Sorry to bother you
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Sorry to bother you |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2018 |
| length | 105 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Boots Riley |
| script | Boots Riley |
| production |
Forest Whitaker , Nina Yang Bongiovi, Kelly Williams, Jonathan Duffy, Charles D. King, George Rush |
| music |
Tune-Yards , The Coup , Boots Riley, Merrill Garbus |
| camera | Doug Emmett |
| cut | Terel Gibson |
| occupation | |
| |
Sorry to Bother You (. English for "Sorry to bother") is a science fiction - Fantasy - Comedy of Boots Riley that on 20 January 2018 under the Sundance Film Festival celebrated its premiere on July 6, 2018 came to US theaters. In the film, the talent of a black call center employee to make his voice sound “white” ensures his undreamt-of professional success.
action
The African American Cassius lives with his girlfriend Detroit in his uncle Sergio's garage. Out of economic hardship, he takes a job as a telephone seller and notices that he has the ability to make his voice sound “white”. This talent ensures success in his work and makes him a star in his company.
Cassius' call center colleagues begin organizing on the ground floor under the courageous leadership of Squeeze to protest the systematic repression of the company's workforce. Cassius and his girlfriend Detroit, who now also works in the call center, are also involved in a strike. Instead of the dismissal feared by Cassius, however, he receives a promotion and is now allowed to work on the upper floor. The product that the “powercallers” sell there is morally more than reprehensible. These are industrial systems where workers are tied to a company by lifelong employment contracts - a new form of slavery. Thanks to his talent, Cassius is such a successful salesman that he is invited to a party by Lift, the famous CEO of WorryFree.
Relations with Detroit are suffering from Cassius' job. When she staged a performance at her exhibition in which she allowed the audience to throw old cell phones, cartridge cases and blood-filled balloons at her while reciting film quotes, Cassius was unable to see this and interrupted the performance. A public dispute ensues and Detroit leaves it. Cassius then goes to the lifts party.
There the eccentric CEO almost forces Cassius to rap in front of all the guests, with Cassius embarrassing himself. Later, Lift calls him to his office, where he offers him cocaine. Cassius has to go to the bathroom and leaves the office before Lift can explain what he wants from him. In the hallway, however, he takes the wrong door and ends up in a shabby washroom. When cries for help come from the only toilet cubicle and Cassius opens the door, it is not a human being, but a human-horse hybrid that goes to the ground in pain. Horse people also emerge from the shower cubicles and beg Cassius to help them. However, Cassius flees the washroom and is intercepted by the elevator in the corridor. With a gun in hand, he leads him back to his office, where he makes him a job offer. WorryFree came up with the idea of genetically modifying workers to make them stronger and therefore more effective at work. Since these horse people will sooner or later found a union anyway, Lift wants Cassius to undergo the transformation as well and become a union leader, who, however, acts in the interests of Lift. For five years of working undercover, he offers him $ 100,000,000 and the antidote that will turn him back into a normal person. Cassius becomes completely paranoid and says that the cocaine he drew is the transformer and that he will now turn into a horse man too. However, Lift calms him down and assures him that it was pure cocaine.
The next day Cassius tells the story to the newspapers. He is invited as a whistleblower on various talk shows and also meets again with Squeeze, Detroit and the other unionists. Together they organize a strike, but it degenerates into a fierce battle between strikers and armed strike breakers. Cassius becomes k. o. beaten and wakes up in a prisoner transporter, from where he observes that the strikers suddenly get support from the freed horse people and can thus decide the fight for themselves. Cassius is then freed from the van.
Days later, he and Detroit go back to Sergio's garage, where they moved back in. When the gate closes, Cassius hits his nose, but when he takes his hands away from his face, he has horse mugs.
In the last scene, Cassius, who has meanwhile completely transformed, and other horse people storm the Lift's villa.
production
Staff and cast
Boots Riley , who also wrote the script, is directing . It is Riley's debut film. The rapper was previously a member of the hip-hop duo The Coup for 20 years . Riley, who has often told longer stories in his previous songs and linked them together across several songs, says that doing something like this in a film was easier for him than it was with music, and that the creative aspect is the creative aspect been a lot easier for him than writing a song. In a lab at the Sundance Institute, Riley had developed the script with actors and other directors and writers.
In June 2017 it was announced that Steven Yeun , Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield had been signed for the film. Actors Armie Hammer , Jermaine Fowler , Omari Hardwick and Terry Crews were confirmed in the same month . Danny Glover , David Cross and Patton Oswalt followed in July 2017, followed shortly afterwards by Kate Berlant , Robert Longstreet and Michael Sommers .
