I Love Boosters Film Review: Anti-Capitalism Meets Satire, Crime, and Fashion

Boots Riley’s new film, “I Love Boosters,” was a vibrant, anti-capitalist fever dream. Everything about the movie–even down to its official poster–references the era of 1960s crime films such as “How to Steal A Million,” that blend crime, social criticism, and high fashion. This film does all the same things, but for a modern audience. 

It was as surreal as a Boots Riley film can be. There are stop motion characters in a world of real people, a building that is tilted at an almost 45-degree angle, though no one mentions it, and a demon model who takes the souls of his romantic partners by going down on them. Yes, you read that right.

The lighting and costumes were also colorful and visually pleasing. I was thanking my lucky stars that the main characters didn’t sacrifice being fashionable in their fight against capitalism!

These elements, alongside the writing and direction of Boots Riley, help to serve the film’s purpose. “I Love Boosters” is a satirical criticism of capitalism with plenty to-die-for fashion  moments along the way.

This review will contain spoilers!

The film follows a group of boosters (people that steal and resell clothes) called the Velvet Gang. When one of the boosters, Corvette (Keke Palmer), discovers that CEO and fashion designer, Christie Smith (Demi Moore), stole one of her designs and is selling it at her Metro Designers store, Corvette and her friends plan to steal from as many Metro Designers locations as they can.

Their cover: getting hired to work at the store.

At the same time, executives at the Metro Designers’ factory in China decide to implement teleportation devices to cut shipping costs. The employees also ask for better pay and working conditions, but Christie refuses to meet their demands. One of the employees, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), steals the device and teleports herself to America, where she plans to send all Metro Designers supply back to China until their demands are met. Eventually, she joins the Velvet Gang as they all have a vendetta against Christie. 

The way the employees are treated in this film is one of the most obvious critiques of capitalism.

They have to sprint to their lunch break, which is absurdly thirty seconds long, while the manager, Grayson (Will Poulter), gets a full hour. Corvette’s coworker, Violeta (Eiza González), gets a paycheck that is about $43,000, but after the company deducts money for employee uniforms and other costs, the check is reduced to just over $43. It’s over the top, but it gets the point across! 

Christie Smith is a symbol of capitalism in general and the “one percent.” She was livid that the boosters were stealing from her, meanwhile, she had already taken Corvette’s design and passed it off as her own. Christie also buys into her own self-importance and convinces others to believe her lies too, using propaganda. 

Throughout the film, there are a handful of side characters, such as Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle), who disguises his pyramid scheme as a self-help program, and Crying Black Mother (Kara Young), a woman on the news who says she wouldn’t want people to “bear the burden of free housing.”

She and the others seem unimportant until the final act, where it is revealed they have been working for Christie the entire time, having had their skin surgically removed so they can wear the skin of other people and promote Christie’s ideologies undercover.

They represent people who have bought into capitalist propaganda so much that they will sacrifice their own skin (their wellbeing) to keep the system going.

One of the “skin people” says she once acted as Candace Owens! This could be taken solely as a dig at Candace, but there’s a bigger message behind it. It symbolizes how all media can be a tool to control the narrative. People with platforms, big or small, can influence the public and get them to support things that benefit the system but harm themselves.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Boots Riley movie without LaKeith Stanfield, who plays the demon model, also known as Pinky Ring Guy. His entrance to the film is jarring as he suddenly appears with no warning in an extreme, borderline invasive close-up, while Corvette is stealing from Metro Designers. Though he helps Corvette and her friends infiltrate Christie’s fashion show in the final act, the character’s purpose in the larger message of the film isn’t clear. On the surface he mostly adds to the surrealism, but in retrospect, it’s possible he represents the concept of sacrificing your soul for pleasure.

Most of his rare appearances in the film are when Corvette is in the middle of a plan with the boosters, and he tries to get her to go out with him. He could represent the temptation to give up the fight and give in to pleasure as a means of numbing oneself in the face of uncertainty. Or maybe he just symbolizes the bums we put up with to escape loneliness, who will actually suck the life out of us if we let them. Either way, Corvette rejects him completely, showing that she isn’t willing to give up her soul.

