Atlanta (5/5 Stars)

“Atlanta” is one of the best television shows ever created. It is sharp, funny, and inventive, equal parts dramatic, humorous and surreal. It has its own tone, its own distinctive style, and most importantly it has something to say. It has a lot of things to say, and it says these things in an exceptional manner in a variety of ways, through humor, through pathos, through Twilight Zone bottle episodes. It is the sort of work of art that is usually produced only by giving immensely creative people all they require and no oversight. And it ended at the right moment. You could recommend the show to someone fifty years from now and you wouldn’t have to caution that the first season is rough but it gets better, or that they can skip the last season because the quality dropped off. I don’t have a list of classic episodes to recommend. The quality is consistent. 4 seasons of ten episodes each, thirty minutes for each episode. 20 hours of quality television. No filler. 

So who is responsible for this modern day feat of storytelling? It is hard to tell sometimes with a TV show as so many people are involved over an extended period of time. However, glancing at IMDB, I believe there are likely three mainly responsible people that clearly work very well together. The first and most obvious is Donald Glover. He is the main star and given his previous fame (Community, Childish Gambino), probably the reason why the TV show was produced in the first place. Donald Glover is also credited as the main writer for eight of the episodes and a director of eight episodes. The second and less obvious is Steven Glover, who I didn’t know about until I was scrolling through IMDB. Stephen is the brother of Donald and the main writer for eleven episodes, eight of those in the first two seasons, including both season finales for Season 1 and 2. Together the Glover brothers wrote 14 of the 21 episodes for the first two seasons. The third is Hiro Murai, who is credited for directing 25 episodes. Neither Steven Glover nor Hiro Murai have any notable credits that predate Atlanta.

Atlanta premiered in 2016 and wrapped in 2022. One of the results of its temporal position is that only Season 1 had DVDs and those DVDs had no special features. So there are no director’s commentary tracks. We will never really know who was responsible for what. Still, I am going to make an uneducated guess and compare the team of Glover Brothers and Hiro Murai to that 20 year period when the Coen Brothers were making movies with cinematographer Roger Deakins. I see a lot of similarities. 

Darius, the Most Atlanta

The main throughline of Atlanta’s plot follows a rapper named Paper Boi as he tries to make it in the music business. That by itself is not an original concept and nothing special. Instead, what gives Atlanta its Atlanta-ness is an ancillary character with seemingly no character arc. This is Darius, played by the exceptional actor Lakeith Stanfield, a man who wavers between being enlightened and/or stoned. Unlike all the hustlers, he lets fate decide the parameters of his life and takes the ride on the wheel of fortune with simplicity. It is likely not a coincidence that his manhood was crushed in an unexplained accident during his youth in Nigeria. Like one of the more fascinating characters in movie history, James Spader in Sex, Lies, and Videoptape, it would appear that Darius’ impotence is a mixed blessing that by depriving him of ambition in turn renders him truthful and at peace with the world.

Darius’ enlightenment allows the TV series to take an existential, surreal at points, view of the other characters’ struggles to “make it”. Because he has no agenda, he is unfiltered and expounds strange attitudes, like his idea that there is but one “Florida Man”, a dangerous and mythical creature on level with Bigfoot. Darius does strange things and strange things happen to him. Because he is untied to a regular job, he ventures out into the world to make side money in strange deals. In one of the weirdest encounters in TV history, he spends an afternoon with “Teddy Perkins” (Donald Glover in whiteface), a recluse and rich black entertainer who has bleached his skin white a la Michael Jackson. 

What does Darius mean? Sometimes, I think critics get too caught up in explaining what they are seeing on screen. There is plenty in Atlanta that is presented without explanation and I would posit that most of it is not to be explained. What these strange moments do on a storytelling level is to introduce a particular tone and mystery to the series, which in turns renders the Atlanta universe larger than it appears on screen.

