I Love Boosters (dir. Boots Riley)

Okay, giving it its own thread because it deserves it; saw it last night and what a goddamn treat of a film stop to start. The trailers have barely scraped the surface of what's going on. Absolutely see this in as packed a theater as you can find.

so yeah, i saw _i love boosters_ last night and i have thoughts

first off i don't get out much so i'd never actually heard of boots riley before i saw the trailer for this last week-ish before _erupje_ (my friend izzy is a huge charli xcx fan, i'd barely heard of her... no really i don't get out much), and i was like, "oh shit this looks sick" so when izzy said it was out in theaters, i was there in a heartbeat

basically i was all-in from the beginning but when the stoner white girl started explaining that the portable hole could also _heighten the contradictions_ i was like "oh shit, i know what _that_ means"

yeah idk. i feel like eisenstein would've been proud. i feel like chuck jones also would've been proud. also has the fucking funniest sex scenes i've ever seen.

it reminded me of so many different films. helzapoppin. they live. i mean it makes john carpenter looks like a coward, which, i'll give him some slack because it was 1988 or so and dealing with the fucking soviets has always been almost as much of a headache as dealing with the capitalists. it also reminded me of rene vienet's gag dub "can dialectics break bricks?" demi moore's character is the one to namedrop "detournement", before the Dialectical Materializer (it's not a term the film uses, but i like the phrase and i'm going to call it that) even shows up, which i think points to how much _depth_ there is in the film. i take it as kind of a "even the devil can quote scripture" thing. i think there is a good critique to be made of vienet's film by comparing it to "i love boosters", because "i love boosters" focuses on _common struggle_. i haven't seen the original film vienet dubbed as "can dialectics break bricks?" but i _have_ seen the original of the "detournement" vienet did next. after that he recut the first (i think) "female convict scorpion" to splice in add sex scenes. "female convict scorpion" doesn't need that fucking bob guccione bullshit. if vienet had fucking _understood_ what female convict scorpion was, what it was saying, which he _could have done_ from the visual language of that film alone, he wouldn't have added sex scenes, he would have fucking _translated_ it instead of treating like fucking "kagi no kagi".

i mean this is always how i talk about films and _i love boosters_ makes it very easy for to do this, which in my mind is an upside. come for done cheadle's laugh-out-loud pussy-eating performance, stay for the class struggle. or you know what, stay for _both_, because in _i love boosters_, there's no contradiction between _those_ two to heighten.

unfortunately i couldn't find a packed theater to see it in, but hey we take what we can get

wait that wasn't don cheadle lol

i'm sorry i don't know actors at all

i keep thinking gwyneth paltrow played christie smith

Roffle, an image. And yes that was LaKeith Stanfield doing the honors. In the livestream after the screening I caught on Tuesday, he said when he got cast his wife said she had to play the person in THAT scene and read for it and there ya go.

but yeah my feeling (from ilx, my social circles, and seeing this film on _opening night_) is that this film is _not_ being heavily promoted and is _not_ getting a lot of buzz, so if you want to see it in theaters (and you _will_ want to see this, one way or another), see it _now_. the trailer doesn't _misrepresent_ the film but there is SO MUCH MORE to it than what's in the trailer. the elevator pitch i've started using for it is "duck amuck meets battleship potemkin"... i mean it's way more than that, but it gets people's attention lol

The art direction and production design scared this middle-class white girl, and Riley would probably be happy to hear that. But this, and the Looney Tunes physics are wonderful for the story.

I'm watching it tomorrow morning.

When this ended I was pleased but not wildly enthused, but on the way home talking about it all with my partner we both got more and more excited about it. It sounds absurd, but it was genuinely a lot more subtle than I realized in the moment! Among other highlights, Moore was excellent, both her performance and every single line of dialogue was perfect

Seeing this tonight!

how do I even describe this

Everything Everywhere All at Once meets Norma Rae?!

duck amuck meets battleship potemkin

Everything Everywhere All at Once meets Norma Rae

as long as you're thinking dialectically you can't go wrong ;)

Quite right.

