I Love Boosters Review

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    I Love Boosters

 I was a huge fan of Boots Riley's last film Sorry to Bother You which released all the way back in 2018 surprisingly enough so when I got word of his next film coming out I knew I had to see it. I caught this at an advance screening at an Alamo theater which included a Q&A livestream at the end. 
Like Sorry to Bother You, I Love Boosters is a film that critiques capitalism. While Sorry to Bother You focused on how it can change the individual, I Love Boosters comments on how it affects the whole. I Love Boosters is a very trippy film. This is a film I have to see at least two more times because I was quite confused in the beginning I feel funny comparing to Sorry to Bother You so much but this film's metaphors are less straight forward compared Sorry to Bother You. It's actually way more out there when it comes to the visual aesthetics and storytelling.


I do give credit to I Love Boosters on that. This film is very colorful. The cinematography stands out with how colorful most of the scenes are and as I mentioned in my last review of Tokyo Pop the production design isn't afraid to get messy. The characters' lived in space is full of various little trinkets in the background that will be fun to pick out on rewatches. There was also a clever editing technique where it was going to transition out from a circle frame and then the character reaches out of the circle almost like a fourth wall break and the scene opens right back out.

I can't believe I got this far without mentioning the story. To put it plainly as I saw it I Love Boosters is about a woman and her friends who make a living off of stealing clothes from retail stores and selling them at a discount to the Bay area community, but things get more complicated once she meets someone who is also stealing clothes but for different reasons. 

Boots Riley, the visionary behind the film.


At first I wasn't sure if I was liking this movie until the actual conflict started to surface. The ending of this movie had me feeling good and it was punk as fuck with a direct fuck you to capitalism and billionaires. The story asks the question of what does it take to fight back against capitalism and if we can become the very things we hate. Overall I like this film way less than Sorry to Bother You. In the QA section at the end I got a bit more insight into the film's themes, but not all that much. Riley did reveal that one of the things I was confused about was added in initially because he just thought it was funny and then added the metaphorical element to it later, still this is a very odd one that I can't automatically recommend to everyone, but if you're into surrealism and the weird give this a watch please.


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