Comedy Archives - Page 10 of 77 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

BlacKkKlansman (2018) – Blu-ray + Digital

November 13, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
written by Charlie Wachtel & David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee, based on the book by Ron Stallworth
directed by Spike Lee

by Walter Chaw Colorado Springs is a big, modern, beautiful city. It's home to natural wonders like the Tolkien-sounding Garden of the Gods and the Cave of the Winds. Its zoo, perched on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, is world class. Spencer Penrose built a shrine to his friend Will Rogers on that same mountain when Rogers died in a plane crash. Cheyenne Mountain is also where NORAD is housed, and Colorado Springs is also host to the United States Air Force Academy and, once upon a time, Focus on the Family. It's an ultra-conservative city just south of blue Denver, which is itself south of the trust-fund hippie commune of Boulder. And for a few years starting around 1925, there was no greater stronghold for the Klan in the United States than in Denver. In 1978, Ron Stallworth became the first African-American police officer hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department, and then the first detective when he went undercover to infiltrate a Kwame Ture speech at a black nightclub. In 1979, he answered an ad hoping to establish a chapter of the KKK in the Springs, posing over the telephone as a man who hated every non-white race, but especially "those blacks." A white counterpart attended meetings while Stallworth eventually gained the trust of then-Grand Wizard David Duke. Duke reached out to Stallworth recently because he was concerned he was going to be portrayed as a buffoon in Spike Lee's adaptation of Stallworth's memoir, BlacKkKlansman. I mean, if the hood fits… If there is one indicator of involvement with cults like this, it's deep-seated insecurity. It bears mentioning that Denver's old airport, Stapleton International Airport, is the namesake of five-time Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton, who was a high-ranking member and, until the end of his reign, vocal supporter of the Klan. The airport is gone, but the neighbourhood that replaced it still carries his name.

FrightFest ’18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

November 7, 2018****/****, 2018, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Interviews, Lebanon, New Zealand, Revenge, Short Films, South Korea, Spain, Thriller, UK, Vampire

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

October 28, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Espionage, Romance

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Justin Theroux, Sam Heughan
screenplay by Susanna Fogel and David Iserson
directed by Susanna Fogel

by Bryant Frazer The Spy Who Dumped Me is a lot–femme-centric rom-com, violent action-thriller, dopey spy farce, and genial paean to friendship in the face of adversity–and director Susanna Fogel revels in the tonal disparities from its opening sequence, which intercuts an enthusiastically mounted, bullet-riddled chase scene set in Vilnius, Lithuania, with scenes from a birthday party for Audrey Stockman (Mila Kunis), a 30-year-old grocery clerk who’s just been blindsided by a break-up text from Drew Thayer (Justin Theroux), her boyfriend of one year. The party’s been organized by Audrey’s devoted pal Morgan (Kate McKinnon), an aspiring actress whose ceaseless shenanigans help blunt Audrey’s sadness. It quickly becomes clear that, somehow, the guy hiding out from Lithuanian thugs in the gloomy, desaturated espionage thriller is Drew himself. When Morgan grabs Audrey’s phone and sends a text calling him a “worthless nutsack” and promising to “set his shit on fire,” Audrey gets a returned phone call from that other movie, in which Drew beseeches her to reconsider. Fogel keeps this up for a solid 10 minutes before the film’s title appears on screen, and it’s an intriguing overture.

BHFF ’18: The Cannibal Club

October 18, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror

O Clube dos Canibais
***/****
starring Ana Luiza Rios, Tavinho Teixeira, Zé Maria, Pedro Domingues
written and directed by Guto Parente

by Walter Chaw Guto Parente's The Cannibal Club is satire served grisly, sexy, slick, and unsubtle, an update in theme if not form of Paul Bartel's still-unsurpassed Eating Raoul–a fable of the class struggle eternal as the 1% literally feeds, as it is wont to do, on the other 99. The more things change, and all that; it's instructive to revisit Eating Raoul's opening narration about Hollywood, which seems to apply equally to every group of monkeys in pants: "Here sex hunger is reflected in every aspect of daily life…where random vice and amorality permeate every strata of society, and the barrier between food and sex has totally dissolved." For Parente, Bartel's murderous–and eventually cannibalistic–marrieds the Blands are Gilda and Otavio (Ana Luiza Rios and Tavinho Teixeira), a rich couple living on a sprawling estate in Fortaleza, Brazil, who go through an alarming number of low-income workers together. The young men are provided by an employment agency, seduced by the lady of the house, and at the moment of climax, murdered by Otavio (who's been jerking off in the wings), butchered, then eaten. Otavio is also a member of the titular club, where the hoi polloi of Brazilian corporate culture gathers to watch a graphic sex show that ends in the murder of the chained couple, who are then, likewise, served up in the Brazilian fashion: on skewers, shaved at the table. There's a hint of Peter Greenaway in that.

