From left, actors Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu and Keke Palmer in a scene from I Love Boosters , a new movie by Boots Riley.
Image from Neon via AP.
Fashion
CULTURE
Fashion
Film
Curious about Vancouver’s new luxury mall? Watch ‘I Love Boosters’ first.
I have always wanted to be a shoplifter.
My imagined life of crime has some very strict caveats, however. Rule No. 1: Steal only from evil corporations. The kinds that exploit their workers, feature wildly overpriced goods and are generally the most blatant examples of late-stage capitalism run amok.
When a branch of Nordstrom’s upscale department store chain took over the old Eaton’s location in downtown Vancouver in the 2010s, my urge to strike back against the U.S. chain was overwhelming.
Now there’s a new luxury shopping destination in town: Oakridge Park .
The long-delayed shopping mall finally opened its doors in Vancouver last week. It’s part of a much larger development that includes not only retail but also residential and cultural spaces , all branded with the ripest, most superlative language that marketers are capable of.
To be frank, Oakridge Park is emblematic of the myriad issues at play in the city, if not the larger social moment. Most of which have to do with elevation of money over everything else on the planet.
WATCH: The trailer for I Love Boosters .
Trailer via Neon .
Before you visit Oakridge, watch ‘I Love Boosters’
Because the universe loves coincidences, Boots Riley’s new film I Love Boosters opened on the same day as Oakridge Park last week.
Ideally, the two should be experienced together, or at least in quick succession. The pairing will prepare you for the absurdity of a luxury mall in a city riven with homelessness, poverty and other social issues.
If ever there was a filmmaker for this moment, it is Boots Riley.
A true force of nature , Riley is a radical auteur fond of wearing enormous hats and possessed of a cinematic vision unlike any other.
His previous work, Sorry to Bother You , told the story of a Black telemarketer named Cash (a bit on the nose, but OK) who code switches on the job, speaking with a white voice at work in efforts to connect better with customers.
That’s only the opening premise. After getting a promotion, Cash is upgraded to the high ballers’ suite, where he discovers that the corporation he’s working for is in the business of slavery and the illegal arms trade. Things get infinitely worse when he discovers the company is also engaged in creating a race of hybrid horse people designed and bred to create a pliant, powerful workforce.
From this you may correctly surmise that Riley is not afraid of politics, symbolism and surrealism in the pursuit of cultural and social critique.
Director Boots Riley on the set of Sorry to Bother You in 2018.
Photo by Tony Chu © Annapurna Pictures. Courtesy of Everett Collection.
In I Love Boosters , Riley ups the ante, offering another evisceration of late-stage capitalism through the candy-coloured lens of high fashion. The film is laden with hefty ideas including dialectical materialism . But it’s also full-tilt boogie bananas, animated by a Tex Avery-style cartoon energy that is as serious as it is silly.
The “Boosters,” a slang term for shoplifters, consist of a group of female friends, otherwise known as the Velvet Gang, in the film. There’s Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Sade (Naomi Ackie).
When we first meet the Velvets, they’re squatting in an abandoned fast-food chicken shack, subsisting on candy and planning to hit Metro Designers, a high-fashion chain overseen by the megalomaniacal designer Christie Smith.
Played with a boggling level of high camp by Demi Moore, Smith puts the shenanigans of real life designers like John Galliano to shame.
Smith is monstrous but also great fun to watch in her black-and-white ensembles that channel Cruella de Vil . Plus her office tower that is so slanted that the floor is set at a 45-degree angle. Everything slides.
The Velvets both loathe Smith and love her work, so they steal her clothes from colour-coded boutiques that pay workers low wages and force them to fork over their meagre salaries to buy outfits to wear while working the floor.
After their boosting efforts attract the spittle-flecked rage of Smith, who calls the Velvets “low-class urban bitches,” the struggle gets more real when Corvette discovers that Metro has stolen her design for a spiky jumpsuit.
In an effort to wipe out Smith entirely, the gang get jobs at a Metro store, but before they can put their heist into action, a lone figure beats them to the punch, stealing every last item of clothing with a mysterious device that sucks up all of the merchandise in mere moments.
This woman, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), is actually a factory worker from China who toils in a sweatshop that makes clothes for Metro Designers. In addition to poisoning its workers, the factory is also involved in creating teleportation devices t…
Read the full article at The Tyee →
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