![]() ![]() ![]() Nobody ever talked about it, but you’d know what to do. Was that a detail from your days in telemarketing? Yeah. In the film, Cassius hits the jackpot when he discovers his “white voice”. You must have been pretty good at it… Yeah, I’m good at listening to people and figuring out what it is that they’re really saying. In order to get by, I would do telemarketing once every two weeks and make all the money I needed. I was like: “I’ve been wasting my whole adult life being an artist.” So I quit music and started an organisation called the Young Comrades with some friends. All of my heroes, like Fred Hampton, had been revolutionaries when they were 19. Why telemarketing? I had done telemarketing a couple of times, once in college and again after our second album, when I had a 24-year-old midlife crisis. But I didn’t know it was going to be fantastical, that just came up logically when I was putting things into context. I knew the compliment argument – that happened to my brother years ago. I knew the first scene, where Cassius Green tries to pass off a fake reference on his CV, because that’s how a friend of mine got all his jobs. What was the initial spark? I just knew I was going to write something set in the telemarketing world, where the main character has to decide which side of the struggle he is on. Sorry to Bother You was gestating for a while: you released an album of the same name in 2012 and Dave Eggers published the unproduced script in 2014. A large plate of cheese sits between us, untouched for the duration of the interview. Clad in a distinctive red-and-black check suit, he delivers carefully weighed answers in a deep, measured drawl, punctuated by the occasional wry chuckle. Riley, who lives in Oakland with musician Gabby La La and their child, is a genial presence. His persistence paid off: the film was described by the New Yorker as “a scintillating comedic outburst of political imagination and visionary fury”, while AO Scott in the New York Times wrote: “If you’re not bothered – also tickled, irked, mystified and provoked –, then you’ve fallen asleep on the job.” ![]() Making movies was a long-held aspiration – Riley studied film at San Francisco State university and spent years honing the script for Sorry to Bother You. In 1991, he formed hip-hop collective the Coup and went on to release six politically charged albums, notably 1998’s acclaimed Steal This Album. His parents were social justice organisers and their son followed suit, joining the Marxist-Leninist Progressive Labor party at 15. To be sure, Sorry to Bother You is here to bother you, and it's definitely not sorry.Born in Chicago in 1971 and moving to the city of Oakland, California, six years later, Riley was steeped in politics from an early age. Art band tUnE-yArDs provides the haywire music, and Riley's own group The Coup adds a song or two, just to heighten the sense of disarray. And Riley's screenplay keeps taking risky twists, introducing strange new environments and elements, which may settle into a groove on subsequent viewings. It can be exhausting, and even its hero frequently looks simply bewildered, but it's so full of ideas - and so outraged over racism, capitalism, and stupidity - that it's worth a second look, or more.Ĭertainly the movie is raw and unevenly paced, and it sometimes feels more angry than fun, but fine performers like Stanfield, Thompson, Hammer, Glover, and Terry Crews bring much-needed sympathy and energy to their scenes. 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. But others will find it a rebellious mess that's difficult to dismiss. This impossible to categorize movie starts off as a hilarious satire and then veers into territory so unexpected (and queasy) that it may alienate many.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |