
Restless and young, best buddies Selim and Çaça live a meager existence on the outskirts of Istanbul. By day they breed pigeons on the roof, by night they roam the streets with their entourage in their pimped-up car, "My Orange Angel". Their neighborhood's view of the city's gigantic business towers accelerates their ambitions. The two buddies want to open their own parking-lot business near a gigantic mall, and they just might get lucky, since they're supported by the local mafia boss.
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.
The shattering of what we strive to maintain as reality. It is certainly truthful to state that most, if not all, of us have experienced moments of genuine mental stress. Regardless of what might be the cause, the sheer unsettledness, the pressure that weighs upon us is a tangible force that CAN seem insurmountable. However, more often than not, this is only a temporary , one we can come through and simply move on from.
Sorry to Bother You ultimately speaks to the unfair advantages that the country’s power structures award to those with the resources to control others, as Lift’s easy access to the media allows his opinion to be the only one that matters in the eyes of the unsuspecting and easily impressed public. Moreover, it reveals the extent to which the American Dream has any true validity. It postulates how the promise of success and fulfillment as promoted by the American Dream more often than not leads to the undoing of the individual. Interestingly, in its revealing of the American Dream as merely a facade, Sorry to Bother You wisely questions whether or not anything can really be done to undo a system that has been accepted and in action for centuries.
'Playing with Fire' was clearly a film made for a kid or tween-ish audience. Keeping that in mind, I thought 'Playing with Fire' was alright, though it did portray some harmful stereotypes.
A sweet slice-of-life anime that visualizes all the ways we creatively hide our vulnerabilities from the world.