Refreshingly, the film doesn’t just criticize the problems with a capitalistic society; it offers solutions.

One being that we are most effective in fighting the system when we work together. 

Throughout the movie, Corvette hallucinates a giant ball of trash filled with overdue bills and eviction notices coming towards her, representing the dread and isolation of looming societal expectations. She also mentions many times that she feels alone.

As the film goes on, Corvette and the Velvet Gang gradually expand their circle, working with others to achieve a specific goal. By the end, Corvette isn’t alone anymore, and the giant ball of trash becomes small enough to pick up and throw away. It shows that fighting alone can be unbearable, but the way to handle the burden is by uniting.

At the end of the day, we have more in common than we think.

Another interesting detail is that the teleportation device has two other settings: deconstruction mode, which reverts objects into the raw materials that made them, and situational acceleration mode, which accelerates objects into what they will be in the future.

Deconstruction mode represents that the system doesn’t necessarily need to be destroyed. We need to take a closer look at the individual moving parts and understand how it works so we can rebuild it. Situational Acceleration mode represents future possibilities.

In the final act, there is a protest at Christie’s fashion show. On one side are the protestors, on the other, those who were guests invited to the show. When the boosters use acceleration mode on everyone, we see what they will be in the future: both sides are protesting together. When Corvette and her friend Sade (Naomie Ackie) accidentally accelerate a police car, it becomes a futuristic vehicle with all kinds of weaponry and destructive features. But when they accelerate the people, it makes them into a version of themselves that depicts unity.

That is how they win.

The film’s ending leaves us with a sense of hope. The Velvet Gang opens a community center to sell clothes, and Christie has to comply with the demands of the people who work in the Metro Designers factory.

It shows that regardless of how bad the world gets, future generations will still unite and fight for something better. This conveys a future of unity, a future that is hopeful in the face of bleakness, and it's a message the world needs to hear.

Fandom Spaces Have a Boundary Problem

At the end of February, amid the ever-persisting Heated Rivalry craze, an article was published for New York Magazine called “The Great Fujoshi Awakening: Why Do So Many Women Love Men Who Love Men?” In the article, the author made very specific references to works of fanfiction online, going so far as to link one of the works within the article. There was immediate public outcry by fans on Twitter discussing the impropriety of bringing free fan works into a for-profit space without the fanfiction author’s consent. While the work was delinked soon after, it brought attention to the rapidly increasing lack of boundaries in fandom spaces, both by fans, people interacting from an outsider perspective, and people involved in the source material.

A multitude of comments have surfaced recently regarding a “separation of church and state” in an analogy for keeping fandom spaces separate from the creators and/or cast and crew of the source material the fans are for. This idea is not new, as there have been conversations around the legality of fanfiction for quite some time. There can be copyright problems, which fans of Anne Rice’s literary works are probably familiar with. Rumors around Anne Rice suing fans for writing fanfiction in the 1990s have circulated for years, but in reality, she just took a stance against fanfiction out of a desire for creatives to come up with their own stories and leave her alone. Some fans said they received cease-and-desist letters from Rice’s lawyer to remove their fanfiction from the internet. It is important to note that Rice later changed her opinions on fanfiction due to realizing she could easily avoid coming into contact with fan works. Because similar problems have occurred over the years, some fanfiction websites, like Fanfiction.net, even have a list of authors whose works are prohibited from the site on account of the authors’ stricter copyright claims. 

Most of the time, copyright claims are only an issue for fanfiction if the creator is somehow profiting from the material. Fanfiction is on public websites with free access, and there are rarely instances where fanfiction authors are making money from their works because they know it would be a copyright issue. Part of the problem with the aforementioned article was that it was behind a paywall, indirectly profiting off of someone’s fanfiction that was temporarily linked. It’s incredibly important to note that Heated Rivalry itself stemmed from fanfiction. Author Rachel Reid adapted her first book in the series, Game Changer, from fanfiction she wrote about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She’s far from the first person to do so: Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfiction, and The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood began as Star Wars fanfiction. 

