On the surface, Sorry appears to be a standard comedy about how working-class people are getting screwed out of their homes in the San Francisco/Oakland area. Instead I was pleasantly surprised to discover how Sorry is a cousin of Idiocracy. How so? It seems in this parallel universe that Fox is the only TV network people watch because the most popular show is I Got the S#$% Knocked out of Me!, MTV’s Cribs is still a thing (ugh!) and there’s other violent “reality” nonsense. Another element warning you how bad it is, people can sell their rights for permanent housing in dorms to perform menial factory jobs very similar to how it works in Chinese factories.
The main plot involves Cassius (aka Cash), a down-on-his luck Black man taking a telemarketing job selling crap nobody really wants. It’s pretty rough going until he learns to perfect his “white voice” (dubbed by David Cross) which gets him promoted to the upstairs office where the power callers work and make serious money. What Cash discovers is horrifying. The power callers are selling something more sinister than encyclopedias. It would be a spoiler to tell you what it is.
Besides the Idiocracy elements in Sorry and the dubbing of “white voices” for certain Black characters (Patton Oswalt is used too), I liked how reality just goes off the rails in the third act and how Cash appears in people’s homes when he’s making his outbound calls. The latter shows the intrusiveness of these stupid calls pushing crap nobody wants. The final part I loved was when Cash is at a power caller party with all these White people. The host assumes he can rap. Initially Cash politely refuses but the pressure is amped up and what he improvises is hilarious in a painfully, uncomfortable way you might burst out laughing at as I did.
I’m looking forward to the next movie writer/director Boots Riley does. Sorry is a something to entertain everybody, it’s not a “black” movie or whatever some critics dismiss it as. Riley made a satirical dystopian movie which is part of the Sci-Fi family. It just happened to have a Black hero.
Sorry to Bother You
On the surface, Sorry appears to be a standard comedy about how working-class people are getting screwed out of their homes in the San Francisco/Oakland area. Instead I was pleasantly surprised to discover how Sorry is a cousin of Idiocracy. How so? It seems in this parallel universe that Fox is the only TV network people watch because the most popular show is I Got the S#$% Knocked out of Me!, MTV’s Cribs is still a thing (ugh!) and there’s other violent “reality” nonsense. Another element warning you how bad it is, people can sell their rights for permanent housing in dorms to perform menial factory jobs very similar to how it works in Chinese factories.
The main plot involves Cassius (aka Cash), a down-on-his luck Black man taking a telemarketing job selling crap nobody really wants. It’s pretty rough going until he learns to perfect his “white voice” (dubbed by David Cross) which gets him promoted to the upstairs office where the power callers work and make serious money. What Cash discovers is horrifying. The power callers are selling something more sinister than encyclopedias. It would be a spoiler to tell you what it is.
Besides the Idiocracy elements in Sorry and the dubbing of “white voices” for certain Black characters (Patton Oswalt is used too), I liked how reality just goes off the rails in the third act and how Cash appears in people’s homes when he’s making his outbound calls. The latter shows the intrusiveness of these stupid calls pushing crap nobody wants. The final part I loved was when Cash is at a power caller party with all these White people. The host assumes he can rap. Initially Cash politely refuses but the pressure is amped up and what he improvises is hilarious in a painfully, uncomfortable way you might burst out laughing at as I did.
I’m looking forward to the next movie writer/director Boots Riley does. Sorry is a something to entertain everybody, it’s not a “black” movie or whatever some critics dismiss it as. Riley made a satirical dystopian movie which is part of the Sci-Fi family. It just happened to have a Black hero.