Costume design
Deirdra Govan was responsible for the costume design . She explained that such a clear but surreal world is created in the film, and Boots Riley's vision was to let the clothes of the people in his film also express this. Govan got most of his clothing from local thrift and vintage stores in Oakland.
In Cassius Green's case, fashion is not initially his priority, he is simply dressed, and an important aspect of his personality is the feeling of being completely with himself. Then he meets Mr. Blank in the film, whose fashion he now wants to imitate and starts wearing pink shirts, but he looks more like he has found the clothes in his father's closet. His close friends see this and tease him about the transformation.
Everything from Mr. Blank's bowler hat to his eye patch should somehow blend in with the dystopian corporate environment, Govan said. About the elaborate earrings that Tessa Thompson wears in the film, Govan says that you had to make sure that they weren't too heavy for your ears when they were made and that they were made with a 3D printer . The clothes of Steve Lift, portrayed by Armie Hammer and the epitome of a billionaire in Silicon Valley, were not in the script. Govan equipped him with a sarong , which she sees as a natural extension of his character as a villain and should make him appear more believable in this role.
Film music and soundtrack
While the actual film music comes from Tune-Yards , Riley's band The Coup contributed the soundtrack for the film. This was released for download on July 27, 2018 by Interscope Records and also contains songs by Janelle Monáe , Killer Mike , E-40 and other artists. In July 2018, Riley's band pre-released a first song on the soundtrack entitled Oyahytt , in which the lead actor Lakeith Stanfield can be heard in the second half. The soundtrack contains a total of nine pieces of music.
The director said in an interview with Max Cea from Billboard Magazine that there are two musical worlds in the film. One is the music that Tune-Yards contributed, which he calls the “musical voice of the film” and comments on what happens in the film. And then there is the soundtrack, which comes from The Coup and expresses everything that happens in the world shown in the film. This music is also what the characters in the film can hear in their world, but not the film music. Riley had worked with Merrill Garbus, the singer of the Tune-Yards, from early 2015. Some of the music was already available at the time of filming. Riley had originally planned to use the music for his 2012 album Sorry to Bother You for the film, as he had already written the script for the film of the same name, but after filming was completed he found that the aesthetics of this music were not matched the movie he'd made. So they produced a whole new soundtrack in the post-production phase. When asked why he thought the sound of the tune yards did a better job of capturing the feel of the movie, Riley said they were from Oakland, they were really cool people, and that he was a huge fan of their music. They used a lot of unconventional instruments and built their vocals in that weird way, which really goes with how they set up the film, the director says.
Filming and publishing
The director made the city of Oakland the setting of the story of the film, in which he was born and lived for 30 years, which is why topics such as rising rents, lower wages and poor career opportunities were real phenomena for him as a black man. Filming took place here between June 22nd and July 30th, 2017.
The film premiered on January 20, 2018 as part of the Sundance Film Festival . In March 2018 the film was presented at the South by Southwest Film Festival. In April 2018, it was screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It was shown as the centerpiece at the Seattle International Film Festival 2018. The film was released in selected US cinemas on July 6, 2018. In October 2018 it was shown at the London Film Festival .
reception
Film genre and comparison with other films
“What if you found out you were living in silent solidarity with the most diabolical villains of all time? Would you recognize it and would you do something about it? "
The Guardian's Grant Pardee explains that the film uses a symbolic narrative similar to the one seen in Get Out : “The only way for blacks to be truly successful in a white world is to be figuratively and literally white " Sorry to Bother You is a post- get-out experience in many ways , even though Riley wrote the script years ago. Pardee goes on to explain that both films are cross-genre horror comedies that take up complex concepts such as systemic racism, oppression, and the black-body occupation of white America. As with Jordan Peele's film, Riley's Sorry to Bother You is a "social thriller," a term first coined by Peele, where evil is not just a person or family, but deep in the roots of society itself, says Pardee. These films asked the viewer: what if you found out you were living in silent solidarity with the most diabolical villains of all time? Would you realize it and would you do something about it? In his film, Riley shows how the various forms of capitalism and the forces that sustain it, how they manipulate, control and ultimately destroy the individual. Although Sorry to Bother You could be understood as an allegory for slavery , the film does not poke around in white guilt, but looks for punch lines and a solution and shows with wit how readily we can ignore the obvious horror on our faces, says Pardee . He goes on to say that the satire feels harder and paler than Get Out , possibly because of its timing .
