Boots Riley
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Connections, in both directions
What starts as a clever comedy involving a guy who discovers an edgy superpower, becomes a crazed science fiction film reminiscent of indie cult oddities like Alex Cox’ “Repo Man.” It’s all very exciting, at least to me, and I’ll bet that I’m not alone.
There are shades of The Twilight Zone and Repo Man in Sorry to Bother You, as well as the classic Eddie Murphy “White Like Me” skit from Saturday Night Live.
Written and directed by Oakland rapper Boots Riley -- his filmmaking debut -- Sorry to Bother You has the makings of a cult film, à la other everything-including-the-kitchen-sink movies such sa Repo Man , Idiocracy , and How to Talk to Girls at Parties .
Instead, it’s a gleeful kitchen sink throwback to the satiric, absurdist, wildly inventive indies of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s like “Repo Man”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Bamboozled”, and “Fight Club” combined with a dash of Mike Judge’s 2006 comic (yet eerily prescient) dystopic fantasia, “Idiocracy”.
It’s like if “Get Out” got all mixed up with “Repo Man,” Robert Downey Sr. and scabrous early Brian De Palma satires like “Greetings” and “Hi, Mom!”
It might be a bit unfair to compare the Bay Area rapper-turned-filmmaker to other directors when he’s so clearly on his own trip, but if you dig the handmade surrealism of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry or the antiestablishment weirdness of Repo Man , then this one is undoubtedly for you.
Riley’s film is a welcome hand grenade of subversive power that often reminded me of another incendiary film, Terry Gilliam’s classic Brazil.
The film, Riley’s feature directorial debut, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this January and has, since then, inspired comparisons to movies like Office Space and Brazil by way of Marxism and Afrofuturism.
He is infatuated with Gilliam (a background paperwork attack echoes Sam Lowry's nightmare in Brazil), and also takes bits from aughts surrealism like Being John Malkovitch and Be Kind Rewind.
But I found myself also reminded of Terry Gilliam's Brazil , and then – just trust me on this – the stop-motion of Ray Harryhausen, as Riley takes his story into Island of Dr Moreau territory.
If I had to sell you “Sorry to Bother You,” the corporate satire/horror film from writer and director Boots Riley, I would say it’s like if “Brazil” starred the lead in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Most easily (if reductively) summed up as Brazil for the woke generation, Sorry to Bother You mixes biting socio-political satire and excellent performances from a varied cast with outlandish imagery and imaginative direction.
Detroit, for example, makes performance art about The Last Dragon (1985), the cult classic martial arts movie produced by Motown kingpin Berry Gordy.
To say any more—like how cocaine, horses and the 1985 Motown-produced film The Last Dragon fit into all of this—is to risk ruining the considerable and utterly unpredictable fun.
For example, there is a long sequence in which Detroit does her performance art—an act that involves her being pelted with various objects while reciting from the hallowed text that is the screenplay for “The Last Dragon”—that must have seemed funny on paper but which pretty much grinds the movie to a halt and just the point where it needs to be building momentum.
Cassius’ upward mobility at work drives a wedge between them, but he’s there for Detroit’s shining moment: an art-gallery show where she recites lines from the 1980s kung fu cult film "The Last Dragon" while attendees throw random stuff at her.
Her gallery exhibition involves giving a near-naked recitation from ’80s martial-arts cult film “The Last Dragon” and urging her audience to pelt her with sheep-blood-filled balloons.
Riley’s left-of-center vision of Oakland takes on more texture with an Idiocracy -style game show where contestants submit themselves to vicious beatings and an experimental art collective that gives way to Detroit getting pelted with balloons filled with sheep’s blood while reciting lines from The Last Dragon .
If Mike Judge’s “Office Space” and Robert Downey Sr.’s “Putney Swope” hooked up after a night of bingeing on hallucinogens, Marxist theory and the novels of Paul Beatty and Colson Whitehead, the offspring might look something like this.
Things go completely haywire once the drug-addled CEO of RegalView (Armie Hammer) arrives with the idea of using Cassius’s gift for selling to push his latest nightmarish venture through—instead of treating this notion as a clever one-off joke, the entire last third of the film hinges on it and transforms what was once smart and biting into a less successful version of those go-for-broke social satires that Robert Downey Sr. used to make back in the day like the immortal “Putney Swope.”
