I Love Boosters

“The Velvet Gang, a crew of professional shoplifters led by aspiring designer Corvette (Keke Palmer), target cutthroat fashion icon Christie Smith (Demi Moore). When she steals one of Corvette’s designs, our crew embarks on a hilariously absurd sci-fi heist adventure.”

I Love Boosters was absolutely nothing like I expected it to be after watching the trailer, which presents itself as a colorful, offbeat comedy about a group of professional shoplifters taking on a fashion mogul. What we get is something much stranger, much more ambitious, and considerably more difficult to categorize. It starts out looking like a fairly straightforward crime comedy and then just keeps expanding into science fiction, animation, surrealism, political satire, horror, and practically anything else Boots Riley can throw at the screen.

While there are plenty of movies being made about consumerism and capitalism, many of them approach those subjects in fairly predictable ways. I Love Boosters doesn’t seem particularly interested in being subtle. Instead, Riley takes these themes and pushes them into absurd territory.

The story follows Corvette, played by Keke Palmer, an aspiring fashion designer who works as a “booster,” essentially a professional shoplifter. Along with Sade and Mariah, played by Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige, she steals clothing from Metro Designers and resells it at much lower prices. The company is owned by Christie Smith, a wealthy fashion designer played by Demi Moore, who has built an empire by selling expensive clothing while benefiting from the same system of labor exploitation and consumer obsession that the Velvet Gang is trying to challenge.

What starts as a simple heist movie gradually becomes something much bigger. The women become involved with Jianhu, a garment worker who has escaped terrible working conditions in China with a mysterious device that appears to be a teleportation machine. The machine turns out to be capable of considerably more than simply transporting people, and once the Velvet Gang gets involved, the movie goes completely off the rails.

If you haven’t seen Boots Riley’s previous work, it is probably difficult to understand exactly what you’re getting into with I Love Boosters. His feature-film debut, Sorry to Bother You, was one of the most unusual movies of 2018. It followed a struggling telemarketer who discovers a bizarre path to professional success before the story turns into an increasingly surreal science-fiction satire about capitalism, corporate exploitation, race, and labor. Even the official description of the film describes it as an “outrageously surreal” examination of capitalism and corporate greed.

Riley followed that with I’m a Virgo, a television series about a 13-foot-tall young Black man who becomes involved in activism and superhero culture. Once again, Riley used an impossible premise to talk about very real issues involving race, class, capitalism, and political activism.

His filmmaking is incredibly visual. He doesn’t just write a character talking about economic inequality. He literally turns unpaid bills into a giant rolling ball that chases the main character down the street. He makes a luxury building physically impossible to navigate. He uses stop-motion animation, miniature effects, deliberately artificial-looking sets, exaggerated costumes, unusual camera angles, and cartoon-like physical comedy.

It’s a very specific style, and you either connect with it or you probably won’t. For me, I Love Boosters is another example of why Riley is such an interesting filmmaker. There really aren’t many directors working today whose movies look and feel like his.

Video

The 4K presentation is exactly the kind of release this movie deserves. I Love Boosters is such an aggressively colorful movie that anything less than a strong presentation would have been disappointing.

The release features a native 2160p image in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio with Dolby Vision and HDR10. The colors are the big attraction here. The saturated pinks, greens, yellows, reds, and purples look fantastic, while the elaborate costumes and production design give the image plenty of texture and detail.

Audio

The disc includes an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track along with a 2.0 audio-description track. The soundtrack does a great job handling the movie’s constant changes in tone and style.

The music from Tune-Yards is particularly important to the film, and the surround mix gives the score an ample sound stage. The various chase sequences, clubs, street scenes, and increasingly bizarre sound effects also make good use of the surround channels.

Special Features

NEON has put together a surprisingly good collection of extras for the release. The set comes with a 4k and Blu-ray copy. No digital.

The release includes:

• The Making of I Love Boosters
• Blooper Reel
• Feature Commentary with Boots Riley
• Boots Riley and LaKeith Stanfield interview
• Keke Palmer and Demi Moore interview
• The Velvet Gang interview
• Photo, storyboard, and concept-art gallery
• Teaser
• Trailer
• TV spots

I genuinely didn’t know what to expect from I Love Boosters, but I certainly didn’t expect this. The trailer makes it look like a strange little comedy about shoplifters and the fashion industry. Instead, Boots Riley has created something that starts there and then explodes into science fiction, animation, and a whole lot of visual insanity, and that’s what makes it most enjoyable, the unpredictability of the story.

There are certainly moments when the movie becomes almost too much. Riley throws so many ideas onto the screen that some of them don’t have the opportunity to develop as fully as others. But I’d much rather watch a movie that takes chances like this than another polished, predictable studio comedy.

Underneath all of the craziness is a genuine examination of materialistic consumerism, economic inequality, labor exploitation, and the way corporations can take something created by ordinary people and turn it into a commodity. Riley doesn’t deliver those ideas through a conventional drama. He turns them into a giant, colorful, ridiculous science-fiction cartoon.

The 4K release is an excellent way to experience it at home, with a strong presentation that showcases the film’s incredible colors and a solid collection of extras. If you like movies that take big swings and aren’t afraid to get completely bizarre, I Love Boosters is absolutely worth checking out.