Reviews and grossing results
The film has so far won over 93 percent of Rotten Tomatoes critics and received an average rating of 7.7 out of a possible 10 points. In addition, the film emerged as the winner of the 20th Annual Golden Tomato Awards in the category Best-Reviewed Sci-Fi / Fantasy Movies 2018 . At Metacritic , a Metascore of 81, based on 47 reviews, could be achieved.
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter says that while the film was made raw and undisciplined, groaning under the weight of self-conscious quirks, he points with originality and crazy creativity.
Mark Hughes of Forbes also says that Riley's directorial debut shows great self-confidence when he chooses a complex approach and spans the characters and the extremely ambitious story. The cast of the film is great, according to Hughes, and Lakeith Stanfield's multi-layered portrayal lets you follow the tragedy and the comedy at every turn , makes the viewer sympathize with the character even if they are wrong, according to Hughes. Tessa Thompson is heroic and fearless, Steven Yeun cleverly portrays Stanfield's would-be rival, and Armie Hammer is the perfect cast as the sleazy CEO who, in the context of his purely for-profit worldview, makes evil plans seem perfectly reasonable and admirable, according to Hughes.
Alexander Friedrich von Filmstarts thinks that the musician Riley had no prior experience as a filmmaker, if you notice Sorry to Bother You especially when the director tries out every imaginable stylistic device: “Vertigo effect, panning, cutting through image cover , Time Lapse - Riley never leaves out any design tool on his debut. This playfulness sometimes seems a bit arbitrary, but still fits surprisingly well with the general hyperbole of the film. ”For Friedrich, the call center is an obvious metaphor for American society, where it is said all the time that performance counts, but in the end it is only the “white voice” that brings Cassius upstairs. In its grotesquely surreal finale, in the last third of the horror film, the film then turns completely off, says Friedrich, and such crazy ideas have not been seen in a comedy from the Hollywood dream factory in ages. The film critic sums it up: "The cynical, bizarre and explosive perversion of the American Dream is one of the most vicious and funniest satires in years."
After arriving in 16 select US theaters, the film posted revenues of more than $ 727,000, or over $ 45,000 per screen, on its opening weekend. The film's total revenue from theatrical screenings is $ 17.5 million.
Awards (selection)
At the upcoming Academy Awards 2019 , Oyahytt from the film is on a shortlist in the Best Song category . The following is a selection of awards and nominations:
Black Reel Awards 2018
- Nomination for Best Director ( Boots Riley )
- Nomination in the category Outstanding Emerging Director (Boots Riley)
- Nomination for the best screenplay
- Nomination for Best Debut Screenplay
- Nomination for Best Actor ( Lakeith Stanfield )
- Nomination as best ensemble
- Nomination for the best costumes
British Academy Film Awards 2019
- Nomination for the EE Rising Star Award (Lakeith Stanfield)
Critics' Choice Movie Awards 2019
- Nomination for Best Comedy
- Nomination for Best Actor - Comedy Film (Lakeith Stanfield)
Gotham Awards 2018
- Nomination for Best Actor (Lakeith Stanfield)
- Nomination for Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award (Boots Riley)
- Nomination for the audience award
Independent Spirit Awards 2019
- Award as Best Debut Film (Boots Riley)
- Nomination for Best Screenplay (Boots Riley)
National Board of Review Awards 2018
- Inclusion in the Top 10 Independent Films
Online Film Critics Society Awards 2019
- Nomination for Best Original Screenplay (Boots Riley)
- Nomination for Best Debut Film (Boots Riley)
Philadelphia Film Critics Circle Awards 2018
- Award for Best Directing Debut (Boots Riley)
- Nomination for best science fiction film
- Nomination for the Grand Jury Prize in the US Dramatic Competition (Boots Riley)
synchronization
The German synchronization was based on a dialogue book by Nico Sablik and the dialogue direction by Tobias Müller on behalf of the Berliner Synchron GmbH Wenzel Lüdecke.
