Robbin' Good: I LOVE BOOSTERS

Rapper-turned-writer/director Boots Riley has a lively imagination and a righteous sense of social satire. Together those qualities make for movies that are electric and chaotic in equal measure. His first feature was the unpredictable 2018 comedy Sorry to Bother You, in which a Black call center employee gets big bucks for deploying an unctuous “White Voice.” That hook soon spun off into wild flights of fancy that slowly diluted its emotional punch in favor of vulgar shocks. Now, nearly a decade later, we have Riley’s second film: I Love Boosters. It has more focus, and even tighter control over the filmmaking fundamentals. It’s a riotous, candy-colored story of have-nots versus a have. It also indulges in bits of magical realism until they take over and turn the movie’s heightened reality into nesting dolls of metaphorical unreality. Yet if it gets less funny as it gets more fantastical, Riley never loses interest in double, triple, quadruple underlining every satiric point. It helps ground all of its interests that the characters are such big, likable personalities. The film’s snappy start introduces us to the Boosters: a lovable group of shoplifters who sneak expensive designer clothes and accessories out of department stores for the reselling. Steal from the rich and sell at a discount to the poor. “Fashion forward philanthropy,” one says. Their ringleader is Keke Palmer, one of our most appealing leading ladies in another of her bubbly, appealing underdog roles. She has an easy, relaxed charisma and a hustling forward momentum. Her accomplices are Zola’s Taylour Paige and Mickey 17’s Naomi Ackie. They give the trio a loose, charming chemistry as they enact increasingly unlikely daring midday heists. Their determination and their friendship dovetail nicely. 

One step ahead of getting caught, and two steps ahead of bill collectors, they’re a scrappy, working class counterpoint to the stylish villain of the picture. From a leaning luxury apartment in the middle of San Francisco, a billionaire fashion designer demands her underlings find these thieves who threaten her retail empire, and further commands her Chinese sweatshops ignore safety and work harder for less to make up for her losses. Demi Moore plays her as if every line was a speech bubble in a political cartoon. She comes across as blend of Cruella de Vil and Miranda Priestly—but somehow both more evil and more believable. Riley has such a clear, totalizing vision for the movie. It has broad, almost cartoonish stylistic curlicues—editing as punchline, pop-art titles, background sight gags, Palmer hallucinating a literal ball of stresses—and then, by the second half, gives way to total fantasy. You might not expect from the small-scale opening that it’d build to a largely stop-motion action finale—let alone a supernatural creature that’s merely a minor side-character or a sci-fi device that operates at the speed of plot. But that’s Riley for you. The movie doesn’t have much of a sense of who its characters are beyond ideas in the points its scoring. But it’s fast and funny and they careen through an increasingly crowded ensemble and convoluted plot. The story’s mechanics lose a few springs and gears in the hard turns, and a finale that wraps up with a flourish of wishful thinking. But the vibrant colors and coordinated gestures and cartoon logic and vulgar jokes build to bold conceits. In an increasingly bland, homogenized cinematic landscape, I’m glad we have Riley out there making movies so distinctive, delirious, and committed to shouting sharp satiric points with style. 

Stealing Beauty: THE SUBSTANCE

Look what beauty standards can do to a body. The more desperately one clings to youthful beauty, the faster it slips away. It’s not news that Hollywood’s visual appeal can do great damage to its sex symbols who, as their brief moment of youthful beauty fades, often see their careers follow. We know this. But it’s nonetheless a lesson we have to keep learning. No wonder Taylor Swift named her song “Clara Bow,” a narrative about this very cycle, after one of the first It Girls of the screen. You know the story. As critic Farran Smith Nehme wrote in defense of Kim Novak, whose elderly appearance on the Oscars in 2014 led to some sadly predictable snark about her artificially smooth expression: couldn’t we have some sympathy for the pressures one faces in just such a moment? After a career of being known for your looks, how difficult must it be to face the harsh glow of the stage lights, and the viewing public’s scorn knowing we haven’t the cultural space for appreciating the natural changing beauty of age. She must have been “worried constantly that no matter how you looked, it wasn’t good enough.” Don’t they all. With every new generation of stars, we seem to find belatedly, and sometimes posthumously, a new sense of grace and understanding for the plight of the old. And then we turn around and let the cycle grind up the fresh meat all the same. Time will be kinder to them in retrospect, too.

