Sorry To Bother You - Review Thread

Feature film debuts for directors have spanned just about any form of success and failure one can imagine. Orson Welles had Citizen Kane, the most astounding debut ever. Ingmar Bergman made Crisis, the worst movie of his storied career. Martin Scorsese made Who's That Knocking at My Door; a flawed film but one that displayed the brilliant energy and storytelling he would later perfect. It seems that for every filmmaker who debuted with something spectacular, there's another that debuted with something mediocre or even terrible, and yet the latter has gone on to hone their skills and become stronger than the director who debuted so brightly and could never build upon that success. Is there really a blueprint for a debuting filmmaker? Not really, and that's part of what makes first efforts so exciting. We're all eager to crown a shining new filmmaker as the next thing. I find that for anyone debuting their feature, it's not so much important to make a really good film (though that's always nice) as much as it is to showcase why your voice matters in the first place. Not every filmmaker will know their style by then. Welles did, sure. Bergman certainly didn't and wouldn't find it until nearly a decade later. Scorsese did and didn't; that style was there but the skill to put it together wasn't quite then. So it's always going to grab people's attention when a debut is so confident, so bold, so unconsumed with trying to please everyone. The filmmaker making their debut with the summer's brashest film yet is Boots Riley who's crossed over to cinema after a long career in music. Though this is his first film, it's apparent from the opening scene that Riley is a filmmaker in total command of his content and certainly has a style and voice that he boldly puts out there. Few filmmakers have debuted with such confident energy and the loud voice to pull it off, and though not everything of the many things that Sorry to Bother You throws at the viewer end up sticking, Riley has the guts to step into the cinematic world with something you've never really seen before, and that's a debut that anyone would be proud of.

Sorry to Bother You takes place in a present day but alternate version of Oakland, California. Oakland and the Bay Area in general have long been known for their left-leaning activism, making it the perfect backdrop for this politically charged film. The film centers around Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), a guy in his twenties struggling to make his payments and grappling to understand his place within the world. That's fair especially considering that it seems a lot of people in this film are as well, presented by how many have signed up the Worry Free program, which is basically like voluntary prison so that you have permanent shelter, food, and an occupation in exchange for any identity and freedom. Cassius' eccentric artist girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), provides him with the positivity needed to combat his growing nihilism, but she too views society as progressively selling out its interests in return for what's been deemed as the correct way of living. If you don't have the nice home, the car, the self-gratifying job, are you really living? Cassius gets a job as a telemarketer, and despite struggling initially is schooled by telemarketing veteran Langston (Danny Glover) to use his "white voice" in order to land sales. Cassius does just that and finds himself basking in immense success, making sale after sale. While his friends and coworkers attempt to form a union and strike against the paltry working conditions, Cassius finds himself in a sticky situation given his newfound success and purpose in life as he's promoted to the top floor of the building where the "power callers" reside. He's sold out who he is, but he's achieved everything in life that society has preached to strive for. From here on the film continues to shock until it later builds into a third act I did not particularly care for or agree with creatively or thematically, but having said that I'd rather a film take narrative risks that don't work than a movie that plays out in conventional ways and still fails to ignite its audience. The third act will likely alienate a lot of viewers, because even for a film like this where wild surrealism is king, it goes way out of left field for its big finale. But then again, should we have expected anything compromising given how the film had played up to that point? Riley wouldn't stand for it, and though I fundamentally disagree with the choice, I applaud him going for it nonetheless.