| Actor / original speaker | Voice actor | role |
|---|---|---|
| Robert Longstreet | Michael Iwannek | Anderson |
| Lakeith Stanfield | Arne Stephan | Cassius Green |
| Tessa Thompson | Marie-Isabel Walke | Detroit |
| Kate Berlant | Magdalena Turba | Diana DeBauchery |
| Michael X. Summers | Tim Knauer | Johnny |
| Danny Glover | Jürgen Kluckert | Langston |
| Jermaine Fowler | Tim Sander | Salvador |
| Steven Yeun | Nico Sablik | Squeeze |
| Armie Hammer | Sascha Rotermund | Steve Lift |
| ( David Cross ) | Dirk Petrick | Cassius (white) |
| ( Lily James ) | Giuliana Jakobeit | Detroit (white) |
| ( Patton Oswalt ) | Axel Malzacher | Mr ..... s white voice |
Web links
- Sorry to Bother You in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Sorry to Bother You in the German dubbing file
- Sorry to Bother You - Screenplay for the film by Annapurna Pictures (PDF)
- Sorry to Bother You in the program of the Sundance Film Festival (English)
- Sorry to Bother You - Official Trailer from Annapurna Pictures on Youtube (Video, English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mike Floorwalker and Andrew Handley: The most bizarre movies coming out in 2018 that will melt your mind. In: looper.com. Retrieved December 29, 2018.
- ↑ Shawn Setaro: 'Sorry to Bother You' Creator Boots Riley Talks Moving From MC to Moviemaker. In: complex.com, June 25, 2018.
- ↑ a b Max Cea: 'Sorry to Bother You' Director Boots Riley on Working With Tune-Yards and Breaking the Rules of Soundtracks. In: billboard.com, July 13, 2018.
- ↑ Anita Busch. Tessa Thompson, Lakeith Stanfield, Steven Yeun To Star In 'Sorry To Bother You' . In: deadline.com, June 15, 2017.
- ↑ outlookindia.com
- ↑ deadline.com
- ↑ deadline.com
- ↑ Bronwyn Isaac: The costume designer of "Sorry to Bother You" tells us how most of the film's iconic looks are thrift scores. In: Hello Giggles, July 26, 2018.
- ↑ a b filmmusicreporter.com
- ↑ punknews.org
- ↑ hiphopdx.com
- ↑ a b Zama Mdoda: 'Sorry to Bother You' soundtrack features Janelle Monáe, The Coup, Lakeith Stanfield and many more…. In: afropunk.com, July 17, 2018.
- ↑ hiphopdx.com
- ↑ a b Grant Pardee: Sorry to Bother You: is Boots Riley's new film this year's Get Out ?. In: The Guardian, July 20, 2018.
- ↑ 2018 Sundance Film Festival: Feature Films Announced . In: sundance.org, November 29, 2017.
- ↑ Program of the Sundance Film Festival 2018 . In: sundance.org. Retrieved January 13, 2018 (PDF; 258 KB)
- ↑ backstage.com
- ↑ comingsoon.net
- ↑ bfi.org.uk
- ↑ Sorry to Bother You . In: Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved February 6, 2019.
- ↑ https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-sci-fi-fantasy-movies-2018/
- ↑ Sorry to Bother You at Metacritic (English)
- ↑ David Rooney, 'Sorry to Bother You' Review . In: The Hollywood Reporter, January 20, 2018.
- ↑ a b Mark Hughes: Review: 'Sorry To Bother You' Is Relevant, Necessary, And Hilarious. In: Forbes, July 13, 2018.
- ↑ Alexander Friedrich: Sorry To Bother You. In: filmstarts.de. Retrieved December 29, 2018.
- ↑ boxofficemojo.com
- ↑ Academy Unveils 2019 Oscar Shortlists. In: The Hollywood Reporter. 17th December 2018.
- ↑ Erik Anderson: 'Black Panther,' 'Beale Street' lead Black Reel Awards nominations. In: awardswatch.com, December 13, 2018.
- ↑ https://moviesonweekends.com/2019/01/03/bafta-film-awards-ee-rising-star-announced/
- ↑ Pete Hammond: Critics Choice Awards: 'The Favorite' 14 Nominations; 'Black Panther' A Marvel; 'First Man' rebounds; 'The Americans' Leads TV Series. In: deadline.com, December 10, 2018.
- ↑ Ramin Setoodeh: Ethan Hawke's 'First Reformed' Leads Gotham Awards Nominations. In: Variety, October 18, 2018.
- ↑ Independent Spirit Awards: 'Eighth Grade,' 'First Reformed' Among Best Feature Nominees. In: The Hollywood Reporter. 16th November 2018.
- ↑ Zack Sharf: National Board of Review 2018 Winners: 'Green Book' Named Best Film, Lady Gaga Best Actress. In: indiewire.com , November 27, 2018.
- ↑ 2018 Awards. In: ofcs.org, December 26, 2018.
- ↑ Erik Anderson: Philadelphia Film Critics: 'ROMA' Best Picture, Barry Jenkins Best Director, Viola Davis Best Actress. In: awardswatch.com , December 8, 2018.