Spoilers allowed here.

Snape kills Dumbledore.
Bruce Willis is a ghost.
Everybody but Perot and the train employees were involved in the murder.
It collapses because of the self-pity and greed of its primary beneficiaries.

Sally leaving the movie: "Why did you take me to that movie? I haven't been this upset about anything in forever!"

Sally, next sentence: "I'm taking everyone I know to see it."

I saw it highly recommended but unspoiled -- all I knew was telemarketing horror/comedy.

Also, because I am an innocent who doesn't follow celebrity culture, I had no idea until my children told me that Armie Hammer is the great-grandson of rich-oil-guy Armand Hammer -- I'd figured the name was coincidence. Makes the casting work great, though.

I thought all actors today were named "Chris."

Also, I had no idea that Armand Hammer had bought a controlling interest in Arm and Hammer Baking Soda just for the lolz.

Everybody but Perot and the train employees were involved in the murder.

"But, 'Astings, zere was still one final piece of ze puzzle. Ze giant sucking sound made it clear zat only you, M. Nafta, could be responsible for ze death of US manufacturing!"

I may have spelled that wrong.

6: I learned that in graduate school.

In a movie with razor-sharp edges, Armie Hammer's face during the rap cuts the deepest. Unlike the rest of the crowd, he isn't feeling the song, but he's pleased and even impressed by the depths of betrayal and self-debasement it represents.

If I go see this and it is an M.C. Hammer biopic, I will be very angry.

That scene was truly amazing. I had the uncomfortable sensation that I could have been a bland white person getting into it and thinking it was really great rap, there but for the grace of God.

I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was watching a scene in which a bunch of white people had paid to watch a black man humiliate himself. And that I was also a white person who had also paid to watch the same act of humiliation.

I assume that scene is the thing that makes people the most uncomfortable. Unless maybe it's all the giant dicks?

The olive door reveal threw me completely -- I had no idea at all that sort of thing was going to happen.

The voices were also very disturbing, particularly where Detroit also does a voice when she's doing her performance art.

I was actually going to volunteer a guest post on this!

I don't have any great insight, but I want to talk about it.

15: same.

So how many people here actually know The Coup's music, and in particular the 2012 album "Sorry to Bother You"? Because, man, was it resonating through my head throughout the movie.

I still haven't devoured articles and interviews about the movie, but what I wonder is just how this percolated through Riley's brain since, clearly, at least 2011.

I should clarify that the album is in no way a soundtrack, even though there's a song "(We've Got a Lot to Teach You) Cassius Green" that is broadly in line with the movie. In fact, on some level, I was primed for the olive door reveal, even though I was totally shocked.

So how many people here actually know The Coup's music . . . I still haven't devoured articles and interviews about the movie

I don't know the Coup (and haven't seen the movie yet) but the press around it makes me interested in their music.

Here are two interviews that really enjoyed

Boots Riley

Is there any similar creative aspect to writing a catchy song with writing a scene?

For me, often I am translating--when I'm writing songs--I'm translating scenes, things that happened in real life, things that I'm picturing that I'm translating those things into poetry. For me, it was just getting rid of one.

They feed off each other?

Throughout my whole career of writing songs, I'm picturing things like scenes, and even when it's not a story song, I'm picturing, "What is the poetry, what is the meaning behind this idea or this thing that's in the real world?" So this felt like I didn't have to do any translating. I can imagine this thing. It was a lot easier for me to write a screenplay than it was to write songs.

Terry Crews

Yeah! The energy [at Sundance] was that good! I was so proud, because usually I'm the guy in the audience being like, "Damn, I wish I was in this!" And I looked at my wife, I was like, [whispers] "I'm in this." [Laughs.] That was a great feeling.

The movie had a theme when I read it, and I was like, "I got the theme of this movie." Didn't get it. Then, while I was acting, I was like, "Oh, this is the theme of this movie." Didn't get it. At Sundance, I'm like, "This is the theme. The other two, nuh uh, that was surface. Now I see it all together, it's a whole other theme." Then I went to San Francisco and they premiered it in Oakland and San Francisco at the same time, and being there in Oakland, I went, "Oh my God, this is a whole other theme here." I bet when it comes out nationwide, I'll pick up another one. It's that layered. It's that deep.

