Hammer first earned widespread recognition for playing the real-life Winklevoss twins in the hit movie The Social Network, about the creation of Facebook. Despite coming from a family of successful businessmen, he struck out in a completely different direction as a TV and movie actor. Co-star Terry Crews, however, gave us a very elegant and succinct estimation of where the line in the sand might be.Actor Armie Hammer is the great-grandson of oil tycoon and philanthropist Armand Hammer. It is an open question-the need to live versus the need to resist-that is at the heart of Sorry to Bother You, and one that the movie refuses to give an easy answer. However, the difference between Detroit and Cash is knowing where their individual line is.Īs Stanfield surmises, “Sometimes the question we all have to ask ourselves, especially where we’re moving up the ladder of a certain type of job where it can be difficult to discern… ‘Should I have really signed that paper? Should I really have done that thing?’ Where does the morality come into just trying to do what you have to do to survive?” While Thompson’s Detroit is quick to judge Cash for selling out to corporate America, she herself puts on a literal white voice for her anti-corporate performance art-a voice Thompson confirmed to us she asked friend Lily James to do after working with her on Nia DaCosta’s Little Woods. ![]() In the film, Thompson plays Cash’s girlfriend and relatively moral angel on his shoulder, but as Thompson is quick to point out, she is still a character with her own pressures and demons to fight. “I really like working with first-time directors, because I love the idea, as much as possible, to have the opportunity to work with auteurs, and, just frankly, to do that you get them early on in their career before they or anyone else realizes they’re an auteur,” Thompson laughs. Already a respected actor who’s worked with several arguable auteurs in recent years, including Ryan Coogler and Alex Garland, Thompson says she looks to find fresh voices like Riley before they are labeled as geniuses within the industry. This is also what attracted Tessa Thompson to the film. He just vomited creativity onto paper, and it ended up being this totally unique thing that I don’t think anyone else could have done.” And if I want to sell this, I have to do this, and the budget has to be that, and I have all these things I have to think of.’ Boots didn’t think of any of that. Watching and reading the Sorry to Bother You mastermind work, Hammer reflects, “Someone who’s been writing scripts their whole life, who knows, ‘Okay this is a formula I have to stick to. Hammer, who has a small but pivotal role in the film, considers Riley an already major influence on his own goal of one day becoming a director. This sense that Riley would break the rules in his filmmaking and challenge what he suspects other writers are pressured by the industry to ignore is something that attracted all of the actors who worked with him on Sorry to Bother You, up and down the line. Soon Cash must decide whether he should keep climbing or join a literal resistance in the movie, personified by an army of former co-workers who now picket his place of business and demand they get a fair wage… or at least not be replaced by corporate greed’s latest scheme. Ostensibly about Lakeith Stanfield’s aptly named Cassius (Cash) Green and his movement up the ranks of telemarketing, it is also very clearly about many other types of movements… including Cash questioning whether to sell his soul to Armie Hammer’s white devil in a nice suit-Hammer’s Steve Lift made his fortune pioneering legal indentured servitude-or to use a white, white voice to get ahead. It does, after all, depict what its director describes as “basic human nature” on a surreal landscape filled with magical realism. Highly ambitious, effortlessly creative, and coming out of the gate swinging, Boots Riley’s directorial debut is one of the most dazzling first-time films in recent memory and should be the visceral indie of the summer. ![]() It is not hyperbole to say that you’ve never seen a film quite like Sorry to Bother You.
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