SORRY TO BOTHER YOU ***
Boots Riley
2018
IDEA: Cassius Green, a down-and-out black man in Oakland, takes a job as a telemarketer and quickly finds he's in for more than he bargained for when he uses his "white voice" to climb the corporate ladder.
BLURB: In its florid
absurdism, Sorry to Bother You seeks
to unsettle us into a refreshed sensitivity toward the abhorrent social practices that have, especially in 2018, become frighteningly
normalized. Riley’s cracked, defamiliarizing tactics claw away at whatever
complacency or impression of sanity is possibly still adhering in an unraveling
contemporary America. How could our own reality be any more outrageous? What
happens when it stops feeling outrageous?
Sorry to Bother You answers by
refusing to let any capitalist apparatus or form of social control read as less
than otherworldly, confounding, and dangerous. It consistently ramps up the
outlandishness of its universe to the point where nothing seems out of the
realm of possibility, where baffling perversity can be the only analog of our
present day madness. Like any good satire, the real sociopolitical and cultural
conditions it targets remain recognizable through the refracting mirror, but
Riley’s film also argues that those real conditions – corporatized slave labor,
white privilege, commodified violence, a class system – should always seem
perverse. Sorry to Bother You unleashes
a torrent of anarchic comedy and dizzying inventions that astutely channel a mood of dazed disbelief. Its images of militarized police
brutality and worker protests, particularly, bristle with anger and a necessary
spirit of rebellion. If Riley pursues the off-color irreverence of his premise
to a fault, it nevertheless reflects the derangements of a social order to which we should never grow too numb.