Two years before filmmaker Riley was born, Putney Swope filtered into urban cinemas as a dead-accurate send-up of most of the same attitudes Riley pillories in Sorry to Bother You, with remarkably similar rapid-fire putdowns and cool-but-outraged cultural analysis.
Aspiring to a kind of 21st-century Putney Swope vibe, Riley’s freewheeling comedy doesn’t lack for ambition in either the gag or ideology department; this is a film with ideas about upward mobility, cultural assimilation, and the enduring hilarity—going back to Richard Pryor at least—of black guys doing their best nerdy white dude.
The directorial debut of hip-hop artist Boots Riley reaches into the stratosphere of creative inspiration with utterly bonkers results that are nonetheless crystal clear in their intentions: “Putney Swope” by way of “Dear White People,” Riley’s wacky odyssey fires a zillion different wacky ideas at once, and more often than not, hits its targets.
Mixing the droll comedy of Office Space with the race-backed satire of Putney Swope, and adding an imaginative dash of Michel Gondry (who gets a parody shout-out in an animated bit), at least something in Sorry to Bother You will surely strike a chord with any viewer, even if it doesn’t fully cohere.
With its wide-ranging political targets and aggressive sense of humor—to say nothing of the bold use of color—Sorry to Bother You recalls some of Spike Lee’s most agitated efforts, Chi-Raq and Bamboozled in particular.
Flat as all the inane art-world parody may fall, when Cash is coerced into rapping for his new white friends Riley conjures an incendiary, catch-in-your-throat comic set-piece to rival anything in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.”
Instead, it’s a gleeful kitchen sink throwback to the satiric, absurdist, wildly inventive indies of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s like “Repo Man”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Bamboozled”, and “Fight Club” combined with a dash of Mike Judge’s 2006 comic (yet eerily prescient) dystopic fantasia, “Idiocracy”.
Most of the film, which also has links to Spike Jonze’s "Being John Malkovich," plays like a variation on some of Spike Lee’s more scabrous racial fantasias like “Bamboozled.”
When Cash stumbles into Lift's plan to exploit workers like never before, Riley's satire enters the nightmare realm of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!
After a skin-crawling sequence in which Cassius is forced to “Rap! Rap! Rap!” by a roomful of drunk white partygoers, the narrative takes an O Lucky Man! -style left turn, unexpectedly recalling the cross-generic shuntings of Brian Yuzna’s seminal socio-economic comic-shocker Society .
Instead, I'd like to focus on the overall tone of the picture, which calls to mind Robocop , Time Bandits , Bamboozled , and, perhaps most clearly, O Lucky Man! Lindsay Anderson's fantasy about the compromises one must make with one's own principles (and the natural order itself) in order to succeed in a capitalist society.
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Directed by Spike Jonze
influenced Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Themes Visuals
STBY taps into a glorious cinematic history, joining the ranks of films like Dr. Strangelove, Network, Fight Club, and Being John Malkovich as satirical touchstones that define an era of American history.
After the delirious highs of Get Out , we get the uproarious Sorry to Bother You , which plays like the demented offspring of Office Space and Being John Malkovich.
Instead, it’s a gleeful kitchen sink throwback to the satiric, absurdist, wildly inventive indies of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s like “Repo Man”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Bamboozled”, and “Fight Club” combined with a dash of Mike Judge’s 2006 comic (yet eerily prescient) dystopic fantasia, “Idiocracy”.
The references to Michel Gondry (Mood Indigo) and Spike Jonze's (Being John Malkovich) palette and framing are explicit, and deftly acknowledged.
Though they would be apt comparisons, likening Riley’s film to a Michel Gondry movie or Being John Malkovich won’t get you anywhere near its vicinity, especially once a massive half-man/half-horse penis shows up on the screen (I swear, I am not making this up).
Channeling the existential refractions of Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) as well as the barbed surrealism of Terry Gilliam, Riley sends his movie right off the rails, creating a kaleidoscopic descent into the unreal (and yet hyper-real) nightmare of modern capitalism, American style.
Soylent Green (1973)
Directed by Richard Fleischer
influenced Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Themes Visuals
Billed as a comedy, Sorry to Bother You isn’t particularly funny, but it’s consistently offbeat and original—roughly akin not just to Get Out, but also They Live and Soylent Green, salted with an hipster wit all its own.