Summer ’03 (2018)

September 30, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Comedy, Coming of Age, Teen, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Joey King, Jack Kilmer, Andrea Savage, June Squibb
written and directed by Becca Gleason

by Alice Stoehr Jamie (Joey King) sits beside her grandmother's deathbed as the old woman imparts some wisdom. "There's just one more thing," she says, "one thing in this world that you need to know. No one's gonna have the guts to tell you. I wish I had been prepared for it." Then, after all this build-up, the punchline: "Learn how to give a good blow job." So begins the coming-of-age story Summer '03, with an impish smile on grandma's face while Jamie gapes at her advice. June Squibb plays the the grandmother in a foul-mouthed mode familiar from her work as Bruce Dern's wife in Nebraska. Her character will flatline a few minutes of screen time later, but not before confessing at length to her progeny while "In the Hall of the Mountain King" swells on the soundtrack. She tells her daughter that she once locked her in a closet; implores her young grandson to enter gay conversion therapy; and reveals to Jamie's dad the existence of his secret biological father. Most of the film takes place over the following week, with the family in chaos (and blow jobs on Jamie's brain) as they plan the funeral.

FrightFest ’18: Ravers

September 29, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, UK

*½/****screenplay by Luke Fosterdirected by Bernhard Pucher by Walter Chaw Bernhard Pucher's Ravers features a couple of nice kills, a couple of funny scenes, and a few underdeveloped character things that sap its momentum, robbing it of both a beginning and an end. Germaphobe Becky (Georgia Hirst) is a cub reporter for a no-nonsense editor (Natasha Henstridge) who tells her that in order for Becky to be taken seriously as a reporter for/by this no-nonsense editor, she has to get her hands dirty. Which is a problem for a germaphobe. Becky visits a toxic facility first and dons a hazmat…

American Psycho (2000) [Uncut Version] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

September 25, 20182000s, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Satire

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas
screenplay by Mary Harron & Guinevere Turner, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Mary Harron

by Bryant Frazer Books are often said to be “unfilmable,” but it’s the rare text that can be described as “unprintable.” That was the fate that nearly befell Bret Easton Ellis’s notoriously graphic first-person serial-killer memoir, American Psycho. Comprising mainly page after page of vacuous conversation among young and moneyed Wall Street types and littered with references to high-end brand names, American Psycho‘s internal monologue reveals the wealth-addled mindset of Patrick Bateman, an investment banker and tasteless sociopath who specializes in mergers and acquisitions and expresses himself through hateful diatribes, hilariously wrong-headed pop-culture critiques, and the occasional torturous homicide, described in sickening detail. As the book neared release, publisher Simon & Schuster faced pressure to drop it from both inside and outside the company. Feminists attacked it as a how-to manual for misogyny, murder, and mutilation. TIME published a passage about a woman being skinned, while SPY excerpted a scene describing oral sex with a severed head. S&S’s own marketing department was reportedly queasy, and even the cover designer assigned to the book balked. Then, in November 1990, barely a month before its planned appearance on bookstore shelves, S&S yanked the book from its schedule. American Psycho survived, of course. Knopf picked it up and issued it as a Vintage paperback original in early 1991. But a number of booksellers declined to stock it, and a preponderance of critics excoriated it. Even so, it was enough of a success to catch the attention of producer Edward R. Pressman, who developed it as a feature project for Lionsgate, then an upstart film distributor based in Vancouver.