A good example of this technique is found in Coen Brothers movies. In the movie “Fargo”, it is called the Mike Yanagita scene. “Fargo”, genre wise, is a police procedural: a crime takes place which the police try to solve. However, the Coen Brothers also wanted to imbue a “trueness” to the story and famously claimed that the movie’s plot was based on actual events (they were not). The Mike Yanagita scene is one of the scenes that makes the movie “Fargo” feel “true”. In it, the police chief assigned to the case, because she happens to be traveling to a city she is not usually in, takes time out of her day to have lunch with a man she knew at university who has randomly called her up to stay in touch. The lunch does not go well and eventually ends with Mike Yanagita in tears. 

The thing is, even though the Mike Yanagita scene has very little to do with the plot of “Fargo”, it feels like something that would happen in real life. In your life, you have the things you are focused on during the day, and then every once in a while, something random happens that demands your attention, if only for a moment. These moments are a reminder that real life is not simply a movie about you. Instead, there is a vastness to the world and an enormous, seemingly infinite, amount of story going on right outside your consciousness.

All movies are artifice. The worst ones, glaringly so. The good ones will apply enough competence to convince the viewer that this particular story is believable. The best ones give the viewer a sense that not only is what they are seeing on the screen happening, but that there is a whole world of activity happening offscreen, just like in real life. This is what Atlanta the TV series accomplishes. It is not only about the experiences of its main characters, but also the secret history of The Goofy Movie, a haunted Bulgarian concert venue, Marcus Miles’ invisible car etc. etc. Watching “Atlanta '' is to experience creativity bleeding off the screen. I believe the people involved could have taken any particular strange moment in the series and built an entire episode off of it. There is this strange and mystical place called Atlanta and this series captured but a glimpse of it.

Earn has No Money

Let’s say you were a writer and you wanted to make your job as hard as possible. You could do worse than making your main character broke. There is a reason why there are a disproportionate amount of stories about kings as opposed to peasants. This is because all stories are character development, and all character development requires agency. That is, what differentiates characters from one another is the choices they make. Poverty limits agency. Broke characters literally have less choices because they can’t afford most. Even when characters are supposedly broke in TV shows and movies, they always seem to have at least enough money to accomplish what the plot requires (or a rich uncle).

Earn has no money and the writers aren’t cheating around the situation. No money means no money. That means it is a problem when the affordable restaurant he is taking a date has closed and reopened as a seafood restaurant that sells fruity cocktails. That means he can’t invest $70 today to make a few thousand dollars a few months from now. Earn needs that $70 today. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one other filmmaker that makes movies about people with so little money (Kelly Reichardt) and the reason why is because it is so hard to pull off. For the entirety of Season 1, Earn lives on the edge of “no money” and the writers consistently find a way around this narrative obstacle course without providing any random victories or windfalls. Everything Earn earns, he earns. That is no mean feat for someone starting with nothing.

Earn has no connections. It is said he attended Princeton, but then dropped out. (It isn’t explicitly mentioned, but you can bet he has student debt). His family won’t let him in the house because as his father explains, he can’t afford it. (It isn’t explicitly mentioned, but you can bet his father spent a lot of his savings paying for a college education that wasn’t finished). And finally Earn is black. He doesn’t have any societal support structure in place. He is out here alone in the world. 

Earn does appear to be intelligent, diligent, and responsible. But is that enough to be successful? It may be enough to be the manager of Paper Boi during his come up. But once Paper Boi makes it to the next level, circa end of Season 2, Paper Boi seriously considers upgrading his business, including an upgrade at manager, Earn’s position. In one of the more brilliant scenes I have seen in the medium, Earn visits a Jewish passport agency that caters to those in the music business. Earn asks the clerk whether there are any Black lawyers in the industry that are better than the Jewish lawyers. The clerk admits that yes there probably are, but being the best doesn’t matter all that much. The industry is built upon network connections. It’s who you know that matters. Earn sits down and in a brilliant stroke of sound design, the front desk bell rings and the sound evaporates from the room.

