Film Review of the Week

Comedy

I Love Boosters (18)

Review: I have never understood fashion. If something feels good then I’m content and I have no appreciation for turned-up trousers, vintage knits or the return of straight-legged jeans (did they ever go away?). Perhaps that explains why I got hopelessly lost tumbling down the rabbit holes of writer-director Boots Riley’s anti-capitalist satire which unzips one wilfully absurd diversion after another to lambast proponents of the fashion industry who profit from the backbreaking exertions of sweatshop labour.

The title refers to organised shoplifters like Corvette (Keke Palmer). She is the ringleader of a team of petty thieves operating in the San Francisco Bay area, who orchestrate distractions to “liberate” large volumes of colour-coordinated merchandise from branches of the Metro brand powered by the aspirational designs of Christie Smith (Demi Moore). Corvette’s tight-knit crew, affectionately known as the Velvet Gang, includes Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Sade (Naomi Ackie). Their repeated attacks on Metro sparks a bitter war of words with Christie on social media. While Corvette is happy to act as a modern day Robin Hood, she also yearns to be a designer and is enraged to discover that Christie has “stolen” one of her ideas for a wearable suit in her new collection.

The Velvet Gang encounters a rival booster, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), who has a handheld portal device that allows her to suck hundreds of garments off racks in seconds. Jianhu reveals she is one of the workers from China who toil night and day to fill orders for Metro. Her thievery is a protest against deplorable working conditions and Corvette’s sisterly entourage pledges support to affect change.

I Love Boosters is a brash genre-melding critique that left me with plenty of questions and few coherent answers. The plot goes haywire with the introduction of stop-motion animated characters to the melee and when Riley’s script adds two further settings to the handheld portal devices – situational accelerator and deconstruct – my comprehension gradually uncoupled from the filmmaker’s intentions.

Palmer’s measured performance provides calm from the stylistic storm raging around her but even she is swept away by a surrealist crescendo that amplifies the controlled madness of Riley’s acclaimed debut, Sorry To Bother You. LaKeith Stanfield materialises intermittently as a demon with a unique way to suck the life out of unsuspecting victims while Moore’s enraged fashion doyenne is a harpy in need of sharper dialogue. Deliberately overblown production design raises occasional smiles, like Christie’s office built on a sharp incline that requires study footwear and strong leg muscles to walk with a perpetual lean from one side of the room to the other. I tilted at the windmills of Riley’s wildly imaginative mind but was neither sucked in nor blown away.

Drama

Primetime (15)

Review: The chameleonic Robert Pattinson delivers a mesmerising and layered performance as an ambitious television journalist with a desire to achieve immortality through his work in documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim’s fiction debut. Based on true events, Primetime dramatises the questionable choices that led to the cancellation of hugely popular hidden camera TV series To Catch A Predator, which employed adult decoys to confront men who wanted to meet and have sex with minors.

Oppenheim’s picture begins two years before tragedy strikes. Chris Hansen (Pattinson) is the crusading public face of a segment of news magazine programme Dateline NBC. Working closely with producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), Chris nurtures a ratings magnet and NBC Entertainment’s president Jeff Zucker (playing himself) gives To Catch A Predator a primetime slot in direct competition with survival mystery Lost. Chris, Andie and the team work closely with Perverted Justice’s founder, Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), to organise sting operations. Struggling actor Daniel Plum (Skyler Gisondo), who looks young for his age, is hired to play one of the 13-year-old victims. He takes telephone calls and appears on camera to convince predators to meet in person. Hidden cameras capture any immorality and attempted illegality before law enforcement swoops in.

The moment Chris confronts a target using his catchphrase, “Why don’t you have a seat?”, is an intrinsic element of the show’s popularity. However, beating Lost in the ratings demands high-profile, headline-grabbing targets such as Rockwall County’s assistant district attorney Bill Conradt (Alex Winter). When Daniel’s resolve wavers as bait for the DA, Chris snarls, “You’re either with me… or you’re with him”.

Primetime is a haunting and highly stylised depiction of a moment in TV history when programme makers pursued lurid on-screen confessions and ignored safeguarding protocols to drive ratings. Screenwriter Ajon Singh compresses timelines and creates fictional characters and events to generate dramatic momentum. Pattinson is spellbinding in a role that often requires him to convey emotions through his eyes and facial expressions. His embodiment of Hansen is just as unsettling as some of the men ensnared by the show. Flickers of an icy grin dance on his lips as he confronts one man who took the bait. “I don’t want any of this for you,” he coldly intones, aware that cameras are capturing his every word, “but at the end of the day, a man must be held accountable for the decisions that he makes.”

Hansen steadfastly refuses to practise what he preaches when it comes to accepting the consequences for cheating on his wife but this potentially meaty subplot needs more flesh on its brittle bones than Singh offers us. Oppenheim’s documentary roots are evident in his faux-verite flourishes, depicting some scenes almost entirely through a grainy CCTV lens. Like viewers at the time, we dare not look away.

Romance

Wicker (15)

Review: If the universe doesn’t deliver the perfect partner, make him yourself from nature’s bountiful harvest. That’s the mantra of a fantastical comedy drama written and directed by real-life spouses Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, based on Ursula Wills’s short story The Wicker Husband. Production designed as a twisted medieval fairy tale a la Beauty And The Beast, Wicker executes its deranged central romance with heartfelt sincerity and reminds us that love makes basket cases of us all.

In a quaint English village, the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki) organises festivities to celebrate the marriage of her sister (Marli Siu) to the Bottlewasher (Gustav Lindt). A ritual to choose the next bride involving eggs fashioned by the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) unexpectedly spotlights the Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman), a pungent loner whose spinster status is a constant source of mean-spirited derision. “That’s not a good omen,” whispers one villager. Unwilling to be treated like chattel by a husband, the Fisherwoman commissions the Basket Weaver to make her a soulmate and one month later, she meets her Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgard) at the altar. “You are the reason I live and breathe,” he tells her sweetly, sparking jealousy among the other wives, whose partners never shower them with compliments.

The Fisherwoman falls deliriously in love with her handmade mate – “You have my heart now and it’s very flammable!” – and their high-decibel sexual antics set tongues a-wagging in the local community. The Tailor’s Wife is furious that the Fisherwoman’s happiness is challenging the status quo and she spitefully sets in motion a plan to poison her rival’s marital bliss.

Wicker is a whimsical, filthy-minded fable of sexual discovery and empowerment, anchored by winning performances from the two leads. Colman has that rare gift of making outlandish caricatures feel grounded and relatable and she teases out the insecurities and self-doubt of her dowdy outsider with panache.

Clad in a stunning full-body textile suit and prosthetics fashioned by the team at Weta Workshop, Skarsgard believably inhabits the beautifully woven skin of his unlikely romantic hero, who is blessed with an impressively proportioned appendage that puts a smile on the Fisherwoman’s face in hilarious and hot-blooded bedroom scenes. A palpable erotic charge with Colman compels us to root for their smitten underdogs as embittered forces conspire to tear them apart.

Dinklage’s silver-tongued craftsman is gifted some of the film’s most quotable one-liners (which are too saucy to be reprinted here) but Fischer and Wilson’s script is generous with the olde worlde wordplay, distributing zinging quips among the ensemble cast including Nabhaan Rizwan’s traditionalist Tailor and Ben Ashenden’s sexually frustrated Baker, whose horn of plenty is running on empty. Fittingly for a rampantly lustful romp, Wicker climaxes with a flourish that combines pleasure and pain. Love hurts and there’s a sweet intoxication to the sting.