In Need of a Boost

I’m filing this from Cinéfest in Sudbury, where the festival has invited me up to do some hosting and moderating and be part of their annual Cinema Summit. It’s lovely up here, and no I’m not just trying to literally outrun the grief of losing Winnie earlier this week. Why would anyone ever suggest that.

Anyway, there’s a lot to do – and there’s a lot to cover in this week’s new-release shelf, so I’ll jump right in if that’s okay. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming. And also, fuck cancer. Let’s talk about movies.

In a very dark week, Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters offered some much-needed joy as well as some of the wildest and most playful images of any movie this year. After his glorious debut Sorry to Bother You and his fun if unwieldy Amazon series I’m a Virgo, Riley has carved out an instantly recognizable aesthetic that feels of a piece with the antic, insistently handmade works of Michel Gondry and the Daniels; watch three minutes of any of these works and you’ll know precisely where they came from. But where Gondry is drawn to whimsy and the Daniels push in on heart, Riley is more interested in structures and systems, exaggerating the flaws of our own reality to show us what’s wrong with the way we live.

I Love Boosters is easily the purest version of his mission statement, starting off as a goofball comedy about the exploits of the Velvet Gang, a trio of women who steal high-end fashions to resell them at massive discounts, and almost immediately introducing all sorts of secondary weirdness into the frame. Designer-turned-thief Corvette (Keke Palmer) squats in an abandoned fried-chicken restaurant, which is haunted by the smells of all the delicious food that was cooked there over the years; partner-in-crime Sade (Naomi Ackie) seems less interested in the social-justice aspect of their heists than the chance to escape her parental responsibilities for a few hours. And Mariah (Taylour Paige) is an enthusiastic comrade in whatever struggle comes her way.

The Gang’s ranks eventually expand to include disgruntled fashion saleswomen Violeta (Eiza González) and Mansion (Najah Bradley) and Jianhu, a Chinese factory worker who adds a remarkable technological tool to their struggle to take down millionaire designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), who’s built her fashion empire on buzzwords, pandering and appropriation and lives in a skyscraper that’s tilted at a 15-degree angle – either because it was designed that way, or because it was incompetently built and everyone just decided to pretend it was intentional.

It sounds weird, and it is, but invitingly so, with all the mayhem and messiness held together by a bouncy Tune-Yards score. Every role is cast with someone interesting, even when it could have been a throwaway part. Will Poulter continues his quest to become an indispensably weird character actor as a supercilious store manager; LaKeith Stanfield, the star of Sorry to Bother You, is here as a character known only as Pinky Ring Guy who exists to make teary-eyed, apologetic monologues. There’s Don Cheadle under ridiculous makeup as Dr. Jack, a feel-good huckster running an obvious pyramid scheme, and Jason Ritter and Eric André and Jermaine Fowler and freaking Kara Young from Is God Is turn up in bit parts just because they clearly wanted to work with Riley, and vice versa.

This film is absolutely heaving with goodwill, and the fact that the whole endeavor is engineered to promote the idea of collective action and unionization in the face of rapacious capitalism is just the cherry on top. Boots Riley is doing right by his art and right by his audience, and while I know cinema is only his side project, I would like him to keep making movies on his own terms forever, please and thank you.

Decal’s I Love Boosters 4K/Blu-ray combo is a visual riot, with Christopher Glass’ vibrant production design looking absolutely stunning in UHD and HDR; the BD master looks great as well, but I suspect there’s a reason Decal is only offering this one as a combo. And the set is loaded with extras, because why wouldn’t everyone who worked on this thing want to share the experience.

“Synthesis: The World of I Love Boosters” is a half-hour look at the production that makes a point of identifying nearly every member of the cast and crew, a truly egalitarian approach that speaks to Riley’s insistence that art is a collaborative work and every job is as important as his own. (He doesn’t even really say anything to the camera until about 25 minutes in.) It’s packed with nuts-and-bolts footage of the stop-motion elements, the creature crew, the miniature work and more elaborate set construction, with everyone clearly having a great time. I wish more behind-the-scenes material was this amiable.

Riley gets to speak in more detail on a typically thoughtful commentary track, which leads off the rest of the more conventional supplements: There’s an interview with the members of the Velvet Gang (out of character) and conversations with Riley and Stanfield, and Palmer and Moore, all shot with the same high style and understated silliness as the film. We also get a blooper reel and a collection of trailers and TVs spots, all of which do their level best to sell the energy and aesthetic of I Love Boosters without letting on just how weird this thing is. Best to let people find that out for themselves, I think.

