SORRY TO BOTHER YOU (dir. Boots Riley, 2018)

enjoyed it overall, kinda agree with flappy bird that the movie's eyes were bigger than its stomach, but there were enough stylistic flourishes and great moments (big and small) that i was able to mostly ignore the tossed-off plotlines and loose ends.

Haven’t seen this yet, but I’ve seen obvious comparisons between this and Get Out, with the reviewer making the caveat that Peele was more sure-footed due to filming genre exercises for years before he made his feature.

Gunna try to get a group screening together with a bunch of local DSA folks later this week.

there were at least two really funny parts in this movie that my audience didn't react as voraciously as me but idk if we should post spoilers yet

it's a racial/social satire that veers into magical realism, like Get Out, but i don't think the comparison does favors to either film.

not really haha funny but i thought it was 'huh' funny that i couldn't tell david cross and patton oswald's voices apart. i feel like they got into sumo wrestling poses and volleyed impressions of each other until they converged.

why was the dude with the eyepatch's name bleeped out

he was voiced by Patton Oswalt right?

it's a racial/social satire that veers into magical realism, like Get Out, but i don't think the comparison does favors to either film.

― ant banks and wasp (voodoo chili)

it's kind of a tonal mess. it veers from racial/social satire (white voice), to magical realism via Repo Man, to Brazil/Infinite Jest dystopia, to horror at the end, to straight up rom-com (boilerplate relationship arc between Cash and Detroit, also the scenes with her and Squeeze go nowhere). the world building is not done well, scenes in the bar & outside at the strike feel like a completely different (more realist) universe than stuff in the office or the news/fake TV shows, or everything else later on. I also think there's a lot of extraneous dialogue & scenes that go on way too long and throw off the rhythm.

don't get me wrong though, I liked it a lot. my criticism stems from frustration that imo this could've been a masterpiece or a modern classic, but it falls on its face and the momentum is really uneven. it's so close to being amazing. but obviously a semi-failed experiment will always be more interesting than a well done, 'safe' film.

maybe my favorite line: "Look, this trophy shows me two things: you have initiative, and you can read. You're hired."

i wasn't as put off by the second half, but i will agree that the first half of the film (the more grounded, telemarketing related half) was far superior, and i found myself missing the characters who were in the beginning of the film (mainly jermaine fowler and terry crews, but also the office drones and "team leaders")

*who were prominent in the beginning

yeah i totally agree, first half was much better.

"Get a room!"
"I have a room, motherfucker!"

Maybe the movie needed to be deliberately worse like Freddy Got Fingered to convincingly assert that its gluttonous lurching was the truest expression of itself.

STBY is trying to do something more serious & less unhinged and personal than FGF, I don't see any similarities between the two.

"Loved the dystopian TV stuff, but damn, y'all only have three channels in the future?"

who wants to pay for cable when you have a phone

It definitely feels unhinged and personal. Pretty similar narrative thrusts, too. Unwilling male lead coerced into adulthood via workforce participation, bizarrely succeeding.

Nice to see this actually made a little money this weekend - seems like the sort of movie that could have easily flopped and disappeared quickly.

This is one of Annapurna's first few films as a distributor it seems, which I'm kind of surprised to learn they haven't been in that business for longer.

(they also publish video games now)

Huh Annapurna is distributing the next Bond movie too

It definitely feels unhinged and personal. Pretty similar narrative thrusts, too. Unwilling male lead coerced into adulthood via workforce participation, bizarrely succeeding.

Nice to see this actually made a little money this weekend - seems like the sort of movie that could have easily flopped and disappeared quickly.

also per Eric Hatch’s point in his recent essay about ‘safe’ arthouse habits giving way to stuff like Get Out & I Am Not Your Negro & Moonlight being huge ‘unexpected’ hits, this movie hit at a really good time

There's some funny and pointed stuff in this -- Lakeith Stanfield is very good -- but about 40% of it falls flat or meanders.

I liked the music! Have never listened to The Coup.

Music was great. And LOUD. Also, anecdotally, I went to another movie tonight and there was a line out the door for STBY.

well i especially noticed in the bar scenes that the b.g. music was absurdly low, to the point where i was fully conscious of the actors doing their dialogue with no on-set track at all.

a bunch of the score was by tune-yards

yep

agreed about the shonky world-building (it is really hard to connect a world with Worry Free to a world with 2018-style labor struggles in a telemarketing office - wouldn't they just fire everybody and replace them with Worry Free? if this company is also in the kind of business we ultimately see upstairs, why would it even care about the normal telemarketing downstairs?). would add as a gripe that the gender politics are pathetic --- it fails the bechdel test outright, and the detroit-squeeze pairing raises shades of "male character loses sexual fidelity of woman, marking his low point." (also distracting given what we've been told about squeeze's sex life, in the film's worst and most tonally off joke.) buttttttttttttttttt i am glad this movie exists. the good kind of shaggy and unfocused i'd say. putting tons of stuff on the table. new metaphors and images that people are hungry for, for a bunch of different pressing issues. big, bold, eager. i wish i'd had this to chew on as a high school junior instead of just bulworth and wag the dog.

oh and bamboozled obv.

o wait that was 2000

i didn't get the sense the movie was interested in world building as much as it was trying to show what present day oakland looks like.

