"Sorry To Bother You"

     What happens when a struggling single mother, a heart-broken plumber and 32 desperate undocumented immigrants run into each other in a Northeast Philadelphia condo complex?

"Equal and Opposite Reactions"
By Patti Liszkay
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"A Rollicking good yarn."
-R.Bruce Logan, "The Narrative Arc"

"Sorry To Bother You"

    Movies, movies, everywhere, but not a one  that I felt like seeing.
    Still, it was Friday night, go-out-to-the-movies-night for cinephiles such as myself, as is Saturday night, too, and sometimes even Wednesday or Thursday night in the rare week when the local cinematic pickings happen to be good and plentiful, as they were not particularly this past week.
      But before giving up and surrendering to the idea of spending Friday night going for a walk or reading a book, or scrounging through Netflix or conversing with my mate, who is, nonetheless, a good conversationalist and current on everything,

... I scraped and scrolled one last time through all the local theater listings, and opted to try a movie  called "Sorry to Bother You" that I hadn't paid much attention to when it came out last week because it looked to me at first glance like a stock  mainstream comedy.

    Boy, is this movie not a stock mainstream comedy.
    "Sorry to Bother You" is more of a...well, I don't know exactly how to describe it...maybe a brilliant, hilarious, horrifying, metaphorical, metaphysical, realistic, thought-provoking, cautionary comedy that's really only half cautionary, the other half depicting what's already happening in our country.
    "Sorry to Bother You" is in truth pretty entertaining. And pretty terrifying.   
     Or, as Tom said walking out of the theater, "That was a really good movie. I wish I could unsee it."
    The story line - or story zigzag would be more accurate - revolves (and revolves and revolves) around a young man named Cassius Green, Cash for short (one of the film's numerous metaphors), masterfully played by Lakeith Stanfield, behind whose deep, soulful eyes appears to abide all the world's travails.

        Down on his luck and his options and living in his uncle's garage with his performance-artist girlfriend, Detroit, also masterfully played by Tessa Thompson,

...Cassius Green snags a job as a telemarketer, discovers he has a gift for trompe l'oreille  - or, fooling the ear

...leading to his promotion to the position of power caller, which involves moving from his depressing cubicle in the basement to a luxurious space upstairs, from which he is required to push  commodities of quite a different nature from the mundane items he'd been hawking  below.

      And so the pilgrim Cassius Green progresses through the twists and turns of the plot while we the audience learn, twist by turn, what this film is about: race, racism, corporate greed, humanity's propensity for falling for seduction by dream and glittery promise, and the ability of cash to buy anything from people's souls to their bodies, from our government leaders to our justice system.
       "Sorry to Bother You," though engagingly funny, is without a doubt disturbing. But in our country today mayhaps it's one's civic duty to be disturbed.

     Back in late summer of 2008 I saw a movie called "The Lives of Others" about the activities of the East German secret police in the 1980's before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    That movie so rattled me that I decided I had to become politically involved in my own country, .and soon after I began working for Obama's presidential campaign.

     Ten years later "Sorry to Bother You" has had the same effect on me.
    So go see this movie. In a least-case scenario it'll entertain you. In a best-case scenario it'll  compel you to at least get out and vote.