- Holla' at your boy, okay?
- Can you believe that Armie Hammer says,
holla' at your boy, at the end?
(upbeat music)
Hey, welcome to Black Film School,
where we talk about the film canon,
interrogate it a bit
and introduce some new films
that we think should be added to it.
(upbeat music)
So stop now, if you have not seen these two movies.
If you have not seen American Psycho,
and if you have not seen Sorry To Bother You,
go watch them now, then come back.
- So American psycho is about
an investment banker named Patrick Bateman,
who is sort of moonlighting as a psychopathic egomaniac
and is hiding this desire to kill
and murder people in very gruesome ways.
- I always use an aftershave lotion
with little or no alcohol,
because alcohol dries your face out
and makes you look older.
Then moisturizer.
Then an anti-aging eye balm,
followed by final moisturizing, protective lotion.
- Okay, so.
He cares so much about us-
Not using alcohols in his skincare because they're harsh,
but here he is rubbing almonds, apricot,
harsh physical exfoliators on that face.
I'm extremely poor and even I know not to do that, so.
Like it makes me feel really smug.
- It's really bad to exfoliate that much.
Number one, you should exfoliate once a day.
There's no need for all this extra shit.
- I have no idea about any of that stuff.
I'm just a Dial soap and cocoa butter kind of person.
- Oh no.
- Don't use Dial soap.
- What's wrong with Dial soap?
- You use- Do you live with a woman?
- Yeah, well I have, my wife only washes with, with water.
She doesn't put any stuff on her face.
- Does your wife hate you?
(laughs)
- Is that a gram?
- New card.
What do you think?
- Oh, very nice. Look at that.
- Pick them up from the printers yesterday.
- Good coloring.
- That's bone,
and the lettering is something called Cillian braille.
- That's very cool Bateman, but that's nothing.
Look at this.
- That is really nice.
- Eggshell with Romalian type.
What do you think?
- Nice.
- Jesus, that is really super.
How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful?
- I can't believe that
Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine.
- That's scene is so hilarious.
I forgot how funny that scene is.
I could not stop laughing.
I mean, it's funny on like several levels.
Cause there's one,
where all of these different actors
are styled to look exactly the same.
So it's like Jared Leto, Justin Theroux, Christian bale,
and I keep on mixing all of them up,
and then they're all just showing the same business card
at each other over and over.
- It's very much like,
a meeting of like the nineties hot boys.
Like the Venn diagram of this scene and like,
potential lovers on Sex In The City is like almost a circle.
- The movie became absurdist to me at this point,
really because a lot of these guys,
their identity is sort of wrapped up in,
one, trying to be better than the other,
and something as insignificant as a business card
is like absurd. It's like-
- It's so weird that they're just so boring, right?
Cause you're wondering who it's for.
There are no women in the room,
so it's for impressing each other, but for what?
Cause none of them even seem to like each other.
What are they doing?
- I think that the scene is also one of those moments
where you're like Mary Heron, genius,
because it's like,
I think there's moments in the film where,
as Kevin was saying, it does become absurdist
and it hits like a very intentional satire.
Whereas, when you read the book,
Bret Easton Ellis kind of has like,
a Dan Humphrey Gossip Girl vibe.
It's like, he's critiquing them,
but like, you know he wants to be them.
When it gets kind of transformed
through Mary's filmmaking lens,
it becomes like an actual satire.
- Something wrong, Patrick?
You're sweating.
- So yeah, I'm a huge fan of absurdist movies, you know,
and that's why I really kind of connected with
with American Psycho,
and if you are a fan of absurd satirical films,
then you should really check out our next film,
Sorry To Bother You.
(upbeat music)
- Hey Mr. D Emmett, Cassius Green here.
Sorry to bother you, I just-
- Hey young blood, let me give you a tip.
You have a white voice in there.
You can use it.
- I remember being young
and being in the car with my mom one time
and she got on the phone
and she put on a completely different voice,
and I was looking at her like, who are you talking to?
And apparently it was someone at her job,
and that was the first time
where I was kind of aware of code switching in a way,
and then when I got to high school.
I went to a predominantly black high school.
I did get called Oreo and all kinds of crazy names.
Told that I spoke too proper, is what they said.
So when I saw this clip for the first time in the trailer,
I fell out, just because, you know.
He's obviously touching on a very real dynamic
black people encounter.
In this particular situation,
I think it's kind of sad
that he has to kind of change who he is
in order to make money,
but that's what this film really is about
and so to bring that in at the outset.
I thought it was quite brilliant.
- Hello, Mr. Everett.
Cassius Green here.
Sorry to bother you.
- You got it wrong.
I'm not talking about sounding all nasal.
It's like, sounding like you don't have a care.
- I find the clip to be maybe
one of the best scenes in the movie,
because I really love the way that Danny Glover
differentiates between proper kind of like,
supposedly Oreo kind of speech
and actually sounding like a white person.
Which is basically like having no conflict in your voice.
- Hey Mr. Kramer. This is Langston from Regal View.