“How you doin’ Earn?” Darius asks in a vacuum

Darius goes on to explain that Paper Boi is new to the business and that he knows he is going to make rookie mistakes, that he feels like he will only have so many chances, and that he doesn’t want to compound his mistakes with those of Earn who is also a rookie and bound to make mistakes. That explanation sounds reasonable enough and extraordinarily unfair at the same time. 

Systemic racism, by its nature, is an abstract notion. We recognize actual racism: a white man in a bedsheet bombs a black church, white politicians conspire to deprive the black population of the vote. We are told that even without actual racism, systemic racism still exists. But how? Well, think of it not in terms of an outside malevolent force acting with purpose. Think of it more as an inside lack of something. Like the difference between hot and cold. There is not a force in the universe that makes something cold. Everything is cold by default and will remain cold until something comes along and warms it up. Coldness is merely the lack of heat.

The hasidic jews in this area of Atlanta have that something. They all dress the same, have the same haircut, and have network connections within their community built up by a history of incumbency in the music industry. They can turn around a passport in a few hours. The black population of Atlanta lacks that something. Indeed, by this series finale, we have just witnessed an entire season of black people robbing each other. Paper Boi has enough street smarts to seriously contemplate ditching his black cousin and replacing him with a well-connected jew. It wouldn’t make sense to accuse Paper Boi of being racist. It wouldn’t be fair either. He is simply an individual acting in his own self-interest, and that self-interest suggests that he should upgrade his business beyond black people because they are not as well-connected in the system. I’m sure someone can inform me that there isn’t actually a Hasidic Jewish population in Atlanta that can turn around a passport in a few hours. Whatever. If you are going to incarnate an abstract notion, you are going to need a metaphor. This is an exceedingly good one.

Vanessa, Weighing Her Options

The character of Vanessa, played by Zazie Beetz, has her own constraints. She is not broke like Earn. She has a job as a science teacher and her own apartment. But she has a child, a daughter with Earn, and much of the TV series is concerned with her attempts to establish herself as something more than that.

To understand what makes Vanessa’s character special, it is best to contrast her with an army of underdeveloped TV women, long suffering wives of man-children like Ralph Kramden, Tim Taylor, Homer Simpson, etc etc. The sexism apparent in these characters is not in their personalities. Most of the time, they are in better shape, smarter, and wiser than their counterparts. The sexism is in the idea that this particular woman would choose this particular man and then stay with him. Indeed, in The Honeymooners, Ralph Kramden’s yelling at his wife Alice is not the most disturbing thing. The most disturbing thing is that Alice never seems to consider leaving, like she’s trapped there, its not even an option. Or like later TV wives a la Marge Simpson, the wife is given a choice, but, against all reason, she always continues to stay and for the most contrived of reasons, like pity for her well-meaning husband.

(I am aware that a TV series entitled “Kevin Can F*** Himself” exists and it is about a TV wife who becomes self-aware that she is trapped in a sitcom, married to an oafish lout. The only reason I have not seen it is because of its location on AMC+, one of the more obscure streaming services)

Vanessa’s relationship with Earn is on a totally different wavelength. First, they have already broken up and she goes on dates with other men. Second, Vanessa has friendships with women who, in so many passive-aggressive gestures, signal that she should move on from Earn entirely. Indeed, nobody in the TV series is all that interested in keeping the two together. What is the problem with their relationship? Well, a very common situation in real life which is almost never shown in TV or movies. It's really simple actually. Earn is broke and Vanessa, still young, smart, and attractive, could probably find a more established man, not only for herself but also to be the father of her child. And both Earn and Vanessa know it.