It’s incredibly important to note that what all of these published authors have in common is that they’re women. To recenter Heated Rivalry, much of the backlash revolved around the idea that straight women were fetishizing gay men. There are plenty of straight female fans of Heated Rivalry, but to act as though they’re the only fans of the show or book series is disingenuous. There is a wide array of queer people who are fans of both, and there are queer people in the cast and crew. The show creator himself is a gay man, and he’s spoken at length about the nuances of why women are drawn to the show. The inflammatory comments surrounding the fanbase of Heated Rivalry are steeped in thinly veiled misogyny. When one Twitter user asked, “Why do men keep calling things women are into mass psychosis?”, another replied, “Cause they can’t use female hysteria anymore.” The fanfiction writer whose work was linked in the New York Magazine article made a statement on Twitter about the situation and also called attention to the rampant misogyny and ignoring of just-as-present queer fans. He (@/subc0rax) wrote, “It feels like a shame that an article that’s seemingly willing to engage with the reasons women enjoy this kind of romance and explore the fact that not all of these fans are even women doesn’t seem to be able to connect the dots and entertain the possibility that there are gay men enjoying the current Heated Rivalry craze with the same fervour and adoration as its female audience.” 

Many of the problems stem from fan works reaching the eyes and ears of the authors and other direct participants of the source material. Many of these instances have been brought up in relation to the Heated Rivalry article. One situation was on the Graham Norton Show, where Norton displayed romantic fan art between the X-Men characters Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr to actors James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. It is uncertain as to whether or not Norton received permission from the artist to project it on television and/or show it to the actors, but it also didn’t feel like it was in good faith and was much rather poking fun at the fan art. There have been similar issues in The Pitt fandom, where interviewers have been asking actors directly what their opinions are on ships (desired romantic pairings between characters, short for “relationships”) of their characters, sometimes even asking if they’re going to happen in the course of the show. An article was recently posted titled “‘The Pitt’ Fans Are Horny Little Freaks,” to which the author was essentially berating fans for shipping characters and creating fan works based on the show. The Pitt actors have also been shown erotic fan art in recent interviews, as a means for inciting some sort of reaction, once again without any consideration for the artists who very probably did not intend for the actors to see it. One Twitter user (@/midwestprincsss) commented, “I really don’t like that fanfic and fanart are being used to make actors give a reaction that’s profitable for the publication interviewing them. Fan work is not for corporations or the folks in the project. It’s for fans.” Most fans feel similarly, especially since the people showing the actors or whoever is involved with the source material are often doing so in bad faith.

Within fandoms, there are boundary problems surrounding parasocialism, in which fans act overly familiar with celebrities as though they know these people in real life. A divisive aspect of fanfiction in many fandoms is real person fiction (RPF), where people write about real people. While plenty of people write and make fan art for their own enjoyment, there are also plenty of people who take it too seriously and begin to intrude on the celebrities’ personal lives. Some will comment cruel things on a celebrity’s Instagram page, and some will go so far as to stalk a certain celebrity and their family. This was a longstanding issue in the Dan and Phil fandom, which kept the YouTubers from talking about their sexualities, relationships, and personal lives for well over a decade. There have been more recent issues for actors in the Disney+ Percy Jackson television adaptation, too, as the teenage lead Walker Scobell took to Instagram to call out “fans” who have been stalking and harassing his friends and family. These examples illustrate that this is not a one-sided issue of outsiders intruding on fandom but also fandom intruding on the lives of the creatives involved in the works they claim to love. 

