highlighting just how absurd the whole thing is, drawing attention to the lengths these people have to go to achieve real success. The fact that our culture places such value on "correct" intonation is, in and of itself, absurd, like an extreme version of the phone voice that pretty much everyone has, and by failing to perfectly sync white voice to black actor, Riley is able to deconstruct and draw attention to this absurdity. The film's other big aesthetic innovation is having Cash plunge (not especially gracefully) into the living room of the people he calls, desk and all. Obviously, this draws attention to the level of intrusion with which most people greet telemarketers, but, at least in the early stages, it also highlights Cash's own discomfit at being the intruder, seen most clearly when he drops in on a couple having sex. This is an excellently-handled piece of visual shorthand, conveying Cash's internal process, without having him verbalise it at any point. Also impressive is the acting. While the standout performances are definitely Hammer and (playing Mr. _______, Cash's superior at WorryFree), Stanfield certainly holds his own, with his body-language providing a clinic of wordless performing. Early on in the film, he's hunched over and put-upon, his every movement seemingly uncomfortable, as if ill at ease in his own skin. Later on, however, after his promotion at RegalView, his physicality acquires a more easy nature, he carries himself more confidently, as if high-powered telemarketing has helped him to find himself, something which is, in the context of the whole, doubly ironic. And no matter how surreal things get (and trust me, they get very, very surreal), the cast keep everything grounded, as if what they're experiencing at any given moment is the most natural thing in the world. Of course, it isn't all perfect. The wildly unexpected plot twist at the end of the second act will be too much for some people (there were multiple walk-outs at the screening I attended). The film is also just a beat or two too long, and the bottom does fall out to an extent before it reaches its madcap dénouement. There's also a mid-credit scene that serves as a kind of epilogue that I'm led to believe was a re-shoot when test audiences found the initial ending too abrupt. For me, however, it doesn't entirely work, and I would have much preferred the original, somewhat darker, ending. Also, with so much satire and humour floating about, almost by definition, not every joke lands, However, the flip side to this is that when Riley's humour does hit the target, it's sublime - Mr. _______ literally beep-denied a name, for example, or Cash's two-word rap being gleefully cheered by Lift's assembled yuppies. Sorry to Bother You is as timely and relevant as it is funny and irreverent, as progressive as it is radical, and as inventive as it is confident. Exploring the intersection between race and economics from a wholly satirical point-of-view, the film both condemns and sympathises with those who choose to sell-out in some way so as to climb the ladder of success. Now in his late-40s, Riley is a veteran political protestor, a Chomsky-literate agitator, who is here positing that the most significant divide in the US isn't between white and black, it's between those with money and those without. Suggesting that the desire to cross this divide can lead to a herd mentality, the film argues that the labour force must never forget their collective strength, and must never turn on one another, as in such a situation, management will use workers like horses.

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• Starts off strong, ends poorly.

  idennis322018-05-03

  I had high hopes for this movie and it fullfills half of it. I saw this at a special screening in Baltimore Parkway theatre yesterday and I still can't believe how strong the first of the movie is and how it gets derailed so quickly. The movie is about Cassius Green, a man who gets a telemarketing job and rising to the ranks using his "white voice". The concept alone lets people know the film deals with themes of identity. But this theme is tarnished by the big plot twist. SPOILER ALERT: The big twist is that the telemarketer's goal is to mutate workers into horse like beings in order to use them as labor and control them by making them snort this capsule that can be mistaken for cocaine. Sounds silly right? Because it is. None of that made sense literally came out of left field and you have to deal with for the last 30minutes - hour of the movie. And the ending has Cassius turn into the horse like being and come and destroy the big bad guy's mansion. It totally ruins the previous themes and becomes a weird, forced sci-fi movie. It's as if the director wanted to mash Get Out with District 9 together. It just doesn't work. The movie overall is hilarious. Literally the movie is PACKED with jokes from start to finish. The dubbing of the "white voice" is odd as sometimes the actors expressions and the voice don't match up. The animatronics are horrendous like TMNT 3 Bad. But the real crime is how they ditched this really thematic angle of the story dealing with identity crisis and how Cassius is selling out to "the man" due to his greed and traded it for a weird sci fi scene about mutation and how they're making slaves out of us. Although creative, the film suffers from its storytelling and for that it gets a 6/10. There's much to enjoy but you'll end up confused in the end.

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• Despite being amusing and thematically engaging, this is one of the most bizarre, unhinged movies (and third acts) I've ever seen

  andrewroy-043162018-09-29

  Sorry To Bother You is certainly bold and original, and there are good elements, but the third act just makes it feel absurd. The humor is the best part - there are several laugh out loud moments, and the humor intelligently uses the societal backdrop to great effect in its comedy. I was really enjoying it through the first two acts - Stanfeld is very good, and the symbolism of the society in the movie and themes of exploitation and unionization were really well done. As Stanfeld learned more about the society and continued to struggle between his moral values and individual success, the details of the world unfold and the viewer has a lot to contemplate. Unfortunately, the good build of the first two acts comes crashing down in the third act, which completely comes off the rails and cheapens the emotional and intellectual investment of the first two acts. Obviously the idea of horse people and the way it was presented was totally insane, but what really did it for me was Riley's failure to engage the audience in any way with Cassius' attempt to fight back against the company. All of these wild developments happen... and literally nothing changes? On top of being clearly unrealistic, the third act showed enormous inconsistencies in Cassius' character, WorryFree's structure, and the state of society as a whole. The final two scenes in which Cassius becomes a horse really sealed it for me as just completely ridiculous. There are many good ideas worth considering and it's relatively effective as a comedy, but the third act is far too incoherent for it to be a truly enjoyable experience.

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