Review of Sorry to Bother You (2018) by Bjemailxxxx — 15 Jul 2018

This movie falls flat on so many levels. I felt like it was the result of a group of Millennials, locked in a room throwing out individual scenes, and laughing hysterically at the thought of each. By the way, these individuals have always been told that everything they have ever done was amazing.

They have never been told that they created crap, and if they did, their parents (or some adult in the room) fixed it. I love, absolutely love surrealist art and satire (Dali, Jarmusch, and Rodriguez are favorites).

One of the elements of both surrealism and satire is subtle absurdity. This movie has none of that, in fact it looks to grab every social warrior cliche and up-chuck it in our faces. It gets 2 stars because of the lead's earrings, which are beyond huge (really yooooouuuge) and always carry some social justice sentence subtitle, just in case you missed it in the trite words and images flashing across the screen.

The art work is also very nice, and some scene set ups, that is the background scenery is also very interesting. However the movie does not work as a cohesive movie moving from scene to scene with an actual integrated story.

At first we really care about the characters, because they are likable, Opening scenes are good. then we realize we could have watched paint dry for 1hr 45min and gotten more intellectual stimulation from that exercise.

Next there is the offense factor, I'm not some old biddy clutching the pearls, but the F bomb is used as an adjective. Now that is the way it's used, if you ever take public transportation, at least in the NYC area, however you hope there is at least an entertaining story in between the F bombs.

The F bomb is not where the offense ends, as a black person, we all know when there are times that you get a better response in speaking very clearly, and dropping all signs and residue of colloquialism.

However increase this by a power of 1000 for the movie. It's in the commercial with Danny Glover, so this is not a spoiler. The over the top high five scene is guffaw worthy if you have ever seen this go on for a interminable amount of time in real life, which I have.

However offense comes in really trying force making race an issue, when it's not. The gratuitous use of the N word as well as the word booshe (bourgeosie). Any black person can be shamed by being called part of the bourgeoisie, or booshee, noted by virtue of living in a comfortable clean, well furnished home, having a comfortable car, and dressing nicely (without necessarily dressing urban).

Clearly (based on social justice rules) all black folk should be part of the struggle, and not have the best they can afford. They should ascribe to some socialist vision of giving their excess to the guy who doesn't get up for work at 5:30am every day, and who doesn't work 2 or 3 jobs.

That guy deserves it. Next offense, 'the man' and his capitalistic ways, making money and making people work like slaves, while promising them a better life. When they can have him taking care of them.

Wait is that 'the Welfare'? But I digress, let's keep our focus on evil corporate America. Next offense, gratuitous use of woman in her underwear, or otherwise levels of undress. I could not understand why the lead Tessa Thompson is basically only in varying styles of underwear for most of the movie.

This is off-set by a performance art display (for no apparent reason) where she is all but naked. She is then pelted with various items, include red dye filled water ballons. Why? We don't know why.

The movie doesn't know why. Oh the offense goes on to a scene where rap is reduced to literally two words, one is the N word, the other begins with S and easily describes this move. However our lead is gleefully cheered on by a crowd of white individuals who repeat the refrain for like 2 minutes of the movie.

Why? Well we don't know why, I guess that is the satire part, because I can swear I saw Jay-Z do the exact same thing, with the exact same words. Or may that was N word in Paris, that is one more word.

All this foo-foo-la goes on. Why? well it's very profound you know. A statement about where we are. Let the people revolt! Stand up against the man! Don't be a booshee sell out! Don't be a slave to capitalistic ideals! The ending, well now we are somewhere where the main focus seems to be to zoom in, or otherwise comment on the male member.

That is not to even mention the scene where people are in various states of copulation for no apparent reason. I'm a fan of Dali's Jeune vierge auto-****par sa propre chastete, so that's not subtle, but this movie, is inane, in turns not funny, not clever.

Not insightful, does not say anything about today's culture, misses the mark There are so many better things you could do with your time, like wash your car, or pull weeds from the yard or sit at home and pick your nose (that's my not humor humor).