Two new discs from VVS Films next. Let’s start with The Invite, which was A24’s latest release to be marketed with a nudge-nudge wink-wink campaign, suggesting there’s a great big twist hidden in the movie that must be experienced rather than read about. (Was it saucy? Ooh, maybe it was saucy!) And while I would always argue a movie’s plot points should be experienced rather than revealed in advance as a marketing tool, it can be a little much. The big hook of The Drama, the distributor’s last release to receive this treatment, was that someone shocks her fiancé by sharing a shocking detail about her past in the first reel. That’s not a twist, it’s the inciting incident.

The Invite doesn’t have a twist or an inciting incident, as it turns out. It’s just a contemporary comedy of manners, one that’s very straightforward in its storytelling. Being all cutesy about the nature of that story just sets people’s expectations too high – and that’s not the movie’s fault. Then again, what do I know? Maybe a similar sell would have made Materialists a hit last summer: Don’t Ask About The Legs!

But back to The Invite. I knew Olivia Wilde’s third feature was a remake of the Spanish director Cesc Gay’s 2020 film Sentimental, which was released internationally as The People Upstairs. But The Invite is in fact the fifth remake of Gay’s award-winning film, following versions from Italy, Switzerland, France and South Korea. And that makes sense. Gay’s film is infinitely exportable; there are only four characters and the whole thing takes place in a single apartment in near-real time, as an unhappy couple have their new neighbors over for dinner and things get awkward.

Wilde and Seth Rogen are Angela and Joe, the understandably beaten-down parents of a 12-year-old who is away on an impromptu sleepover. Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz are Hawk and Pina, whose enthusiastic sex has been so loud lately that it’s ruined Joe’s sleep patterns. Pina, who is a psychotherapist and sexologist, has some thoughts about why that might be; Hawk, whom Norton plays as a more oleaginous version of his Oscar-nominated Pete Seeger, has thoughts about everything. Joe has thoughts about Pina and Hawk’s thoughts, mostly uncomplimentary. And Angela thinks Joe should shut up and enjoy the conversation, maybe see where things go.

Like I said, it’s an endlessly reworkable premise, and this version – scripted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones – glories in grand statements followed by awkward silences and muttered rejoinders, exposing each character’s insecurities and hidden desires in turn. And it’s not all sex stuff, though in fairness the funniest moment in the film involves someone enthusiastically naming a specific act they’re clearly dying to try. That’s also the most genuinely human moment in the picture.

The comedy comes from the imbalance in enthusiasm, but there are moments Wilde’s direction seems determined to miss the point with a frenetic editing rhythm and an overly aggressive string score, which gives The Invite an undercurrent of anxiety even when it’s trying to sit still and pay attention to its cast. The latter might have been an issue with the mix at my screening, but the former isn’t, and as with her previous feature Don’t Worry Darling, there were moments when I wondered whether Wilde even knew what kind of movie she was making. But unlike that absolute disaster, The Invite is small and focused enough to power through the superficial distractions and gets its message across honestly and an open heart. Maybe that’s the secret A24 was trying to hide, though I can’t imagine why anyone would.

Released into theaters just a few weeks after Disclosure Day, The Outer Threat stands as a remarkable example of parallel evolution: The directorial debut of veteran Canadian producer William Woods is a modestly budgeted thriller about a rural family forced to go on the run following a world-changing discovery that plays like a lo-fi cousin to Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster … at least at first.

There’s more than just one thing happening here, and almost all of it is happening offscreen. But Woods is entirely concerned with this family – father (Mark O’Brien), mom Michelle (Constance Wu) and kids Francois (Isaac Smelcer-Zhang) and Maddy (Callista Crowe) – as the world collapses around them. Or maybe they’re the only ones it’s collapsing around.

The Outer Threat is a personal take on a global event, not unlike M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs – which was something we noted on Will’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie earlier this week. O’Brien’s Daniel Ashford is a driven astrophysicist, to the point that it’s alienated him from his family long before we meet any of them. Daniel is brilliant but manic, and we quickly get the sense that Michelle – who’s also got a background in the field – has long been protecting him from his worst impulses. But when his latest investigation yields real results, Daniel has to send the data to his government contacts – and as soon as he does, their entire county literally goes dark. Was it just a coincidence, or has someone or something – something powerful enough to shut down an entire city, and maybe more than that – been watching him all along?