The olive door reveal threw me completely

Oh my god, that was a wild scene. Also, that bathroom (pre-reveal) is frequently in my nightmares. More like unpleasantmares than actual fright dreams. (A real unpleasant-mare! har har.)

There's this whole theme about making extremely literal, heavy-handed art which occurs on a bunch of levels.

Not going to read this thread just yet, just here to say I hope it makes its way to this part of the Middle East.

If it does, apparently you'll see a whole different layer.

From the Rolling Stone profile, this was what stood out for me.

Riley spent the next couple of years working as a telemarketer. "I was so good at it, I could just work one day every two weeks," he says

It's funny that "an avowed communist" is so skilled at capitalism, but also just shows the kind of person that makes it in our worldhas to be kind of an ubermensch - not just incredibly creative, but also a super salesman.

Also I wondered if he used a white voice to sell. That part offended me, because I have a white voice and I was a horrible failure as a telemarketer.

I've told this story here, but when I had a telemarketing job in high school, I used both an Irish brogue and a Southern accent. The brogue worked great, the Southern didn't, but that's plausibly because (at the time) I could do a pretty solid brogue from imitating relatives, and my Southern was laughable.

It's interesting that we're all still avoiding spoilers. I wonder why?

The comments have been so cryptic I'm assuming this movie doesn't actually exist.

You know what's unimportant but I appreciated? How much of a non-issue it was that Detroit fooled around with another guy. It didn't wreck Cassius, it wasn't a plot point that they had to work around, it was handled exactly how the gender-reverse situation would be handled in a breezy 80s movie. "Did you love her?" "Nope!" "Great! Back to normal!"

I wondered what Boots Riley was intending to say about MLK - when the Armie Hammer character told Cassius he could be the MLK of equisapiens.

30: I rest my case.

31: What are you talking about? That was a huge spoiler!

> There's this whole theme about making extremely literal, heavy-handed art which occurs on a bunch of levels.

Oh shit, 22 just blew my mind

A friend of mine who shares my unironic love of The Last Dragon just pointed out that the dialogue Detroit quotes in her art piece is from basically the only notable exchange between the two major white characters in TLD.

19: I was a big fan of Kill My Landlord and Steal this Album back in the '90s. (Just recently I read that Pam the Funkstress died. Oh no!)

30 - That as a black labor radical who reads books he, Boots Riley, has got a better understanding of MLK's politics than Steve Lift, Smug White Tech-Bro? I don't think he was saying anything about MLK himself, but rather the modern narrative of MLK, who was a important, beloved, cuddly man who gave one speech that had one sentence and never would have done anything to anger white people and it's a shame he had to die.

Bruce Willis is a ghost.

Die Hard finally makes sense.

(Like, why was King in Memphis to get murdered by James Earl Ray? He was there to support the "I am a man" garbage workers' strike. Boots Riley knows this, even if Lift and Cassius don't.)

And when Cassius learns, the changes his name to "George Foreman".

30: It's not just that Boots Riley knows more about MLK; it's about instrumentalization regardless of content.

Like, obviously it doesn't make sense to say "an MLK, except we control him"; that's like saying, "an airplane, except that it's made of cottage cheese". Whatever a corporate person controls is not going to have any relationship to MLK, someone could only be stopped by murder.

But just as with all the other instances of popular culture that we see in the film, the idea is that their content doesn't matter to capitalism, only the work they do. Like when Cassius is forced to rap, or the horrible VIP room or even Detroit's art. We don't actually know what Cassius says; we only know that it functions as a way for white people to take pleasure in racism. Riley could literally mean that we're to understand that white people are enjoying the chance to hear/yell a slur and we are literally hearing what is being said; or Cassius could be fumbling through some attempt of his own; or he could be saying the finest and most adroit rap from his favorite album. But we hear only the function - this spectacle of racist degradation.

I think what Boots Riley is saying is that, uh, all that is solid melts into air? That everything becomes fungible under capitalism?

But I think he's also saying that capitalism is limited by the material world and by history - you can't make giant dangerous horse-monsters and not face consequences, MLK has enough actual content that you can't tell a Black guy that he'll be a ringer MLK and have it work, even when Cassius is like "stop throwing stuff at Detroit that's fucked up". Capitalism wants MLK and giant horse monsters to be totally fungible, but they're not.

