Writer/Director Boots Riley's first and last movie was Sorry to Bother You in 2018. In my review of the same, I stated that the movie felt like a half-decade worth of material backed up wrestling for position at the floodgates of creative fulfillment. On an originality scale from 1 to Being John Kaufman it was around 8 or 9 Charlie Kaufmans.
This applies to I Love Boosters too, a second feature that inexplicably took another 8 years to make. (Having said that, he did write/direct/produce a TV series in 2023 that I did not see). In addition to my original comment about the creativity and originality of Boots Riley, I will add a favorite observation of Roger Ebert, which is that the worst movies are made by the best directors. A bad director usually puts out a boring, mediocre product. Only a truly talented director can take a bad idea and run it right into the ground.
I Love Boosters is a bizarre movie that doesn’t make any sense in the beginning and somehow makes even less sense by its end. It is about a group of shop-lifters, named the Velvet Gang (played by Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige, and Naomi Ackie) which target (exclusively, I think) the high-fashion stores of Christie Smith (played by Demi Moore). The stores are mono-chromatic, which means all the clothes in any particular outlet are all the same color. This looks cool but lacks practicality. After stealing all these same color clothes, Keke Palmer then hits on men in clubs at night and takes them to her place. At that point, she explains that she is not interested in sex and tries to sell them discounted shoes. This is arguably the worst business plan I have ever seen on a movie screen.
The high-fashion stores of Christie Smith do not appear to have any customers. Instead, Christie Smith seems to make her money by requiring her employees to buy the clothes she is trying to sell, which cost like $2,000 for a set. This too is an extraordinarily bad business plan. Christie Smith works out of a tilted, but somehow not collapsing, skyscraper. The metaphor, if it is one, is never explained.
About halfway through the movie, the Velvet Gang gets hired to work in one of the Christie Smith stores, and as they are working up their plan to steal all the clothes, the clothes get stolen first by a Chinese woman with a strange technological device. What she has, depending on what knobs are twisted at what point, is something that can either 1) teleport objects/people/whatever back to China; 2) Shoot continuous blasts of liquid (water?) that Deconstructs whatever has been blasted; or 3) Shoot continuous blasts of liquid (water?) that Resolve Contradictions in whatever has been blasted.
And now maybe we can piece together why this doesn’t make any sense. Boots Riley is trying to implement the ideological tenets of communism. Just because someone is a communist, doesn’t mean that they can’t make good movies. Boots Riley’s first feature was a good movie. I took exception to his rosy view of slavery but otherwise liked the movie. But communists who try to make communist movies generally make terrible movies because the ideology is so wrong about people, about history, about everything. You can knock your head against the wall and try to make sense of ideology, but you ultimately never will. It's just so stupid.
Let’s take a fairly good example of how dumb this movie (and communism) can be. The United States is a democratic/capitalist country. China is a communist dictatorship. Christie Smith is an American fashion magnate whose clothes are manufactured in China. The Chinese people who manufacture the clothes work in poor conditions, even having to sand-blast denim without proper protections. They are also underpaid. Boots Riley lays the blame for this at the feet of Christie Smith and capitalism. That is stupid.
Safety regulations for businesses are imposed by governments. In America, our democratic government imposes these regulations on businesses because the people demand it and elect representatives to make the laws. In China, the government does not impose these regulations on businesses because the people don’t have a say in their government and can’t elect representatives to make the laws. If poor working conditions were the outcome of capitalism, it would be America that would have poor working conditions, not China, which is communist.
Boots Riley seems to think that the workers should unionize and go on strike to get better working conditions and better pay. That is something that can happen in a democratic and capitalist country where the government, management, and labor are separate entities and the people have constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. Boots Riley doesn’t seem to understand that workers can’t go on strike in China because the government is both management and labor and the people have no constitutional rights to act independently of the government. The government, management, and labor are all headed by the same people and not surprisingly, the people that represent management don’t have the interests of labor at heart. The fact is that workers in China have poor working conditions because their government dictates that they should have poor working conditions. If working conditions were controlled by American businesses, then you would expect the same, nay you would expect even worse working conditions to exist in capitalistic America. But they do not. It is the other way. Try to resolve that contradiction, dipshit.
Communist ideology results in heartless evil outcomes. One of this movie’s parodies involves the weeping of an unnamed black woman on the nightly news. She believes that there is too much crime in the neighborhood and wants more police protection. Boots Riley does not believe that this type of person is anything but a capitalist pawn. In one particular scene, she and a few other like individuals are ordered at gun-point to remove their expensive Christie Smith suits. They not only strip off their clothes, but their skin as well. They are not humans. They are things wearing human suits. I’m not sure you can get a better demonstration of how communist ideology dehumanizes its ideological opponents. Boots Riley believes that the police are a capitalist conspiracy. So, anyone that complains about high crime must not be fully human. With this sort of thinking, you begin to understand how communist governments justified the wholesale murder of tens of millions of their own people in the 20th century.
One thing that doesn’t seem to be communist related is the Lakeith Stanfield character who pops up with a french accent and repeatedly tries to seduce the main character. Apparently, he is a demon that sucks the soul out of women via the vagina while performing oral sex. We see an extended and disgusting scene of this and I could not begin to tell you what it had to do with the rest of the movie. For that depraved scene alone, I would suggest not watching this movie.
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