This weekend, the Belcourt’s Midnight Movies series will show not one but two California-based darkly comic satires with surreal sci-fi twists. Before writer-director-musician Boots Riley’s upcoming film I Love Boosters hits theaters in a few weeks, the Belcourt will take you back to his 2018 directorial debut Sorry to Bother You, a comedy that’s Black in every sense of the word. LaKeith Stanfield, who was already a veteran of absurdist, Afrofuturistic joints (Atlanta, Get Out), plays an Oakland man who becomes a successful telemarketer thanks to his exemplary “white voice” (provided by David Cross). Things get even crazier when he rises through the ranks and discovers a batshit conspiracy (hatched by a hedonistic CEO, played with unsurprising amorality by a pre-scandal Armie Hammer) that even shocked the hell outta me when I first saw it. Released during that glorious year when filmmakers of color (from Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther to Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman) were dropping some eye-opening, politically/culturally relevant African American cinema, this one is — like the other late-night flick playing this weekend — the most punk of the pack.
Midnight at the Belcourt
2102 Belcourt Ave.