That idea of a fading star doing damage to herself to further her youthful glow is the concept animating the wild and propulsive and insular new horror picture The Substance, a hard-charging work of showbiz satire that builds and builds until it erupts in gore on its way to a creature feature ending that’s both dripping in viscera and in despair. Set in a simple simulacrum of Hollywood, it stars Demi Moore as an aging actress who’s been hosting a fitness program for years. She’s on the verge of getting replaced by a newer, younger host when she turns to an underground experimental drug—a thick neon-green liquid that’s among the most potent symbolic horror concoctions this side of Larry Cohen’s The Stuff—that’ll reactivate her cells and unleash a newer, younger self. There’s a sadness immediately present as we see a woman desperately clinging to a youthful beauty because she has no greater ambition than that. Her talent or artistic endeavors are in the past, if they ever existed, simply because she’s been part of a business that’s made her only business her charisma, her screen presence, her sex appeal. When that’s all you’ve been paid to give for years and years, no wonder it’s all you want. She needs it to maintain her lavish, empty lifestyle. Moore plays this hollowed-out dissatisfaction with a weary resignation. When she meets with her producer (Dennis Quaid)—a sneering faux-cheery objectifier, wiggling a flaccid shrimp as he talks with his mouth full as he tells her she’s too old to keep hosting—she stares at him with buried outrage burning up into ugly agreement. Yes, she thinks, if only she could be young again.

This desire is so viscerally literalized here that taking The Substance causes the fresher body to hatch gorily out of the old. A viscous, bloody birth bursts out of her back until the lifeless shell lies bleeding on the bathroom floor while the new beauty (Margaret Qualley) stands dripping on the tile. It’s not a younger self; it’s a self, younger. The new body is shot like a car commercial—overlit poses while the camera swoops tight along aerodynamic curves in close up. The old one is a husk that’s to be kept hooked up to a liquid diet so the patient can switch between bodies to keep the bodies properly balanced. It soon enough becomes a pointed, physicalized Dorian Gray situation, with shades of Jekyll and Hyde, her split personality drawing her toward inevitable doom. Her self-loathing has been embodied. The more she wants, the less she’ll have. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat, of the similarly bloody French thriller Revenge, certainly isn’t pulling punches here, and isn’t hiding her intentions in subtlety. The movie is broad, blunt, obvious, as funny as it is nasty. Its conceit is pulled thinly over a drawn-out scenario that gets only more gross and explicit as it propels itself toward a grotesque ending. I mean that as a compliment. Fargeat frames it all in a bold style that keeps a steady eye—bright frames, clean digital precision, unsettling symmetries, thunderclap symbolism—as it piles on the absurd complications. It become a movie about a frenzied emptiness, a fractured loss of self that leads to desperate measures in an attempt to find something fulfilling, something whole. It drips with contempt for those who’d use an appreciation for the beauty of bodies as an excuse to reduce the humanity of those beauties—and bleeds sympathy for those bodies discarded when the shallow no longer have use for them. As Swift writes: “Beauty is a beast…demanding more / only when your girlish glow flickers just so…”

Staying In: SONGBIRD

Is the first movie made during the coronavirus epidemic of 2020 exploitative bad taste filmmaking? How could it not be? Although I'd argue it's always too soon for a bad movie, and never too soon for a good movie inspired by a current event, given how impossible it appears for the worst of us to take this crisis seriously, or do even the smallest of mitigation steps, it might be hard to watch a pandemic lockdown thriller which has a scene wherein the main romantic couple is about to be kept apart by draconian quarantine rules and the guy shouts “to hell with the rules!” That’s the gist of Songbird, a cheap genre effort filmed over the summer. It gets its narrative engine out of people who’ll do anything to be together or scrape by in the face of dystopian stay-at-home orders, which include quarantine camps where those who break the rules are sent to die. It’s set in (an imaginary, one hopes) fourth year of COVID, where the world seems abandoned and pretty much done for. Yet, if only for the sake of thriller mechanics, hope might be in there some where. Two young folks — a delivery guy (KJ Apa) and a (totally understandable) shut in (Sofia Carson) — are in love over FaceTime and hope to get black market immunity passes. His boss (Craig Robinson) buys them from a wealthy sleaze (Bradley Whitford), a lucrative enough idea that the rich man’s worried wife (Demi Moore) is almost okay with his affair with a live-streamer (Alexandria Daddario). The latter’s nonstarter music career has a fan in a wheelchair bound vet (Paul Walter Hauser) who moonlights as an amateur drone pilot. Meanwhile, a nefarious garbage man (Peter Stormare) leads HAZMAT troops for the department of sanitation. 