I thought this was a Pretty Good Movie, although frankly I wish Boots Riley had made sure that it passed the Bechdel test - why doesn't Detroit have, eg, women friends? I don't think I've ever met a woman artist who had no woman friends.

I also really liked all the performances.

~~~
On another movie-related note: I think that new radical social formations are coming into being and the powers that be had better watch out. I think there's a lot of old-school riots-and-strikes social conflict coming down the pike, the kind of thing where we either win or there's a real, vengeful, brutal repression, no middle ground.

I feel like there's been a change in the air since about Ferguson, so this isn't just a "we elected Trump, OMG" situation. These times seem different from, eg, the nineties or even the financial crisis, possibly because global warming is really, really kicking in or because of the nature of the "recovery". In the past few years, I've been seeing positions taken in relatively mainstream media that were the sole purview of Z Magazine (remember that?) when I was younger.

In any case Sorry To Bother You felt far more like a sign of the times than did the various gonzo left cultural productions of my youth, which mostly felt good and truthful but still rather out of sync.

MLK has enough actual content that you can't tell a Black guy that he'll be a ringer MLK and have it work, even when Cassius is like "stop throwing stuff at Detroit that's fucked up".

Although that would have been pretty distracting.

What I was trying to say was that when Cassius intervenes in the art show, he too is illustrating the way materiality can't be circumvented. (Like, I think the movie is ambivalent about Detroit's art - it means a lot to her and it has content, but it's also a hustle and there's vagueness in it, like what she says about 'Africa'. She's in this situation where a lot of her choices are bad, so her talent - which is dramatically expressed in those fantastic earrings - is constrained.)

so this isn't just a "we elected Trump, OMG" situation

I agree it isn't just because we elected Trump. Trump is the symptom in a certain sense. But, the fact of his election is going to make it very much more difficult to go back. People who want vengeful, brutal repression have gotten encouragement and power.

Like, obviously it doesn't make sense to say "an MLK, except we control him"; that's like saying, "an airplane, except that it's made of cottage cheese". Whatever a corporate person controls is not going to have any relationship to MLK, someone could only be stopped by murder.
I don't see that this is true in any general sense. If MLK himself was uncontrollable then yes, a clone of him would be useless to The Man. But in reality the man wouldn't want a literal copy of MLK, they'd want some more-or-less credible activist who was also more-or-less controllable. On that score it turns out that, for instance, Aung San Suu Kyi is totally down with the junta, Mandela was likely a KGB man, and a lot liberation leaders in Francafrique served French interests just fine.
(I haven't seen the movie, so just talking in general.)

This bit in the movie had a historical basis. The FBI explicitly tried to find a controllable Martin Luther King, and even thought they found their man. It didn't work.

http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-29/news/mn-1199_1_pierce-associates

Samuel Pierce later became Secretary of HUD under Reagan; an amazing 16 senior officials in his agency were later convicted of corruption-related felonies. Pierce himself was never charged.

There were rumors that Clarence Thomas had also been a candidate for the position.

It makes sense that they tried. If you operate largely on the basis of serving your own self interest (and tend to take a very narrow, short-term view of that interest), you would think others have similar values and thus looking for an activist to buy seems reasonable.

45: It's more than that. I take Frowner to imply that there's some essential contradiction between being a progressive activist and being personally corrupt. That's contradicted by the history of essentially every revolutionary party and every colonial liberation movement.

Nobody ever says "you could be the Bayard Rustin of monstrous horse people"

Like when Cassius is forced to rap, ... We don't actually know what Cassius says; we only know that it functions as a way for white people to take pleasure in racism

I thought we do know what he says--that he literally says exactly what we in the theater hear, and that that's what the audience in the film hears, and it's enough for them. There doesn't seem to be much positive motivation for thinking otherwise, afaict.

48.2: That was what I thought too.

48: agreed

Didn't mean to drop out early on this thread. So a couple more thoughts:

I thought it was interesting that, as Black a movie as this is, it was much more explicitly about capitalism than race. I don't want to be misunderstood--there's a lot about race in here, beyond the ways in which it centers blackness and treats it as a cultural baseline. But it seemed to me that huge parts of the way that I usually see black people talk about race in America--forget about the stupid "national conversation"--was somewhere between implicit and actually missing. Frex, the oppressed--whether at the telemarketer or WorryFree--are not disproportionately black, the cops are not cracking disproportionately black skulls, I don't think (and I might be wrong on this one) that Left Eye is panracial.