This situation is complicated further by the fact that Earn has pride and will not be taking the pity route. In one of the better episodes in Season 2, Vanessa asks Earn what he wants out of their relationship. Earn tries not to answer the question several times. I’m speculating here, but I believe that Earn always wanted Vanessa, but his pride also constrained him from making a commitment he wasn’t sure he could deliver on. In other words, he had love, but wasn’t about to ask Vanessa to accept him only on that. In this way, in the first two seasons, he is noncommittal in order to buy time to get his shit together. It speaks volumes that when Earn finally has money in Season 4, he buys the largest tent possible for a family camping trip and goes all out in trying to win her over. He has arrived and is now ready to be her man in a way that won’t embarrass her in front of all her family and friends when she chooses him. I would posit that taking reality into consideration like this storyline does makes the whole thing more romantic. In fact, as far as I am concerned, this is one of the most romantic love stories I’ve witnessed.

Alfred, Keeping it Real

Which brings us to Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles, played by Brian Tyree Henry. In many ways his arc is the most familiar of all. He is an artist and his arc deals with how his success affects his artistic integrity. 

You’ve seen this conflict many times throughout many TV series and movies. What makes Alfred’s particular situation interesting though is how his specific style of music is entirely at odds with any type of normal success. Paper Boi is a rapper that deals drugs on the side. The main launchpad to his popularity is a shootout. A super fan compares him to rap artists from the 90s (that all died violently) and expresses his admiration in how he was willing to just blow away a guy. To this fan, this makes Alfred more real.

Is Alfred real? As an example, artists and especially writers (of which rappers are a subset) generally work in isolation. As this is the case, it is normal for an artist to be introverted. Alfred appears to be introverted on a very basic level, but he is also working in a genre that demands a certain level of provocation. So Alfred goes to a club to be seen when he would rather be not seen. While he is at this club that he doesn’t want to be at, he becomes uncomfortable because there is another musician across the room with a bigger crowd. Alfred, who doesn’t want to be seen, is now frustrated that he is not being seen enough. He can’t win.

Alfred describes rap music as making the best out of a bad situation. But what happens to a rap artist if they make it and, by definition, are no longer in a bad situation. In Season 3, he is asked by a corporation to be part of an apology tour for some ill-advised racist provocation on their part. His natural hustler suggests that he take the corporate money for the minimal amount of effort he would need to put forward. That would be keeping it real. But is it? Or is it more real to refuse to be part of the apology tour because it is not sincere and thus a betrayal of his blackness? Which is the more real course of action, how he would have acted when he was a nobody or how he should act now that he is a somebody? 

What happens when a black man wins? The third and fourth seasons of Atlanta mainly concern this brave new world, and for that reason we see Alfred take center stage in place of Earn. “Atlanta” does not have a firm answer to this, which makes sense because one probably doesn’t exist. One of the better Twilight Zone bottle episodes concerns a rich black philanthropist who goes back to his high school and guarantees a college scholarship to all students that can prove they are sufficiently black. In a sign that the writers of “Atlanta” have seriously thought about the obvious consequences of reparations, they then provide all the obvious arguments against it, in particular the reality that an individual could be black in skin color and also “not black enough” to warrant redress. A mixed race teenager who looks white is not included in the scholarship fund, nor is a recent immigrant from Nigeria. If the point is fairness, why should they be included when “more black” people are the “more real” victims who deserve more payback. After one ditches a policy of treating everyone equally, what necessarily results is a categorizing of people that has no natural end to it. After all, we are all individuals and thus different.

Alfred wanders the murky middle for most of the series, both increasingly assured in his success and troubled by what it ultimately means for his artistic integrity, or for society, if it means anything. We are happy for him when he gives himself a break and buys himself a safe farm to get away from it all. Sometimes, even with all the interminable bullshit in the world, and sometimes because of it, it is okay to skip the Black sushi restaurant that society tells you to like for the corporate Popeyes across the street that you know you want.