There’s a little “Soylent Green” and “Brazil,” The Truman Show” and Karl Marx in all this, and Riley gives this just-past-the-present future the sting of recognition, workers with zero power and no rights facing an economy stacked against them at every turn.
Looking as wild-eyed as Charlton Heston at the end of “Soylent Green,” Cassius goes on TV and screams, “They’re [third-act spoiler redacted], and nobody gives a f—!” Except guess what: Neither do we.
Detroit’s artistic and revolutionary sensibilities remind me of the current incarnation of Nola Darling in Spike Lee’s Netflix series reboot of his 1986 classic She’s Gotta Have It .
I haven’t seen anything like this since the days of She’s Gotta Have It.”
STBY taps into a glorious cinematic history, joining the ranks of films like Dr. Strangelove, Network, Fight Club, and Being John Malkovich as satirical touchstones that define an era of American history.
Instead, it’s a gleeful kitchen sink throwback to the satiric, absurdist, wildly inventive indies of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s like “Repo Man”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Bamboozled”, and “Fight Club” combined with a dash of Mike Judge’s 2006 comic (yet eerily prescient) dystopic fantasia, “Idiocracy”.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Directed by Michael Radford
influenced Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Themes
A phantasmagoria with shades of Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange and George Orwell’s 1984 thrown in for good measure.
In other words, it’s a satire like that combines the contradictions of communism in “Animal Farm” with a caustic look at a modern “1984.”
Lakeith Stanfield (the man who delivered the titular “GET OUT” warning in last year’s most original film) does his best work here as Cassius ‘Cash’ Green, a young man not too sure about what he’s doing with his life.
Jordan Peele ’s revelatory Get Out (2017) framed an African American’s distrust of his own subjectivity—are they going to destroy me, body and soul, or is that just paranoia?—within the conventions of the gaslight horror film.
There are many who have already compared it to Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but it isn’t.
Get Out’s Lakeith Stanfield stars in this gonzo amusement, written and directed by Riley, that surfs genres and mocks its own interior mantra: “Stick to the Script,” or STTS for short.
Several critics have drawn the comparison between Sorry to Bother You and Get Out, which Stanfield was also in for a brief but astonishing moment.
While the Get Out comparisons to Sorry to Bother You are a touch overstated—they both have black writer-directors, elements of horror, Lakeith Stanfield, and that’s about it—both movies appeal to the viewer’s humanity and transform common-sense fears (liberal racism and the ever-growing hand of capitalism, respectively) into surrealist nightmares, the point being that oftentimes, familiar horror can be mined from our own headlines.
Omari Hardwick’s costuming recalls Shaft (1971) and Coffy (1973), a kind of literal pun on blaxploitation movie history and black exploitation in the workplace.
After a skin-crawling sequence in which Cassius is forced to “Rap! Rap! Rap!” by a roomful of drunk white partygoers, the narrative takes an O Lucky Man! -style left turn, unexpectedly recalling the cross-generic shuntings of Brian Yuzna’s seminal socio-economic comic-shocker Society .
Omari Hardwick’s costuming recalls Shaft (1971) and Coffy (1973), a kind of literal pun on blaxploitation movie history and black exploitation in the workplace.
The Holy Mountain (1973)
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
influenced Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Plot
The movie includes, among other things, elements of magical realism, a worker enslavement scheme lifted straight from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, and an insane third-act twist that takes a hard turn into Get Out territory.
In this way, Sorry to Bother You is proudly linked to the deep tradition of visually distinctive and narratively idiosyncratic comedies of cinema history like Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich and Adaptation by Spike Jonze, Robert Altman's M*A*S*H and Brewster McCloud , Terry Gilliam's Brazil , and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove— dating all the way back to the earliest masterworks like Chaplin’s Modern Times .
That razor-sharp commentary echoes the same achievements Paul Verhoeven designed with Robocop.
There’s a hint of Woody Allen in our antihero’s obsession with the futility of his existence (“Baby, can you please not talk about the sun exploding tonight?” pleads Detroit), accentuated by some hilariously literal sight gags that recall the fourth-wall-breaking visions of Annie Hall .
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Directed by Spike Lee
influenced Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Characters Themes
Like Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Cash really only wants to hang out with his best girl, Detroit (Tessa Thompson).
It’s Brazil meets Black Mirror meets Do the Right Thing in equal measure, and one hopes we don’t have to wait long for Riley’s next movie.