This is a film where, with some reservations, you should believe the hype. From the bravura opening scene, where we see the desperate hero’s job interview lies get ruthlessly exposed, through to the deeply weird and unsettling climax, this socialist parable is a scabrous and strange attack on, well, almost everything. Your jaw will be on the floor, your sides will ache. Meanwhile, you’ll learn some new shorthand for the way capitalism makes stooges and cowards of us all. Oh, and there is eye-candy for whatever your tastes might be.
The basic plot: a young black guy needs a job. He gets one with a dodgy telemarketing company. Told (by Danny Glover, no less) to use his white voice, he quickly climbs the ranks. But the “How to succeed in business without really trying” goes deeply awry, not because of his colleagues’ striking for better conditions but because… ah, that would be telling. Suffice to say, shit gets weird, with allegory made flesh… There’s an excruciating ‘rapping’ sequence, an animation film within a film that is Sesame Street on acid and… oh, I could go on. It’s at least fifteen minutes too long, but you forgive it for its energy, its cynicism, its beauty. Do not miss this film, which sits somewhere within all of the following:
Horror, bodies Get Out and The Fly
(Reality) television Series 7: The Contenders and They Live
Politics Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, In Time, Elysium,
How on earth did this get made- Bulworth
Black politics/representations of blackness Soul Man, (and others, just can’t think of them right now).
marchudson.net 
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