Judas and the Black Messiah (3/5 Stars)

 

There is an inherent conflict in the mythology of the Black Panthers. Its supporters want it to be an important group and at the same time deems its enemies as overzealous. The title of this movie, directed by Shaka King, is illustrative. The Black Messiah is allegedly a descriptive title given by J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, to Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers. Such a title imposes an importance on Fred Hampton akin to Jesus Christ. This movie wants you to think of Fred Hampton as an important, potentially dangerous, man. It also wants you to believe the FBI was wrong to treat him as such.

What I knew about the Black Panthers walking into this movie was scant. First, their name post-dates the Marvel comic Superhero by a few years. That is probably coincidental. Second, they were heavily armed and “patrolled” neighborhoods with the vague mission of defending the residents therein from the police. Third, they had some ancillary connection to the ideology of Malcolm X.

I was wrong about the third one. Whereas Malcolm X was staunch in his belief that black people had the right to defend themselves, with violence if necessary, I don’t recall him preaching civil war in his book. He seemed to be more interested in black self-reliance, going so far as to advocate segregation. To put it another way, he seemed less interested in affecting the white man and more interested in the white man not affecting the black man.

The Black Panthers, at least the Fred Hampton led ones in Chicago, are Marxists. They are preaching a racialized Marxist ideology. The movie does not shy away from this. Fred Hampton preaches revolution from the stage, and because he uses the terminology of Marxism, it is no metaphor. One listening to it would be justified in believing that Fred Hampton means to bring about a violent revolution, starting with the overthrow of the Chicago Police Department. The movie believes that the FBI thought that.

The movie makes a big deal about Black Panthers’ charitable works in the community. Apparently they ran food services for hungry children. This is hardly relevant as to whether the FBI deems them dangerous and no excuse for them to be considered harmless. Many dictators, gangsters, and totalitarian governments give away bread and circuses to the poor. It is not something only good and peaceful people do. It can be noted however that when good and peaceful people do it (like say the church) they don’t also walk around heavily armed.

Still they probably were mostly harmless. They were not, as argued by an FBI agent using a false equivalency, like the Ku Klux Klan. The Black Panthers did not have the same amount of numbers, had little to no political support in any level of government, and although they had guns, had no knowledge of tactics. A commendable thing about Director Shaka King movie is that even though he is clearly sympathetic to the Black Panthers, his movie is still honest enough in its portrayal to allow them to perform acts of extraordinary stupidity. At one point, after a Black Panther has initiated a shoot out with the police, several police cars nonchalantly stake out the Black Panther headquarters. One particular cop taunts the Panthers with a megaphone. A member of the Black Panthers reacts to this by opening the window and brandishing a shotgun. What results is the world’s most predictable shootout with the world’s most predictable ending: the cops win. What was the plan? Did the Black Panthers really believe that a show of force would intimidate the cops? Did they think that once the shooting started, that the cops would give up and go away?

(For all the bad things said about the moral impact of the video game Grand Theft Auto, one particular mechanic of the game should be taken to heart by all would be revolutionaries: Once you shoot a cop, the only option is to run. Because the cops will keep coming and coming until you are dead, at least in America.)

Fred Hampton is played by Daniel Kaluuya. The title “Judas” is Bill O’Neal, played by Lakeith Stanfield, the Black Panther head of security and also an FBI informant. Interestingly, although Hampton and O’Neal are the characters with the most screentime in the movie respectively, both Kaluuya and Stanfield were nominated for Oscars in the Supporting Actor category, Kaluuya winning. Kaluuya is a fine actor and Stanfield is a favorite of mine. Having said that, both are miscast. Fred Hampton was 21 at the time of his assassination (Kaluuya is 32). Bill O’Neal was 20 at the time (Stanfield is 30). The actors bring a gravitas to their roles that is misleading and blinds the audience to reasons for their behavior that would be obvious if younger actors had played the roles.