Telluride ’18: Non-Fiction

September 3, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Telluride

**½/****
starring Guillaume Canet, Juliette Binoche, Vincent Macaigne, Nora Hamzawi
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Walter Chaw The questions asked in and by Olivier Assayas's Non-Fiction are slippery and at times satisfying for that. This is his Hong Sang-Soo following a pair of Apichatpong Weerasethakuls (though he would say his films owe a bigger debt to Bresson)–a movie, in other words, involving the intricacies of relational dynamics, shot on what appears to be a shoestring and a lark over a long weekend among friends. Probably it's what one of his characters calls "auto-fiction," a blurred line between memoir and pure fiction, with the tension being that maybe there's not much of a difference after all between what's true and what's made up in the pursuit of truth. It's one of those movies that seems like a defense of concept, a response or an invitation to conversation for critics. (Assayas himself was one, once upon a time.) Even more, the picture suggests an auto-critical confession of sorts, yet I'm not sure of what. Past or present infidelities? A declaration that he's found peace at last? An apologia for indiscretions and a pathway to a more authentic life? Whatever Non-Fiction is, it's maybe just a little too clever for its own good.

Telluride ’18: The Front Runner

September 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Telluride, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Alfred Molina
written by Matt Bai & Jay Carson & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw In 1988, Gary Hart, the democratic former senator from my home state of Colorado, was the front runner for the Presidency of the United States. About a week before the primary, which would have cemented his ascendancy to a post seemingly all but preordained, this guy–classically handsome, tall, masculine, progressive–did what powerful men in privileged positions sometimes do: he slept with a young woman who wanted a job with his campaign. That’s a problem, but the problem is he dared the WASHINGTON POST to follow him; he touted his ethics and morals as a foundational plank to his platform, and when the MIAMI HERALD took him up on his dare, they discovered that he was maybe a serial philanderer who in those last halcyon days before the Internet, hadn’t learned the voracious appetite the public has for a good, sleazy story concerning the tragic fall of kings. It’s hardly ever the crime–it’s almost always the cover-up. And in 1988, Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner says, politicians weren’t very good at the cover-up. Largely because the press was complicit in helping politicians, athletes, and other powerful men in powerful spheres keep sexual dalliances and abuses quiet. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, after all.

Telluride ’18: The Old Man & the Gun

September 1, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Telluride

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Sissy Spacek
written and directed by David Lowery

by Walter Chaw David Lowery follows up his enigmatic A Ghost Story with this slobbery, open-mouthed kiss to Robert Redford, in his alleged swan song to screen acting. Redford plays real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker, who, in a blue suit and stupid hat, resumes his long career of traumatizing tellers and imparting folksy aphorisms after escaping from San Quentin. Seeing this life as his calling, Tucker was oft-described as seeming "happy," and so that's the tactic Lowery and Redford take towards this material, presenting everything as this bucolic Americana bullshit of the variety the elderly and the elderly-at-heart, especially, get off on and which Redford has made his stock-in-trade in his dotage. The only thing missing is an early-bird buffet as patrons enter the theatre. Tom Waits and Danny Glover play Tucker's sometime-partners in crime and poor Sissy Spacek is enlisted as his gal Jewel ("Well, y'sure look it!") to deliver "good-natured" to the assembled. Yes, Redford, one of the most exceptional and brilliant actors in film history, is now delivering the patented Robert Duvall elderly performance: repeating phrases, smiling in a non-specific way, and patting people's hands as they talk, complete with a wired hearing aid dangling from his ear.

FrightFest ’18: A Young Man with High Potential

August 31, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Germany, Thriller

***/****
starring Adam Ild Rohweder, Paulina Galazka, Pit Bukowski, Amanda Plummer
written by Anna de Paoli & Linus de Paoli
directed by Linus de Paoli

by Walter Chaw The storyline goes like this: Rey, the young woman in the new Star Wars trilogy, is a "Mary Sue"–a term used to describe a female character who is born fully-formed and, therefore, undeserving of her status as the hero of the story, any story. It's an argument made by mediocre men, usually mediocre white men, who have gathered together over social media to share their frustrations about how, essentially, their own worthiness has never been recognized by a world designed, now, to overlook and disdain them. It wasn't supposed to be this way. The parallel storyline is that women are usually murdered by men they know–ex-lovers or spurned would-be lovers–and that the best indicator for murderous gun violence is a history of domestic violence. We hold these truths now to be self-evident. And suddenly these mediocre men who used to get pushed into lockers and demeaned for their solitary interests are the masters of our culture, our industry, our government. There were warnings about this in films like The Last American Virgin and Revenge of the Nerds, remembering that the triumphant happy ending of the latter entailed one of the nerd heroes raping the girlfriend of the lead jock…and the girlfriend liking it a lot. Masculinity has always been this mash of the tragic and the toxic. It's irresolvable, though at least there can be better awareness.