Sorry to Bother You is about a lot of issues, and none of them are really portrayed with much subtlety. I don't think the film brings anything relatively new to the discussion and certainly digs its feet firmly into unions good, corporations bad, police states are bad, mindless television is bad, obsession with consumerism is bad sort of thought process. The film throws a lot out there, and the third act largely abandons delving into these beyond surface level interpretations, but perhaps the biggest theme Riley is satirizing here is society's not so gentle nudging of minorities to accept the idea that if you want to succeed in corporate America, you've got to embrace white America as the blueprint to success. It's where the film shines the most, especially in sequences where Cassius becomes so comfortable using it (voiced by David Cross) that he's not even aware it's taken him over. It's a hilarious and yet very sharp critique of the still present racial divisions in America and the biases that permeate even worse in the corporate workplace. This is a movie that has a lot of anger and frustration behind its messages and attacks, and yet it's all done while making you laugh at the clever wordplay, surreal sequences (there's even a Michel Gondry-inspired claymation portion of the film), and absurd characters that Riley has created. As I've stated multiple times by now, the third act is a misfire for me, and unfortunately that also comes at the expense of the comedy as well. Nearly all comedies struggle with the third act the most when they try to inject a lot more drama into the story, but it rarely works because it doesn't feel genuine especially after the first half of the film dedicated itself to comedic situations and plot was such an afterthought. Unfortunately, Sorry to Bother You runs out of steam the more that the film progresses, and it almost feels like Riley is overcompensating on the weird because he needs to continually top himself. It never gets exhausting or repetitive though, which again we can be thankful for Riley not following conventional sensibilities to get his points across. And while many of those points feel pushed aside by the time the wild third act takes over, you have to give Riley credit for attempting to tackle so much in his first feature even if the result is being a case of simply too much to chew. Sorry to Bother You has a lot of flaws narratively and thematically, and despite moments of sheer brilliance (one of the coolest sequences is when Cassius' room "upgrades" itself in stop motion) there are also a lot of things that simply don't work. But I'm far more forgiving of a film and filmmaker that try to challenge themselves and thus the audience than a movie that plays it safe and brings nothing to the table. Whatever anyone's opinion ends up being about Sorry to Bother You, even the most critical cannot deny that Sorry to Bother You is a filmgoing experience unlike one they've encountered before, and coming from a first time filmmaker, that's pretty damn impressive.

7/10

Give this a big ole 'dug it' from me.

I enjoyed the story as a whole but felt it could have had some smoother transitions at times. Kinda Brazil light in some parts, would have liked to see the inside of a worry free spot, enjoyed the acting. Third act delivered for me as far as comedies go.

I wouldn't call it that great of a comedy, def has some parts that had me laughing though. Thompson is great, stanfield is great, hammer delivers, absolutely hate the walking dead dude though. Stop trying to make him and actor.

6.5/10

Sorry To Hate You.

Oh, wait, no I'm not.

I hated this.

I know I'm gonna be in the minority on this, but I don't care.

Look...Boots Riley tried something different, and yeah, I can respect that. But both he and this movie have their heads so far up their own asses, it's not even funny. As a first-time director, Riley shows some definite skill behind the camera and that's hard to deny. However, this also feels like the work of that overeager kid in class who so desperately wants to impress their teacher that they throw every single idea they have for a project at the wall and thinks that's gonna be enough. Sorry To Bother You is a movie that has no shortage of ideas and things to say, but there's just so many of them, that none of them feel fully formed and the film as a whole just comes across as jumbled and unfocused; a random stream of consciousness, in some respects. Sometimes that can be good, but here it's not. And it becomes bizarre for the sake of being bizarre. There's no rhyme or reason for it, just Boots Riley wanting to impress people by showing how "out there" he can get. Beneath all this surrealness, I don't doubt he had a good idea to start with. But the problem is that it gets drowned out so much bizarre stuff, that it becomes less about the message and more about "Look at my filmmaking skills."

Who are you and what have you done with PhantomKnight?

The movie certainly seems to start out with one solid idea that it wants to make a commentary on, but then it just keeps piling on tons of other things that it wants to also make commentaries on, that the central message just gets muddled.  And fast.  It really felt to me like Boots Riley ultimately overreached and on top of that, came off too desperate with all the surreal touches he added in.  I get what he was going for, but it just didn't work for me.