For example, Bill O’Neal’s career as an FBI informant started when he was a teenager. He had been caught impersonating a federal officer while trying to steal cars when he was 17. If you wanted a good reason why he was so impressionable and would betray all the Panthers for steak dinners, money, a car, and a business, all you need to know is that he is just a stupid kid. As for Hampton, it is illustrative of the actual pedigree of the Black Panthers (as opposed to their mythologized status as a dangerous terrorist group) that the head of the chapter is barely old enough to drink alcohol. In his wisdom he appointed a paid informant as head of security. These were kids playing dress-up, wearing silly fatigues and berets, walking around with guns they hardly knew how to use.

Really, the main character of this story is Bill O’Neal’s FBI handler Roy Mitchell (played by Jesse Plemons). He, along with the rest of the FBI are the adults in the room. They are the ones with the moral dilemma on their hands, the ones that have agency. The Black Panthers are outmaneuvered and outgunned at every turn, their ranks rife with informants. The movie ends with what can be categorized as an act of war by the FBI against the Black Panthers. It was a surprise attack in the dead of night with overwhelming force, no due process, ending in the assassination of an unconscious Fred Hampton. When such tactics are used against citizens, that’s called fascism. Who is the real Judas here? It’s the FBI and they betrayed all of us.

Uncut Gems (5/5 Stars)

The comedian Artie Lange once described the lure of a gambling addiction. He’s sitting at his home with a friend watching a football game, Browns v. Rams, two terrible winless teams.

“What a boring game, I don’t care about this game,” says his friend.

“You want to make it interesting?” says Artie, “How much money do you have in your savings account?

“$800”

“Put $1,500 on the Rams.”

Suddenly you are watching the most exciting game of your life.

Artie’s anecdote came to me while watching “Uncut Gems,” a whirlwind of a movie about a compulsive gambler, Howard Ratner, played by Adam Sandler. The movie starts with Howard Ratner in the hole six figures deep with loan sharks circling and his family falling apart. We do not have much sympathy for Howard. It seems highly likely that he legitimately owes the money (he probably gambled it away) and that his wife should definitely divorce him (he is cheating with an employee at his jewelry store). But Howard has a plan or at least chutzpah and he is about to take us on a fast and frenetic tour of the diamond district in NYC at a very specific time in 2012. It’s all or nothing game time. He is betting big long shots to either save everything or lose everything. Whether or not he wins feels besides the point. Who cares if the Browns win or Rams win. Everything is on the line and it is exciting.

This movie is exciting, remarkably so. It was written and directed by a relatively new team of writer/director brothers Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie, and their natural talent sparks off the screen. The movie’s plot is all walking and talking. There are no special effects, no fight scenes. And yet, “Uncut Gems” feels like it has more action than most blockbusters. And it is continual action. It starts off frenetic and keeps the pace for the entire movie. This is great writing, stirred with great direction, finished with great editing. I would love to see the Safdie brothers get their hands on a comic book blockbuster. It would be interesting to see if they can translate their skills through the machine. The outcome, if successfully, ought to be the best of both worlds.

The plot is exceptionally clever. Howard Ratner’s crazy scheme involves getting his hands on a lucky rock, a solid block of uncut gems, smuggled in from black Jews in Ethiopia. He loans it to a professional athlete who believes the rock is lucky and will help his game. Howard then bets big on the personal stats of the professional athlete. As his bookie says to him, “that’s the dumbest fucking bet I’ve ever heard of.”

But who is this professional athlete? Well, it is Kevin Garnett, the real professional basketball player. And guess what, there is Kevin Garnett, cast in this movie as himself. And when does this movie take place? It takes place during the 2011-2012 Eastern Conference semifinals between the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers. These are real games and the actual ESPN footage is shown in this movie. And here Garnett is in this movie acting as his approximately seven years younger fictional self, looking to give his historical self an edge via a lucky stone. Because “Uncut Gems” is such a great movie, it may have the effect of cinematically immortalizing that playoff series. Print the legend sort of thing. For what it is worth, Kevin Garnett’s performance is the best by an NBA player I have ever seen, but then again that bar is decidedly low (looking at you, Shaq)