FrightFest ’18: The Night Sitter

August 30, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

***/****
starring Elyse Dufour, Jack Champion, Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum
written and directed by John Rocco and Abiel Bruhn

by Walter Chaw From the first synth chords of Rob Himebaugh's awesome '80s-inspired score; from the first glimpse of DP Scotty G. Field's gorgeous, neon-soaked lighting schemes; from the first look at world-weary heroine Amber (Elyse Dufour), herself a feat of lighting and colour coordination, The Night Sitter announces itself to be a major player. Filmmakers Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco's feature debut, it covers one really bad night in the life of poor, terrified Kevin (Jack Champion). His dad (Joe Walz) a wannabe reality-show host of one of those paranormal shows, hires Amber to sit for him and his girlfriend's (Deanna Meske) horrible kid, Ronnie (Bailey Campbell), leaving them alone with a locked door, behind which are all the demonic artifacts dad's been hoarding throughout his misspent career. That he's a loser is never a question (he times his reel to "accidentally" play for the benefit of pretty Amber), but he's a rich loser–meaning that as soon as dad is gone on his date, Amber calls her friends (Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum, J. Benedict Larmore) to come help her loot the place. Unfortunately, Ronnie has found where dad keeps the key to the demon room.

FrightFest ’18: F.U.B.A.R. (2018)

August 25, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, UK

**½/**** written by Ben Kent & Joel Wilenius directed by Ben Kent by Walter Chaw A lark, and often a good one, in the Very Bad Things vein where murder spoils an evening of debauchery, Ben Kent's feature debut F.U.B.A.R. offers up a twist by setting its shenanigans at one of those paintball courses where people pretend to be zombies for the pleasure of the armed guests. It's a bachelor party for nebbish Sam (Sean Verey), who, saddled with his obnoxious chums, hopes the weekend goes well so he can impress his future father-in-law, Gerald (Mark Heap)--Gerald being an ex-Navy…

Support the Girls (2018)

August 24, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Regina Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, James Le Gros, Shayna McHale
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Angelo Muredda A relaxed, low-stakes counterpart of sorts to Boots Riley's more amped-up Sorry To Bother You, Andrew Bujalski's Support the Girls is about as good as movies about labour, power, and empathy for one's fellow worker get. The marketing materials have emphasized the ostensible hijinks wrought by the film's Hooters knockoff setting, pitching Support the Girls as a more conventionally satisfying ensemble comedy than the rambling micro-budget indies with which Bujalski made his mark–a natural next step, after Results, in his post-Computer Chess evolution into the mid-budget range. Its uncharacteristically glossier colour palette and hooky premise aside, though, Support the Girls is a refreshingly rumpled affair that's squarely in the Bujalski tradition, more than earning its cathartic closing moments of a trio of exploited bar workers' collective rooftop scream into the abyss by taking every opportunity available to be the anti-Garden State: a film that prizes character over manufactured quirk and genuine workaday ennui over dopey existentialism.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

August 8, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
written by Charlie Wachtel & David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee, based on the book by Ron Stallworth
directed by Spike Lee

Fantasia Festival ’18: One Cut of the Dead

August 8, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Zombie

***/****
written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a young woman (Yuzuki Akiyama) running for cover in an abandoned factory, but lo, her zombie boyfriend (Kazuaki Nagaya) proves inescapable, and sinks his teeth into her neck as she tells him she loves him one last time. Then a director (Takayuki Hamatsu) yells cut and proceeds to berate his actress for still not being realistically devastated after 42 takes. When he storms off in a huff, the actors commiserate and the makeup woman (Harumi Shuhama) chimes in with a little lore about the factory involving medical experiments on the dead. On cue, a “real” zombie appears, setting in motion a bloody chase through the studio and nearby woods as cast and crew unleash their inner Ash and struggle to evade the contageous bite of the infected. Lasting 37 minutes and unfolding as a “single” shot, this is a dumb but energetic sequence indebted as much to the climax of Children of Men as to any zombie movie (though particularly Romero’s–the undead are a nostalgic mint green). And then credits roll, and One Cut of the Dead flashes back one month earlier to the inception of what we just saw: a (fictitious) one-off for Japan’s Zombie Channel, also called “One Cut of the Dead” because it was shot live without any editing.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Born of Woman (short films)