The key Stanfield-Hammer scenes were among those that needed tightening, but Armie had one hilarious line reading: "I'm not insane."

worry free is a standin for wework, no?

i didn’t find it hard to connect the worryfree world with the low wage telemarketing one - it seemed clear that worryfree was new and trying to aggressively expand, cf that scene with the freshly cleared out housing tracts, and a la so many development efforts that start off like a house on fire and reap the uncritical press attached to the business world, and the telemarketing efforts were connected to that expansion and would probably be swallowed up by it eventually.

hey, everyone doesn’t have a tesla but it still gets a lot of press.

that's fair!

amazon too is a model here. or at least the way it’s been expanding

oh def, I really assumed workfree was mainly about conditions in amazon express-shipping facilities and so on. arguably the lifetime-contract thing is what the movie really gets wrong: the trend is towards making labor more disposable, part-time, and precarious, not locked-in for life.... not a major problem tho. i do wish hammer got a line about like "hey these people all signed contracts, it's an equal agreement" or w/e. big part of that whole ideology that cd be made explicit.

but again since the movie (usefully) has its mind on so many things, it'd be unfair to expect it to be a perfectly developed drilled-down satire on all of them. the one sold in the trailer is the one it does best: what white people want to hear and see black people as being, and people trying to maintain their ethical and personal centers despite the dehumanizing qualities of this racism joined with the power of capital. the pairing of detroit's performance piece and cash's unwilling rap pays this off particularly well even if it seems oddly unfair to the detroit character. (and then the attempts with varying success to mobilize performance/imagery/white-assumptions strategically also fit in this frame...)

i thought it was more hooked into the wework apartment buildings (which seem more friendly because of the demo they're pitching to)
https://www.welive.com/

wow, i somehow hadn't heard about those! yah good connection.

yeah here's a piece on it

https://www.gq.com/story/inside-welive

I know this script got developed through the Sundance Lab, but they let Riley down imho. The romance and the triangle situation with Squeeze were played much too straight, and padded this by at least 10 minutes.

I don't know if Detroit's cellphone/Year of the Dragon performance piece was sposed to be bad or not... I've seen much worse.

y'all have some real dumbass pickyass pettyass grievances with what is essentially a hyperstylized satire

"this scathing critique of the horrors of late capitalism doesn't even pass the bechdel test" is some real "alexa what is neo liberalism"

I think we get that! but the execution fell flat (and i'm not talking about the sci-fi twist, that saved the last act for a little while). xp

the action climax went on way too long and i felt the audience enthusiasm being sucked outta BAM. I liked the last scene and the coda fwiw.

"i felt the audience enthusiasm being sucked outta BAM"

the essence of Emeril

again, i liked the film plenty! i'm really glad i saw it and glad it exists! i still think it's worth marking really underdeveloped/served-as-an-accessory female characters in what is getting bandied around in the conversation as the year's wokest movie or whatever. professional critics have also observed this problem, while praising the movie overall.

the Last Dragon performance - - - i think it's a reasonably complex scene where you could simultaneously see detroit's intentions and cash's reaction. i don't think it's "supposed to be bad" (though it kinda is - reminds me of doonesbury pastiches of early 80s performance art).... but i do think that it's significant that it's the one scene where we see detroit using her own "white voice," and - - - - sorry i feel like i would get into spoilers to really spell it out, but it's basically directly before the 'rap' scene and they're both about groups of white people basically being reassured that some form of performed racism/abuse of the performer is totally okay and they they audience have been invited to do it by the black performer so hey we're all cool right?? and then we have this universe's version of "i'd buy that for a dollar," or the big memeification of violence subplot, and at a meta-level here we have this movie, a comedy, about black characters suffering... blah blah blah, just saying i think her performance piece is supposed to both a sincere piece of her larger radical praxis (which as we've seen covers a few different kinds of activities), and deeply enmeshed in the economics and power structures of this world..

iirc she uses her white voice in the telemarketing boiler room too

Detroit’s white voice was really funny and pointed

Anybody else catch “Both Sides Convenience Store”?

I didn't. Was trying to keep up with the changing earrings gag.
do you think tessa thompson is better developed here or on westworld?

Trump is a byproduct of the same economic and social conditions that drove this film. I see above that Riley wrote the screenplay during the Obama administration, but when did this movie go into production?

Principal photography began on June 22, 2017, in Oakland, California and concluded on July 30, 2017.

Met a (white, decently well-off) lady this weekend who hated this movie for how "dystopian" and "negative" it was, lol

since Riley is saying in interviews "Trump has already pushed Dems to the right" I don't think he tailored this to who's in office.