The casting in this movie is perfect and contains the kind of names that make you believe the Safdie Brothers may have some special pull in the acting community. Adam Sandler pulls off a great performance. Everyone who has seen “Punch Drunk Love” knows he can be a good actor, if only he showed up and cared more than once a decade instead of doing a fourth Hotel Transylvania. The Safdie Brothers somehow made him care. They also got three of the more interesting Jews in the business: Eric Bogosian, Judd Hirch, and Idina Menzel. And these guys aren’t especially in the business anymore as far as I know. Eric Bogosian is a monologist. Judd Hirsch is retired. Idina Menzel is on Broadway. Then there is the irreplaceable LaKeith Stanfield who always seems to be underutilized.

Overall, “Uncut Gems” is one of the best movies of the year. I think they should pass it out in all major movie studios to those in charge of the action blockbuster department. If only movies with 100 million dollars budgets were this entertaining.

Knives Out (5/5 Stars)

The Trope (aka Movie Cliché) abounds for a practical reason. They represent to the unimaginative a kind of shortcut in the creative process. Instead of going through the rigamorale of producing from scratch a totally original plot, they reuse tried and tested plot devices gleaned from genre and tradition. Like jokes told more than once, these tropes lose some of their effect each time they are employed, but this should not cover up their inherent truth: They are used so often because they work.

Perhaps the most used plot is the murder mystery. Agatha Christie at one point would churn these stories out annually making her the most best-selling author behind The Bible and William Shakespeare. Someone gets killed: Big Deal. The killer is still out there: Present Danger! Who is it? Suspense! The most used trope within the murder mystery plot is the locked room. That is, all the characters are in the same locked room with the dead body. We don’t know who the killer is but they must be someone in the room.

This story has been told many times over. As stated before, such retelling lowers the effectiveness of the trope. That is unless the writer reemploys creativity to the trope, subverting the audience’s already held expectations. In this way, the plot’s dull edged are resharpened and, once again employ their original effectiveness. Such is “Knives Out” an ingenious locked room murder mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper)

The setting is an old mansion isolated in the New England woods. Therein Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), best-selling author of murder mysteries, is holding his 85^th birthday party. All his family is in attendance, a colorful privileged lot of bigoted conservatives and insufferable liberals. Harlan does many things that night to give a colorable argument for each of his family members to seek his death. And then Harlan commits suicide by slitting his own throat. The police are pretty sure it’s a suicide but then the great private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) shows up, hired by an unknown someone who suspects foul play.

Benoit Blanc is himself a mystery. He is played by an Englishman (James Bond no less), has a decidedly French name, and employs a southern accent. This is not explained. Without giving too much away, and I can’t because what I am about to reveal happens in the first twenty minutes, the story is not necessarily a whodunit, but more of a how did a particular character didn’t do it?

We are shown in the first twenty minutes that Harlan’s in-house nurse Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) mixes up his medication, giving him an overdose of morphine. In order to spare her a criminal conviction, Harlan instructs her how to escape the house without attracting suspicion and then kills himself. But is that all to this story? And who hired Benoit Blanc to investigate? And why?

The family of Harlan Drysdale is a cabinet of unique caricatures and good casting. The more important ones are: Linda Drysdale, daughter of Harlan (Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband Richard Drysdale (Don Johnson), and their playboy son Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans); Walt Thrombey, son of Harlan (Michael Shannon); Joni Thrombey (Toni Collete), daughter-in-law of Harlan. It is to the credit of Rian Johnson, that they are not all terrible people. They have their faults, and some are worse than others. Others, like Walt Thrombey, are not so bad, well, most of the time. In this way, the writer throws the audience leads and red herrings and makes us thinks very hard about how much we trust everyone.

