Sorry to Bother You<\/a>, an absurdist black comedy starring Stanfield as a code-switching telemarketer who gains success but loses his identity.\u00a0The director\u2019s latest is even more playful: a riot of neon costumes and cartoonish visuals somehow holding together a plot about a gang of female shoplifters (known as \u201cboosters\u201d), led by Keke Palmer, who rob from a designer-store chain run by Demi Moore in a cunty blonde bob. The boosters sell to the poor at discount prices like urban lady Robin Hoods. It accumulates into an anti-capitalist, anti\u2013Devil Wears Prada call for global workers\u2019 action that speaks to our collective sense of helplessness in America and beyond.<\/p>\n\u201cThere\u2019s silliness in it,\u201d said Riley, wearing his signature sky-high elongated fedora and a patterned black-and-white suit at the Q&A. \u201cBut also, I think it\u2019s a very important movie to be out there right now, because I think we all need to figure out ways that we can change what\u2019s happening, ways that we can fight fascism, change the structure of the world around us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve definitely bought a lot of stuff from boosters in my life,\u201d Riley admitted, explaining how he came up with his mishmash of concepts. He was also thinking about fashion as an artistic endeavor, how much it costs, how many people are involved in making it, how all the people who make it can\u2019t afford it, and how women should get it for free because they can\u2019t be a member of society without it.<\/p>\n
Boosters begins by following the back of Palmer\u2019s head as she shimmies her way through an Oakland club lit up in greens and reds, looking for a good time, it seems. She spies an enticing guy, Stanfield, with seductive eyes and a Jheri curl, but goes for a cleaner-cut hunk instead and takes him back to her tiny apartment. He\u2019s ready, and she opens the door \u2026 to a bunch of clothing racks, all in red. He\u2019s got to be a size 12, right? It takes him a minute to comprehend that she doesn\u2019t want to fuck. She wants to sell him shoes.<\/p>\n
Palmer\u2019s character, Corvette, is down on her luck and sleeping on a friend\u2019s couch in a onetime fast-food chicken restaurant that still has the light-up menu on the wall, right next to the makeshift shower in the kitchen. The message is clear: This gang of best friends, which consists of Corvette, Sade (Naomi Ackie), and Mariah (Taylour Page), is broke \u2014 and enterprising. They\u2019ve formed an outlaw trio of shoplifters known as the Velvet Gang, who always dress on point and are obsessed with Metro Designs, a couture label designed by Moore\u2019s Christie Smith, a girlboss and artistic genius who treats her workers like garbage. They steal from her and sell out of the back of vans to their sharp-dressed community. Their motto: \u201cFashion. Forward. Philanthropy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Every month or so, Metro Designs changes its monochromatic color scheme, forcing the boosters to pull another heist (usually with a white girl to cause a distraction). This allows Riley and costume designer Shirley Kurata to constantly transform their set from green to yellow to aquamarine. Peppered through it all are images you\u2019ll never get outside of a Boots Riley film, like a self-help seminar at a discount furniture store in which Palmer sits in a blue velvet massage chair that keeps smushing her face as she talks. Or a two-story-tall ball of receipts and eviction notices that comes rumbling down the street toward Corvette every once in a while, threatening to crush her unless she keeps on boosting.<\/p>\n
The movie really kicks into another gear when a fourth booster shows up, a teleporting genius from one of Metro Design\u2019s factories in China (Poppy Liu as Jianhu), who\u2019s on a mission to get Christie Smith to accede to some pretty reasonable demands, like 30 percent higher wages and to stop sandblasting jeans and causing everyone to get cancer. But the joy of Riley\u2019s \u201cbaby,\u201d which he said took five years to get made, is how it plays like a stream of outlandish moments, the most noteworthy of which are:<\/p>\n
Moore, in her first movie since her Substance Oscar nomination, is having a blast in a platinum haircut that carries the haughty authority of Miranda Priestly and the judging-you-while-smiling air of Leslie Bibb in The White Lotus. Her Christie Smith is an artiste, a visionary and science genius from MIT who rose to design Chanel at age 15. She is not happy about the Velvet Gang stealing all her merchandise and reducing her margins, and she says things like, \u201cMumblecrust whores!\u201d and \u201cThey\u2019re just a bunch of low-class urban bitches \u2014 with all due respect to urban bitches.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first I was saying, like, \u2018Wow, I didn\u2019t didn\u2019t know that I would be thought of as cool enough to be part of a Boots Riley film,\u2019\u201d Moore explained at SXSW, but she wanted to do it because she\u2019d never had a chance to be a part of something like this.<\/p>\n