But the equisapiens were just about to kill the bad guy--it's very uplifting. (xpost)

Maybe she thought Armie was the good guy.

Armie is very definitely an on-the-nose portrayal of a certain type of startup dude who goes to Burning Man every year

more like up the nose right

finally caught this last night, theater was pretty full!

lots of good one-liners throughout... "that's CLEARLY an OLIVE door"

the strongest callback/influence I felt in it was the movie How To Get Ahead In Advertising, same uncomfortable mix of dead end capitalism and horror/surrealism

"maybe the artist is being literal"

Tonally it's a mess isn't even criticism anymore -- it's description. The social protest scenes were written, not felt too. Armie Hammer was simultaneously perfectly cast and too on-the-nose, although his nose was perfect for the coke sequence (directed too broadly too; many of the performances could've benefited from hitting the obvious notes). Didn't care for the early office politics scenes: too familiar, especially the De Bauchery joke, har har.

But the connections between telemarketing and an plutocratic global Octopus made sense, and the fantasy stuff >>> realist scenes.

should have put "tonally it's a mess" in scare quotes

yknow I liked STBY but I'm mostly excited about the fact that it seems to have done well enough that Boots and maybe some other filmmakers of the far left will actually manage to get shit funded a little more often. ultimately I found the politics more resonant than the filmmaking, though it's not totally graceless or anything

i loved this

this was really good.

the equisapiens freaked me out

it needed more wildcard moves like the equisapiens, instead of the umpteenth parody of performance art.

the performance art is significant for the contrast with direct action also carried out by Detroit, and each one's potential for changing minds (in various directions)

the union/labor stuff was the most banal and should've been excised or tackled differently

How much time/money was spent on the Michel Dongry short? That was great.

A beautiful mess of a movie, probably my favorite thing I've seen this year. I even kind of like how unfocused and underdeveloped some of the ideas are

Anybody else catch “Both Sides Convenience Store”?

― devops mom (silby), Tuesday, July 17, 2018 9:17 AM (three months ago

That is actually the name of the store. It is called that because it has entrances on two streets. I bought cigarettes there on the reg at my old job

oh that's awesome, I assumed it was a Repo Man style world-building detail

Lol no. Inconveniently, it doesn't sell alcohol, but I think it's partly due to licensing issues and also the people who run it are Muslim

A while back (like 10-15 yrs ago iirc) there was a series of incidents where Black Muslims would go into Arab Muslim-owned convenience stores that sold liquor and like threaten them and criticize them for selling alcohol and poisoning the local black community

How much time/money was spent on the Michel Dongry short? That was great.

It was, but it completely horrified me! That part where the view pans up and you get a Simpsons-esque view of between the floors, and it just looks like flesh and bone...ugh. Such a little detail but important. The whole film seems to be about flesh in one way or another, pretty obvious given it’s about capitalism. The most popular tv show is about people being subjected to horrific physical abuse, the Worryfree system is buying whole families of people to farm out for labour, Detroit’s piece involves her exposing her body while the audience injure and stain it. The equisapiens are designed to improve on the inherent weakness of human flesh etc.

I’m going to feel really silly if I get this on Blu-ray and find out that’s not what it was meant to be at all!

Other things I liked:
- obvious but still funny shot of Lift with both republicans and democrats, just to rub it in
- the worryfree ads increase in scale and frequency to where they’re telling people to sign their whole families up. Maybe children are better at putting together high end electronics? It reminded me of that black mirror episode about the bike farms where families are separated.
- lift says worryfree isn’t slavery because there’s no coercion or violence but cassius’s uncle is considering signing up in desperation he’s going to be made homeless and his diabetes is playing up.
- the cribs parody with the dead-eyed workers was great and reminded me of those creepy fake amazon worker twitter accounts
- whole film looked amazing

Anyway this comes out this week in the UK I think?

Looks like it. Kermode loved it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQkloGDZjSY

Liked this a lot.

Kermode's review is so plodding, drawn-out, obvious and lifeless. Was he always like this?

Blindspotting is the fleshed out sociopolitical realism that STBY veers into in between the heavily stylized genre stuff

Really? Including the magical-realist ending of rapping at a killer cop while you're holding a gun on him?

Well not that part lol.

I was too charitable to Blindspotting, which no one will remember... it is milquetoast in comparison to STBY, which remains a mess, but a memorable one, and it hits highs that Blindspotting never does.

"I'm a Virgo" out on Prime today - looks weird!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSyKhFwEo7c

Watched the first episode. The attention to detail in the little burger boxes, Cootie's stitched-together clothes, the innocent, Ted-Theodore-Logan way he talks, it's all great. The only thing giving me pause is that I'm sure something terrible is going to happen and I don't want it to.

Weird, I was just watching Carmen Ejogo in True Detective (s3) so looked her up seeing her in this trailer - had no idea she was British and previously married to Tricky!