August 6, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Finland, Horror, Ireland, Norway, Sci-Fi, Short Films, South Korea, Thriller

by Walter Chaw This is what I believe: I believe that men and women are essentially different and that those differences result in perspectives that are necessarily different. I don't consciously privilege one perspective over the other, but I acknowledge that I am not always aware of my prejudices. I think Wonder Woman would have been garbage if a man had directed it; and I think 20th Century Women, written and directed by a man, had beautiful roles for women. It's confusing and it can be exhausting, but at the end of the day, creating an equal opportunity for women and people of colour to tell stories (whether they're theirs or not) can only be good. So…

Fantasia Festival ’18: Rondo

July 27, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** written and directed by Drew Barnhardt by Walter Chaw Hypehante Drew Barnhardt's sophomore feature Rondo is vile, amateurish garbage that fails largely because it's so pleased with itself. It features narration ripped off in style and intent from Todd Field's Little Children, of all things, giving its set-up a kind of arch distance, but what begins as moderately clever reveals itself to be a desperate way to provide exposition when dialogue, character work, and camera movement have failed. Rondo follows Boone (Grant Benjamin Leibowitz), a junkie crashing on his sister Jill's (Breanna Otts) couch, visiting a sex party…

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)

July 20, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Disability, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Kathy Driscoll-Mohler
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the book by John Callahan
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Angelo Muredda "I'm a sucker for quadriplegic movies," VARIETY critic Peter Debruge wrote of Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot from Sundance, before criticism from disabled activists apparently inspired his editors to do some quiet and uncredited post-publication editing. Whatever its merits as a biopic of an outsider artist–dubious, given the cuddliness offensive of Danny Elfman's insistent score–or a "quadriplegic movie" (minimal, given that its subject, Oregon cartoonist John Callahan, was actually a paraplegic), Van Sant's return to movies people might conceivably care about is at least not so homogenous and tired as that backhanded praise suggests. It's hard to shake the feeling that the film is the belated two-birds-with-one-stone fulfilment of a business deal with Callahan, who died in 2010, and Robin Williams, who first optioned the story and once intended to play Callahan himself. Despite the whiff of old Tupperware leftovers that hangs about it, the film is pleasantly rumpled in the tradition of Van Sant's more interesting work–predictably boring in its rehashing of disability clichés, from casting to writing, yes, but formally unusual, and committed to the repetitive and potentially un-cinematic bootstrap work of self-improvement and forgiveness that movies about addicts and accident survivors tend to sail through.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

July 7, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Armie Hammer
written and directed by Boots Riley

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Boots Riley’s hyphenate debut Sorry to Bother You–it happens in the last third of the picture–that rang so pure and true to me I felt adrenalized, known, inspired. The best art does that: locates that juncture between expression and activism. I felt it during Get Out as I began to recognize the parties where I’d been the only minority guest and somehow also the guest of honour; I hope to feel it one day while watching something about the Asian-American experience. I’d always wondered about the black community coalescing around bootlegs of Seventies kung fu movies, but now I understand it as I find myself vibing to Janelle Monae’s and Childish Gambino’s energetic, pithy counterculture activism. Sorry to Bother You belongs to this moment of crisis. It’s a withering indictment of capitalism and the white ruling class in the United States as it’s metastasized into a machine that’s only ever interested in consuming its weakest, most underrepresented members. The running joke involves prison/work programs dressed up as a way for entire subsistence, formerly middle-class families to sell their lives to the proverbial “company store.” “WorryFree” promises freedom in endless toil. The sign over the entrance to Auschwitz and on the gate at Dachau promised something similar with “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”). In this way, the for-profit prison system in the land of the free is presented for mockery and shame. The idea that the corporate structure in the United States is akin to a prison is raised, too. If films are an empathy machine, this one is the “uncomfortable recognition generator” piece of it. These past eighteen months have been sobering for a lot of my white friends. Sorry to Bother You is a summary of what, until Trump, was easy to sweep under the carpet.