This is not any one fandom’s problem, as these issues have been arising since before the age of the internet. However, the increased amounts of social media platforms and the rise of public-facing fandoms have made these issues more apparent. So what should we do? First, news outlets need to stop using fan works without the creators’ consent, especially when they’re profiting off of it. Otherwise, fandoms are always going to have problems. There will always be plenty of kind, welcoming, and respectful fans, just as there will always be some fans who start arguments, breach boundaries, and give their fandoms a bad reputation. As many things do these days, many of these problems boil down to critical thinking and media literacy skills. There needs to be a boundary between fans and what their fandom is for, or we will lose any worthwhile contact going forward. Fanfiction writers and fan artists shouldn’t be afraid of their works being exposed on television or published articles, and actors and other creators shouldn’t be afraid of their lives or the lives of their loved ones being aggressively disrupted.

How “The Ugly Stepsister” Painfully Explores the Need to be Beautiful

I’ve watched the trailer for Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister over 5 times now. It all started when my best friend sent me the trailer on Instagram and I was immediately intrigued. The idea of reworking Cinderella into a horror movie from the perspective of one of her stepsisters sounded like an excellent way of embracing the story’s grim (pun very much intended) roots. Past versions of the tale have featured cannibalism and various forms of mutilation, yet the classic Disney film has remained the prevalent iteration. Aside from Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods, I had yet to see a Cinderella story that fully leaned into the gory elements that existed alongside the pumpkin carriages and fairy godmothers.

As a bass beat punctuates the trailer, questions start to flash on screen:

“Do you ever feel inferior? Unworthy? Ashamed? Rejected? Invisible?” and finally “Ugly?”

The last word, which continues to flash on screen as the titular stepsister, Elvira (Lea Myren) sits down in front of her vanity. Elvira herself is far from being ugly. Myren is a very pretty actress who looks like she could play Anya Taylor-Joy’s younger sister. But this movie isn’t called The Already Pretty Stepsister, so certain steps have to be taken in order to let audiences know that Elvira is indeed the ugly stepsister.

Frankly, Elvira’s mother lives up to the title of Evil Stepmother because she’s decided to stick this poor girl with an obnoxious pile of sausage curls overflowing her head and completely overwhelming her soft, delicate features while throwing copious amounts of stiff, brown fabric onto her small frame. The torture is topped with a stack of bows that look like a mess of whipped cream atop this Kibbe system nightmare. Of course, all of this serves to emphasize the beauty of our Cinderella, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess).

Agnes appears to us looking perfectly put together with her historically inaccurate half-ponytail with relaxed beachwaves and her simple yet elegant pale blue dress, which only makes her bright blue eyes stand out. Brief shots of half-eaten cakes and cinnamon rolls crammed into drawers, a close-up shot of Elvira’s stomach, and glimpses of her braces are further meant to alert audiences that Elvira is, in fact, ugly. It’s not enough that (for some reason) her clothes are unflattering to her features, but apparently, her body is also far from the ideal that Agnes apparently embodies.Elvira is not ugly, but she just happens to have all of the supposed signifiers of ugliness. The only reason why she does not appear as put-together as Agnes is that her mother is possessed by the vengeful spirit of a stylist who’s obsessed with heaping bows and curls onto a petite person with pixie-like features. As for her body, Elvira barely looks any different from any of the other girls in her dance class. Sure, the camera focuses on her stomach after eating one of the several sweets hidden in her drawers, but it’s nothing abnormal or shocking. By all means, it is a completely normal body. So when we see Elvira’s nose gruesomely cracked open by a terrifying plastic surgeon (appropriately named Dr. Esthetique), it hurts in more ways than one.

It’s an image that is all too familiar. A girl who looks perfectly fine, even pretty if only her mother would stop, insisted on pairing sausage curls with gigantic bows, going to extreme lengths to completely change everything about herself rather than emphasizing the beauty that is already there. Unfortunately, for many people, and especially young women, these are the types of growing pains that we experience.