There is one character that Rian Johnson wants us to trust completely and that is the in-house nurse Marta Cabrera. Marta has a medical disorder that causes her to vomit every time she tells a lie. But she is also the one who gave Harlan a fatal dose of morphine and last saw him before he died. How did she not do it? Well, watch the movie and see if you can figure it out before the cliché everyone-in-the same room as the great detective makes his speech scene. The reveal is highly effective.

Sorry to Bother You (5/5 Stars)

Sorry to Bother You has lots to say and uses its time wisely. This is one of those movies that you can spend much time afterwards discussing what it had to say. On an originality scale from 1 to Being John Malkovich, it is around 8 or 9 Charlie Kaufmans. It starts off in a new place and then half-way through goes completely crazy.

Sorry to Bother You was written and directed by Boots Riley. Never heard of him, but the way this movie plays, it feels like he’s had half a decade worth of material backed up in his system wrestling for position at the floodgates of creative fulfillment. Sorry to Bother You is about many things: wealth and poverty, capital and labor, ambition and community, individuality and conformity, weird art, wrong-headed genetic experiments, and slavery.

Our hero Cassius Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield) starts with an existential crisis. He lives in his uncle’s garage and hasn’t a job. He is simply surviving. What will his life amount to future generations? (Even when the movie is small, it is big.) Cassius Green lands a soul-crushing seemingly impossible job at a telemarketing firm. They will hire anyone who walks in the door. He is not doing well. Then, a fellow colleague played by a wonderful Danny Glover (still alive!) gives him great advice. Use your white voice he counsels. “White Voice?” asks Cassius. Glover explains what he means. Its not just sounding nasal. It means sounding like you don’t have student loans, that you pay all your bills on time, that you don’t have a care in the world. You are who the other person on the phone wants to be like. Oh, that white voice. Cassius Green gives it a shot. (He sounds remarkably like the actor David Cross, best known as Tobias Funke the therapist turned actor in “Arrested Development”.) This apparently is what black people think white people sound like. Like the movie in general, it’s too funny to be truly offensive.

Pretty soon, Cassius’s telemarketing career takes off and two subplots run right along side his growing success. The first is that the telemarketing center tries to unionize. This is led by a guy named Squeeze, played by Steven Yuen, who stages a work stoppage during prime calling hours. As one character remarks, it is some very Norma Rae shit. Having seen that movie, I agree. The second is that after Cassius gains a promotion he starts selling a product called “Worry Free” labor. “Worry Free” is a company that contracts with regular people to provide guaranteed food and shelter in exchange for otherwise unpaid labor. Its not necessarily slavery but Sorry to Bother You wants to liken it to such. Obviously, Cassius, being black, has some qualms about selling slavery to anyone, even if the slaves are of all races. But he also doesn’t want to be poor loser anymore and what exactly is his responsibility to everyone else?

Then there are weird art show, at least one riot, and the horse people. But I’m not going to get too far into that. It would be impossible to explain here. Two more points. First, this is the second movie this year that puts Oakland, California on the map. The first was Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther”. It is beginning to feel like that place is the next hot place to make great movies. If one more great movie from one great new filmmaker springs from there in the near future, it would be fair to say its a trend.

Second, is a philosophical qualm. Unlike Boots Riley, I don’t believe slavery is a particularly profitable or productive way to run a business. Here, “Worry Free” is making cash hand over fist by this type of business practice. History disagrees. As the Adam Smith would say, the problem with slavery (besides all the evil) is that, because there is no hope of bettering their situation, the workers are not incentivised to worker smarter and/or harder. Rationally, a slave will work just as hard as they can to avoid punishment. I’ve heard this weird argument flitting about that the wealth of America was produced through slavery. That is a bit like saying the economy of South Korea was built by North Koreans. If slavery produced wealth, the world would have been a whole lot richer a whole lot longer ago. This the truth of the matter. Having said that, Boots Riley made a great film and Lakeith Stanfield, well, his character reminded me of some great white characters like Peter Gibbons from Office Space and C.C. Baxter from The Apartment.