The Outer Threat doesn’t take too long to answer that question, and what our heroes discover lets Woods nudge the trajectory of his story in an interesting, almost existential direction rather than following the usual bombastic action beat sheet. Everything – literally everything – is rooted in these frail human characters and their need to rebuild a functioning family dynamic.

It’s also worth noting that the other key supporting characters – William Fichtner as the owner of a roadside diner, Oscar Hsu as Michelle’s estranged father – are determined to keep their own loved ones safe, even though it might not look that way to people on the outside. It’s a small movie about big things, and a big movie about small things. I was very pleasantly surprised by it. You might want to take a look too.

VVS’ discs of The Invite and The Outer Threat are simple affairs, with excellent 1080p presentations of the features – with Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio in both English and French – but not much in the way of extras. The Outer Threat doesn’t have any special features at all, while The Invite has a two-minute “first look” promo that finds Wilde, Cruz and Norton chatting together while Rogen offers his own thoughts in a separate EPK session. If it’s a deliberate choice it’s very clever, getting the audience to see him as the more isolated character in the story … but I suspect it just worked out that way because Rogen was working on one of a dozen other projects that day. Maybe it was The Muppet Show.

Finally, there’s the sixth Scary Movie, which dusts off the spoof franchise created by Shawn and Marlon Wayans a quarter-century ago, when they discovered there was a huge audience for a movie that re-enacted the beats of Scream, but with fart jokes. The return of the Scream franchise made another one of these inevitable, I suppose, and probably even easier since Paramount acquired the franchise in its purchase of the Miramax/Dimension library. And while it’s nice to see the Wayanses reclaim the property after being iced out of the last three, there’s just not a lot here to justify your time.

Yes, it’s nice to see Anna Faris and Regina Hall return as idiot besties Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks, who sat out the fifth one – does anyone remember the fifth one? – and pick up right where they left off, with Cindy now living like a recluse because that’s how Jamie Lee Curtis was reintroduced in David Gordon Green’s Halloween and Brenda trying way too hard to be the cool mom on the block, because that’s what Octavia Spencer did in Ma.

And when someone pulls a Ghostface attack on Cindy’s youngest daughter Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), Tuesday’s estranged older sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) comes home to Woodsville – accompanied by her far too nice boyfriend (Cameron Scott Roberts) – to expose the new Ghostface and confront her family history. And also Shorty and Ray are there!

So yeah, it’s just the plot of Scream 2022 with breaks for parodies of other recent horror movies. There’s a Longlegs bit and a Substance bit and a couple of Sinners bits and Weapons bit and John Wick bit and a a Get Out bit that turns into a K-Pop Demon Hunters bit, because why not. (The prologue, a reworking of the Scream VI opening starring Teyana Taylor as herself, is probably the best thing in the whole movie.)

If there’s one reason to watch this thing, it’d be the joy of watching Keegan absolutely go for it in every single shot as Sara. She’s chasing the same wild-eyed, full-bodied comic energy that Faris brought to the first Scary Movie, and she feels like just as much of a discovery in this one. So that’s something.

Paramount goes back to individual 4K and Blu-ray editions with Scary Movie; there’s no combo to be found. The 4K disc supplements a pristine presentation of the feature in 2160p and Dolby Atmos with four featurettes that add up to a little less than half an hour of material, all of it very friendly. There’s a check-in with the legacy cast (“Scream Together”) and an introduction to the new actors (“Fresh Meat”), along with a catchup to the half-dozen other members of the Wayans family accompanying Shawn and Marlon into the franchise (“Wayans World”).

“Scene Dissection” is the longest segment, with director Tiddes discussing how much fun he and his team creating the film’s elaborate parodies. I’m glad somebody did.

I Love Boosters is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Decal Releasing. The Invite and The Outer Threat are now available on Blu-ray from VVS Films. Scary Movie is now available in individual 4K and Blu-ray editions from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Up next: Supergirl and Evil Dead Burn slug it out for your love while Leviticus slithers around in the background. And of course paid subscribers can look forward to tomorrow’s What’s Worth Watching. Not on the paid tier? That’s easily fixed! Just five American dollars and you get to find out what I think about concrete!