A ScreenRant review by Mae Abdulbaki describes how beauty in this world is viewed:“As a performance, as status, as a means to attract and remain valuable in the eyes of society." Beauty is essentially a currency amongst women, and the extensive procedures that Elvira puts herself through are the labor needed to earn it. She screams in pain with blood leaking from her eyes after having false eyelashes directly sewn onto her eyelids, all for the attention of Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). The film is listed as a horror-comedy, but those who identify with Elvira’s struggles know that it is truly a tragedy. One review that flashes on screen during the trailer calls the film “savagely brutal and yet strangely beautiful.” A description that is ironic, given the way that Blichfeldt’s intentions seem to be to rip beauty standards apart limb from limb, as blood spatters onto a horrified audience. Personally, I’m all for it. If Elvira’s torture feels visceral (one audience member threw up during one sequence during its Cannes showing), that’s because it is forcing the audience to feel what nearly every young girl has had to feel on the inside as she grew up. “Savagely brutal and yet strangely beautiful.”

While it may even be frustrating to see Elvira viciously mutilating herself for the attention of one man she barely knows, how many of us have been like her? Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney) has faced similar criticism for the insanely intricate morning routine she subjects herself to just to gain a little bit of attention from Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi). But unless you can confidently admit to yourself that you’ve never gone to any lengths just for the attention of a crush, none of us is any better.

Even without a romantic interest, we live in a society that immediately judges people based on their physical appearances. Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz write how “it is acknowledged that many women willingly engage in ‘beauty rituals’ and perceive being (or becoming) beautiful as empowering, not oppressive.” This idea is made more complex with the frequent promotion of “self-care” and “wellness” by social media. We may not view multi-step skincare routines or smoothie recipes as beauty rituals because they have been wrapped in the idea that it is being done for yourself. But, let’s be honest here, “wellness” has simply replaced “beautiful,” and it is not a coincidence that the expected outcome of following these rituals is a “glow-up” in the form of a slimmer body, smoother skin, and more voluminous hair. These rituals are meant to lead to the achievement of beauty standards.

“The social advantages of pretty privilege are many: good-looking people come off smart, capable, trustworthy, and generally morally virtuous.”

On the other end of the spectrum is the unfairly gorgeous Agnes. Silently judging Elvira while looking effortlessly ethereal in an Elle-Fanning-as-Sleeping-Beauty type of way. Although she meets beauty standards in a way that Elvira does not, she, too, is dependent on her beauty to move herself forward in the world. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore index categorizes Cinderella under type 510A — Persecuted Heroine. While it would have been easy to place Agnes/Cinderella into the role of villain to Elvira’s persecuted heroine, Agnes is not any better off. As previously mentioned, beauty is a currency, and Agnes only happens to have an abundance of it.

As a young woman without a father or a dowry, Agnes must rely on her pretty privilege to catch the attention of the wealthy prince. According to Sable Yong for Time Magazine, “the social advantages of pretty privilege are many: good-looking people come off smart, capable, trustworthy, and generally morally virtuous.” Elvira temporarily gains this advantage sometime after she swallows a tapeworm egg to eat away her body weight, and her hair begins to fall out in clumps. Whether she likes it or not, she has become beautiful. But it’s still not enough. Yong writes that pretty privilege “calls for a kind of beauty that appears convincingly ‘natural’ in order to imbue positive associations of goodness and moral virtue.” As painful as those procedures may have been, it is no match for the beauty that Agnes was born with.

“A kind of beauty that appears convincingly ‘natural’ in order to imbue positive associations of goodness and moral virtue.” The penultimate moment comes when Elvira holds up a meat cleaver, preparing to chop off her toes. Besides the moment when the slipper fits Cinderella, this is one of the most famous scenes of the Cinderella story. Elvira has gone through hell and back to forge herself into the living doll that she thought the prince wanted. But Agnes, even with her face obscured, has managed to destroy everything that she has worked towards. When we see her glaring down at her own foot, there is a sense that it was never just for the prince. The whole world has told Elvira that in order to be valued, she must be beautiful. All of those surgeries and procedures were ways of punishing herself for failing to embody beauty standards in the same way that Agnes does. But we all know how the story of Cinderella ends. Only one stepsister will get her happily ever after.

Read the original post here: https://medium.com/@jdvaldep2/the-stepsister-was-never-ugly-how-the-ugly-stepsister-painfully-explores-the-need-to-be-a47fd855a156