The whole thing is pretty predictable as far as it goes, with writer-director Adam Mason borrowing cynical topicality to add some interest to a typical low-budget, here-today-gone-tomorrow picture of this size and type. It doesn’t not work. There are some cleverly imagined touches — an app that scans for fever and uploads the stats to the health department; a UV disinfectant box for deliveries — that are fine extrapolations on worries from half a year ago (my, how so much has changed, even though so little has changed). The cast is talented enough to imbue some urgency to their pro-forma plights. And the filmmaking has an occasional charge of rudimentary chase-scene excitement. Just as often, though, it’s a clunky little picture. I found myself admiring it mostly as a series of logistical puzzles, noting how the film has been written and filmed to avoid scenes with more than one actor, and even scenes with a few generally only has one unmasked, or has one in an over-the-shoulder shot that could’ve easily been fudged. So it’s boring. Isn’t that ultimately more disappointing? If it was more exuberantly bad taste, it would’ve at least been something more than its destiny as a title mentioned at least in passing in every history of this time in showbiz.

A Company on the Verge of a Breakdown: MARGIN CALL

The entirety of J.C. Chandor’s debut feature Margin Call plays like the first act of a disaster movie, the moments when the experts slowly become aware that things are about to go very wrong, that the world of the film is about to explode. In this case, the disaster is all too real, has already occurred, and we’re still living in its aftermath. Set in the fall of 2008, the film takes place over 24 hours in a big financial firm as one analyst figures out just how bad things are going to get. The shocking truth he discovers is that risky bets on mortgage-backed securities and the like are about to come up for big losses. The company is over leveraged. The decisions that are made this night will mean the difference between the life and death of the company, of its workers’ and their families’ finances, and probably for the entire American economy, if not the world’s. Sound familiar?

The film starts with a fired risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) giving a flash drive to one of his youngish employees (Zachary Quinto). It contains the formulas that predict impending devastation, the keys to understanding the suddenly very real possibility of complete and total financial ruin for the firm. He passes this information along to his boss (Paul Bettany), who passes it along to his boss (Kevin Spacey), who gives it to analysts (Demi Moore and Aasif Mandvi), who give it to their boss (Simon Baker), who calls in the CEO (Jeremy Irons). It’s an all-star cast (or a close-enough approximation of all-star) ready and waiting for the disaster to strike, repetitively going over their options and weighing consequences. They can see it coming, they can try and slow its approach, but this thing is going to hit and hit hard.

Chandor fills the film with tense boardroom scenes and jargon-filled power plays, along with brief moments that play almost like asides, sketching themes too concretely. At one point, during a rooftop smoke break, one suit actually peers over the edge and says, “It’s a long way down.” What this screenplay could have used was characters who were more than just symbols and with more bluntly clever macho Mametian rat race rat-a-tat in their dialogue. (Paddy Chayefsky and Aaron Sorkin are further good examples of the kind of character-driven satirical spark technical talk can sometimes have). The actors – most of them pretty great – are ready to sink their teeth into meatier roles than are provided.

This is a film that tries to create characters that are understandable, relatable even, in a film that looks to find empathy but not excuses. It gets there, but it’s all so heavy handed. I believed these actors were the kinds of serious suits who would soberly and gravely use bursts of business speak to tersely and tensely discuss risky financial deals. What I didn’t believe were the moments like the ones when Bettany gives a remorseless little monologue about how people say they want a fair world but “nobody actually wants that,” when Tucci trots out a wistful bridge-building anecdote to make the point that Wall Street produces nothing of tangible value, or when Spacey reveals he has a symbolically significant dying dog at home. The small details of the film are so convincing – the jargon, the drab gray production design, and the simple modern costumes – but the words spoken are so often flat that, try as I might, I simply couldn’t believe the big picture.