- In terms of my voice,
I was mostly like raised by my Jamaican grandmother
and she was like very into annunciating
and like using proper English,
you know, colonization.
So, I kind of grew up speaking like this
because that's the way that she wanted me to speak.
In school, mostly just people thought that I was rich,
which is like, they just said that I sounded rich,
which I mean, I wasn't.
I was just like working class,
but taught to speak as if I might perhaps not be.
- Five years as our man amongst horses for $100 million.
Holla' at your boy, okay?
(laughs)
- We have the giggles.
- Can you believe that Armie Hammer says,
holla' at your boy, at the end?
I think that this is his best performance.
Like I hate when he's supposed to be a regular guy.
No, you're not.
You're rich. Just be rich.
- I was going to say that as well.
- Obviously Boots Riley is
a very politically minded director,
but I just, I have to wonder how much Armie Hammer is like,
in on the jokes.
His name is Armand Hammer the third.
It's like, is he even acting?
Is this just Armie hammer?
Like, I don't know.
- You want to have a false leader
for these fucking horse people,
but at the same time he works for you.
- Yeah.
- The thing that really shook me
when I saw it in the theater was that, you know,
it looks familiar.
White people, or corporate people,
rich people are kind of pandering to you
and trying to be your friend,
but then in reality, by this point, you know,
Cassius had already snorted the stuff.
He was already turning into this horse person.
So, I thought it was like, a really good depiction of,
you know, the experiences not just really just black people.
To me, it's bigger than that.
It's like really a class issue.
You know, people who are trying to make ends meet
and are kind of swallowed by big corporate entities.
You know, I was really disturbed by this scene.
There was a scene that came right before it,
where they're making Cassius rap in front of everybody.
- And I know you can bust a rap, right?
- No, actually I can't.
- You know, it really brought back some,
you know, horrific memories of being in situations
where I'm the only black person in the room,
and you know, I'm kind of just being used for
people's kind of financial and entertainment interests.
- Rap, rap, rap, rap, rap.
- This is my like most disturbing moment in the film.
Not just like when they reveal who the-
What do you call the, the, those things, the horse?
- Equisapiens?
- I would fuck the horses.
(laughs)
- I don't want to yuck someone's yum,
but it's not it for me.
- Like I said earlier,
I'm a huge fan of absurdity in movies,
and when I saw this movie I had written a script,
and I had some pretty weird things in my script,
and my reps at the time just thought that
there was really no market for it,
and when I saw Sorry To Bother You
I was like, yes there is.
You know, we can really do it.
You can do anything you want to do.
You can be as bold as you want to be,
and so just for like, the fact that he was bold enough
to put that on the screen.
I celebrated that moment.
Like, you know, when I saw it in the theater,
I was like, horrified, disturbed.
I was laughing.
You know, it was like so many different emotions
wrapped up all into one.
- Right, and I mean, the whole thing about
running into the equisapiens is like,
this idea where it's like,
okay so, Cassius is a black man.
There's a way that he can like rationalize the wealth
that he has acquired as like,
this is what black people deserve,
and then to me, essentially, one of the few groups
that would be considered lower than black people
and find out that that's, who's doing the labor.
It's like a very like conscious moment for him
because he's just like, Oh, like I thought that, you know,
I was the marginalized person and that I'm the only one,
and it's like, no, the people who have to do this work
that I no longer have to do, we-
I also have to think about them.
- Whoa.
Hey, sugarpud.
- Hey lovely.
Can I get that?
- Who invited you?
- So I, I saw the movie,
and I felt like the gender representation of it was bad.
I found the depiction of Detroit to be very limiting,
and this idea that she was an accessory to the work movement
instead of at the forefront,
which a lot of organizing,
I would say most of the organizing,
is done by black women.
- I really like that sentiment.
As Jordan said, she's very much an accessory.
Both in like her desirability,
and also in like her political function within the film.
I think he's just made like a black manic pixie dream girl.
I think there is a lot
of really good things about this film,
but I think there's a lot of things that need a lot of work
and a lot of interrogation
- I went and saw this film right as I left film school,
Like, whenever a black film comes out,
all the black NYU grad film students go together
and I really loved it,
and a friend of mine talked to me about why she didn't,
and it really kind of aligned
with what Jordan and Sarathi were saying.
I didn't see it at first, you know,
but now I do, so thank you.
(upbeat music)
Well, for me, it's, you know,
just as someone coming out of film school.
We don't really see films like this from black filmmakers.
I don't know if there is a satire,
a black satire in the film curriculum at NYU right now,
and so just giving young black filmmakers
who want access to that kind of work.
That is important, you know, and this film does that.
- Yeah, I think that
we aren't really taught to appreciate black satire,
because there's so little funding,
and so little attention to a lot of black films,
at least historically,
I feel like the films that do come through,
tend to be very like naturalistic,
and so to see a black director play around
is very important,
so that the rising black filmmakers know
that it doesn't just have to be a story about you
or specifically the kind of stories
we see coming up all of the time.
- Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed the conversation.
Tune in for more episodes of Black Film School
if you want to learn more about black cinema,
and get more into the film canon.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)