It looks like a shining Tower of Pisa in a sea of normal skyscrapers and provides some of the movie\u2019s funniest visual gags, like when Corvette sneaks into Christie Smith\u2019s office by hiding in a coffee cart but can\u2019t get out because she keeps slipping and falling on the slanted floor in her pantyhose.<\/p>\n
Corvette and Sade boost by stuffing their clothes with clothes, but the joke is that they take SO MUCH \u2014 entire racks \u2014 resulting in a getaway waddle that makes Palmer look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, dressed in powder-pink Juicy Couture and a wig.<\/p>\n
Riley peppers his movie with news reports about rising crime rates with incredible chyrons showing an \u201cUpstanding Community Member\u201d (Ritter) who says workers strikes caused him trauma and a \u201cCrying Black Mother\u201d calling for more police. This is all a conspiracy, of course.<\/p>\n
We learn that Metro Designs is stiffing its workers by forcing them to buy the overly priced monochromatic couture they have to wear to work in the retail shop. This information is conveyed by a hilariously avant-garde Poulter, playing the store\u2019s manager, who dyes his hair to match each monochromatic scheme and hides his nefariousness behind a company policy that requires techno music to be played at maximum volume at all times. He even has a little speaker dial that he turns to \u201cLow-Key\u201d when he wants to use corporatespeak that makes no sense and to \u201cMax Vibes\u201d when he wants to explain how he\u2019s screwing workers over but not let them hear him.<\/p>\n
We get to see Jianhu plunder an entire store in seconds with a \u201cmagic bag\u201d containing two handheld teleporting devices shaped like metal doughnuts. The devices, which she stole from the Metro Design factory in China, have \u201csituational accelerator\u201d and \u201cdeconstruct\u201d modes and spew energy that looks like a stream of high-pressure water when activated.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll let you figure out how those modes work, but at one point, they point it at a police car and it turns into a monster truck operated by Eric Andr\u00e9 doing his best evil-maniac laugh. At the premiere, Andr\u00e9, in a caftan and a gondolier\u2019s straw hat, stood up and said he\u2019d done his part in 15 minutes and that everyone on the red carpet thought he was Boots Riley, which is how he even made it into the theater. Boots then replied that he gets mistaken for Andr\u00e9 and gets a lot of free liquor for it.<\/p>\n
Eiza Gonz\u00e1lez also has a terrific, scene-stealing turn as the trio\u2019s pot-smoking co-worker who happens to know a lot about teleporting and quantum theory.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t spoil too much, but the gang does end up getting pursued by a rabid group of skinless corporate goons \u2014 all red muscle and sinew \u2014 portrayed by stop animation.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a banner year for cunnilingus in movies. In Sinners, Miles Caton\u2019s Preacher Boy finds \u201cthe button\u201d and licks it like ice cream as his proud cousin Stack listens from the other side of the door. In Marty Supreme, Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s character is so ensorcelled by Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s tongue that she finds herself on her back in the grass of Central Park and almost arrested by cops.<\/p>\n
But neither even comes close to what might be the marquee scene of Boosters, when Stanfield\u2019s mysterious Prince-dude, who\u2019s been trying to go out with Corvette, takes a friend of the gang back to his home. As the trio recounts the story, we see him going down on her, and it is so good, she starts to levitate. And it just goes on and on. This is the greatest cunnilingus known in the history of man going down on woman, complete with some incredible spraying of bodily fluids. Until \u2026 the camera pulls back and we realize that this is not a man but some dinosaurlike demon.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo bad,\u201d one of the Velvet Gang sighs. \u201cHe\u2019s fine as hell.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stanfield told the crowd that the woman in that scene is actually his wife and then said to Riley that the next time he makes a movie, he doesn\u2019t have to pitch it. All he has to do is call.<\/p>\n
\u201cMe too,\u201d said Palmer.<\/p>\n
\u201cMe three,\u201d chimed in everyone else.<\/p>\n
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