There is a post-credits scene, I'll note, but it's more of an alternate/extended bit from elsewhere in the movie. Fun, though. I kinda like movies like that and Sinners where you don't need to stay for that kind of final beat, but it's a last moment in that world.

Didn't make it last night because my wife had work to do, and the handful of screenings left nearby are all too late for me/us. Oh well. "duck amuck meets battleship potemkin" sounds awesome. "Everything Everywhere All at Once meets Norma Rae" does not.

Marxian dialectics and cunnilingus.

fwiw I didn't like EEAAO, but I did like this. It 100% has a cartoon vibe, though I'm not sure direct comparisons to Chuck Jones are fully justified (though there's a sequence that feels directly inspired by Monsters Inc, the most classic cartoony pixar). Ultimately though it's pretty sui generis imo. Did you like Sorry to Bother You?

I never got around to seeing it, tbh. For no particular reason, it's been on my list.

So here's something interesting. My wife suggested we try to see it again tonight, but knowing that her time is more premium than mine, I told her to look up a couple of reviews first to make sure she'd like it. After doing so she got back to me and said it didn't seem too weird and she wants to see it, but one recurring complaint she encountered was that the dialogue was sometimes really hard to make out in the mix. That's nothing new these days, but apparently this one is particularly (maybe even sometimes intentionally?) egregious. She has really bad hearing, so she wants to wait to see it at home with subtitles.

haven't seen it yet, but just wanted to say that Boots is a fixture around downtown Oakland... I see him getting burgers with his family, he'll show up at shows and stuff... definitely not a man in a high castle

as long as you're thinking dialectically you can't go wrong ;)

― rob, Thursday, May 28, 2026 11:19 AM (yesterday)

i'm a marxist dbt booster (pun intended), comes naturally to me

re: dialogue - i'd say it's less that it's mixed poorly and more that it's "maximalist" in a way where it's basically impossible to catch all of it in one viewing.

i definitely didn't get the sense of riley as an ivory tower guy! that's one of the things that makes the film so compelling. he's present in the world in a way that, like, i for example am not, _and_ he knows as much about guy debord as i do. he probably knows _more_ about guy debord than i do.

one recurring complaint she encountered was that the dialogue was sometimes really hard to make out in the mix. That's nothing new these days, but apparently this one is particularly (maybe even sometimes intentionally?) egregious. She has really bad hearing, so she wants to wait to see it at home with subtitles.

Yeah, this is a common complaint with this film in particular, whether folks see it in art houses or other sized screening room.

It’s a problem generally, agreed, but this particular film didn’t help because you had rapidly given ADR’d lines about how certain plot critical things were explained, but in a montage where the other frequency range of the audio track washed out the dialogue

Boots is a fixture around downtown Oakland... I see him getting burgers with his family, he'll show up at shows and stuff.

the first time I ran into him was in Berkeley at a burger place! the second time was at the OSH near my house.

I think he’s more of a Fanon guy than a Debord guy …

that bitch got a magic bag

agree with all the analyses of the movie being a live action cartoon but the cartoon it most specifically reminded me of might have been tuca and bertie

I hadn't heard about the sound issues; that was definitely a problem for me too, though we had the mixed blessing of French subtitles to aid us.

An ancillary benefit of watching this is I've been listening to The Coup for the first time (weird that I never did before now, not sure how that happened). "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO" should be a modern standard

"Fat Cats Bigga Fish" is probably the best hip hop song of all time.

yeah they were a very good bay area rap group even if you look past the radical politics. pick a bigger weapon has been my go-to album lately, but can’t go wrong with their 90s output, especially genocide & juice

when i saw sorry to bother you at the alamo they played a bunch of coup music videos in the pre-show. he’s been an eccentric genius for a long time.