It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie The Week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Keith Phipps here again with.

Genevieve Kovsky, Tosh Robinson.

Scott Tobias.

On the first half of this episode, we discussed Robert Downey Sr.'s countercultural cult classic Putney Swope and its take on the advertising world.

With this half, we'll take a look

at another film happy to take swings at capitalism. Boots Riley's, sorry to bother you. This is Riley's

debut as a film director, but music bands know him as the frontman of the coup, a long-lived, Oakland-based

hip-hop group that, from its inception, has attempted to merge dope beats with radical politics.

In some ways, sorry to bother you plays like an extension of that mission. Lakey Stanfield plays Cassius Green, a down-on-us-luck, Oakland resident who takes a job at the bottom-feeding telemarketing firm of Regal View. But all is not as it seems at Regal View. When a senior employee played by Danny Glover informs him that success awaits him if he'll put on his white voice, confident, a little nasal, more than a little unconcerned, he'll find greater success.

Soon he's promoted to the rank of power caller and allowed access to levels of the business he never imagined before.

As in Putney Swope, there's a lot going on here, including a foray into the art world by Catchers His Girlfriend, Detroit, played by Tessa Thompson, the Worry Free Corporation and its promise of lifelong employment, a strike, an animal human hybrids created by supercapitalist Steve Lyft, played by Army Hammer.

What is this movie trying to say, and does it say it successfully?

We'll talk about it after the break.

Thank you. And does it say it successfully? We'll talk about it after the break. I just really need a job.

40 on 2.

This is telemarketing.

Stick to the script.

Hey, hello.

...