Lakeith Stanfield – Christian Sauvé

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-07-272023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, July 2019) At a time when nearly every Hollywood movie seem scripted by computer and assembled mechanically (yes, even the good ones), it’s refreshing to see a film that strikes out on its own, offering pugnacious social criticism and heading in narrative directions that you wouldn’t necessarily guess from the opening scenes. So it is that writer-director Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You is a surreal, ambitious, flawed and immensely likable debut. It starts as a silly comedy in which a young man gets a telemarketing job in order to escape poverty. But there’s a deliberately overdone style to let us suspect that there’s far more here than a straightforward comedy. Indeed, the cinematography of the film, the various clues about an indentured-servitude megacorporation and the film’s growing themes of dehumanization show us a slightly alternate version of reality where everything is for sale, starting with integrity. The protagonist, played by the likable Lakeith Stanfield, only finds success on the phone after finding his inner “white voice,” but it only gets much, much wilder than that, to the delight of some and the chagrin of others. By now, I’m such a Tessa Thompson fanboy that every new movie with her feels like a gift and she doesn’t disappoint here as a visual artist who ends up being the (slightly hypocritical) voice of reason to the protagonist’s gradual ascension through corporate ranks. There are tons of celebrity cameos here, but many of them are audio-only. The weird sense of humour of Sorry to Bother You is delightful (if not always controlled), especially when its scabrous nature illustrates a sharp criticism of pervasive capitalism. The mixture of high and low humour is fantastic, and makes much of the film’s heady themes seem far more accessible. The strong pro-union message of the film is particularly likable — (North-) America can certainly use some of that these days. Sorry to Bother You is certainly odd, divisive and too weird for some and I like it a lot just for that: the science-fictional surrealism on display makes for a welcome change of pace from mimetic realism, and I admire the audacity of aiming in that direction. I certainly have my quibbles with the final act (and specifically its ending) but I’d rather not change a thing than lose this very peculiar vision. Science fiction comedy, political satire, strong actors and audacity—what’s not to like?

Movie Review

Death Note (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-08-252019-07-28 Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, August 2018) There has been a lot of criticism aimed at Netflix’s Death Note movie from fans of the original anime, but the irony is that for viewers coming in fresh without knowledge of the film’s inspiration is that Death Note, taken by itself, is actually not bad—it feels like a throwback to the kind of high-concept horror movies circa 1995–2005. Something like Idle Hands, perhaps, or more specifically the first Final Destination. Consider this: A teenager gets possession of a book in which he can specify who will die and how. From that simple premise stem a few complications: a bloodthirsty demonic personification of the book coaching the protagonist or maybe trying to take over his soul; media attention toward a sudden slew of high-profile deaths (as, naturally, our hero scribbles all sorts of high-profile criminals in the book); a genius-level detective tracking down what he thinks is the source of those mysterious deaths; and the inevitable romantic complications of a high-schooler getting his hands on life-and-death power. I understand from the numerous complaints that the anime is better, smarter, stronger, faster and possibly tastier than the film adaptation, but as a first-time viewer I don’t have much to complain about: while Death Note does tie itself up in logical knots in trying to fit the premise in a two-hour movie, it’s intriguing throughout, and ends with a nice fillip that shows more imagination than the usual horror film confrontation. Nat Wolff is fine as the protagonist and Lakeith Stanfield is interesting as Detective L, but it’s Willem Dafoe who seems to be having the most fun voicing demon Ryuk. Director Adam Wingard leads the material competently, but he’s a bit stuck with the original material—even newcomers such as myself can see the compromises made in order to distill it to a movie and whitewashing it to American audiences, although my suggestion would have been to run even rather away from the source material in the hope of ending with something that doesn’t feel like a half-baked compromise between weird source material and the requirements of a self-contained movie. Until the sure-to-follow sequel presumably addresses some further plot threads, I’m relatively satisfied by the result—which is probably what Netflix aimed for when it backed its production.