Mind you, all of this is in keeping with Riley's Marxism, but I found it so interesting because, again, the movie does not in any way put race in the background. But, aside from the rapping scene, the racial critique was never remotely as upfront as the economic one.

Also, the movie pretty much fails whatever the white equivalent of the Bechdel Test is, right? Somebody mentioned a white-white conversation at the art opening, but A. I don't recall it, so how important could it have been, and B. I'm guessing it wasn't white people talking about white people stuff.

That was all one thought. The other is to thank NickS so much for the first link in 20 (I'd already seen the 2nd). That description makes so much sense wrt my experience o the album & movie. That's exactly what it felt like: that he'd already written a song about the underlying "scene", and then was revisiting to create the scene for the movie. The song and scene have the same POV of the IRL scene, but different voices, narratives, and specifics. But the POV is so clear--Riley's really fucking good, in both media.

Somebody in a thread at the other place said they found the movie too upsetting to find it funny, which I found a really odd response. How can you not laugh at the absurdity? Not that it was all a lark, but even fairly deep into it, I was laughing hard.

I get that 51 is a weird comment about a movie where the black character gains massive success by using his (comical) white voice. But I guess here's my point: other than the 1%ers, are there any White People Behaving Badly? That is, in a specifically racialized way, e.g. calling the cops on black men in Starbucks? I don't think so, and I don't think that was an oversight.

I think part of why it struck me is that a lot of the current discourse is that it's not just Klansmen, but ALL white people who are awful. That's what felt missing.

The bechdel point strikes me as odder!

Somebody mentioned a white-white conversation at the art opening,

If you're referring to what I think you are, it's not that there is a conversation between two white people attending the opening, but that the bit of The Last Dragon that Detroit recites is itself from the only notable conversation between two white characters in The Last Dragon.

I think part of why it struck me is that a lot of the current discourse is that it's not just Klansmen, but ALL white people who are awful. That's what felt missing.

It felt to me like it was there and just didn't need to be spoken. This was one of the most tightly written movies I've seen in as long as I can remember and I assume the elisions are deliberate.

30: I guess I should tell what I was thinking -- if you were creating a workforce of super strong equisapiens, and you were concerned about them rising up in rebellion, it might seem like a great idea if you could figure out a way to make sure the leader of their rebellion was absolutely committed to non-violence.

58: And since I'm spelling things out -- my inference about Boots Riley's beliefs - that however radical and incorruptible MLK was -- his insistence on non-violence made him effectively a tool of the ruling class.

(Way, way, overstating this, but that's the general idea)

I thought it was just that Steve Lift was an ignorant racist casually invoking MLK without actually knowing anything about the historical MLK.

(Is "MLK was effectively a capitalist tool" a thing communists believe?)

60.2: I believe this was a common view in the Black Panther party -- that was the milieu in which Boots Riley was raised.

But 60.1 is a perfectly plausible interpretation.

Ok, Jammies and I have a question: what's the significance of Left Eye? Was Lisa Lopes a radical?

It literally just occurred to me to connect "Left Eye" with Mr ___'s eyepatch, although I'm not sure what to do with it.

That is, he doesn't have a "Left Eye", but then I run out of gas.

He's probably noticed already. If you mention it, it will just make him self-conscious.

His left eye is fine. The patch is so white people will recognize him.

56: That's right, thanks.

I should be clear that the Bechdel thing wasn't in any way a criticism. I mean, that probably goes without saying, but now it's said. It's a bit like how the only good white person in Black Panther is the borderline bumbling (but ultimately heroic) tagalong.

Endorse 60.1.

63: I had noticed that as well, and from the first wondered if he was some kind of covert Left Eye operative (though Detroit's left-eye mark washes off, so who knows).

I just realized 62 was about the movie and not just a TLC joke.

The Left Eye was, I thought, an explicit reference.

The eyepatch and blank name was an implicit (i.e., all in my head) reference to Major __ Decoverly.

It's a bit like how the only good white person in Black Panther is the borderline bumbling (but ultimately heroic) tagalong.

See also Kurt Russell in "Big Trouble in Little China"; essentially the result of John Carpenter realising that a US audience would watch a Hong Kong martial arts film if you filmed it as though the comedy sidekick was the hero.