Marximum overdrive
Boots Riley's I Love Boosters is a truckload of fun. Gang of shoplifters (The Velvet Gang-- Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige), Sade (Naomi Ackie)) prey on a chain of fashion stores (Metro Designers) owned by ultrarich Christie Smith (Demi Moore); they're joined by Chinese factory worker Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and her band of laborers: high-style hijinks ensue.
(Warning: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail)
Curry Barker Obsession (2025) is basically W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," and "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" meet Fatal Attraction and Misery-- nothing startling new, only he's leaned into the sneaky comic spin of the premise, has a terrific cast to inhabit the roles, and the visual chops to tell the story with snap and zing.
Pig hunt
(Warning: plot and surprise twists in book and TV series discussed in explicit detail)
I remember reading William Golding's 1954 debut novel as a teen and having nightmares about running through the jungle with other boys in pursuit, waving sticks sharpened at both ends-- did not help the development of my socialization skills, lemme tell you.
The book comes off as a fable, the characters barely sketched-in symbols, the theme clear enough and neat enough for literature majors to milk for their theses: humans have this ingrown tendency to violence, and we flirt with or ignore it at our peril. Really that simple, the novel's chief virtue and key weakness, and folks who seek to adapt it flirt with this fact or ignore it at their peril.
For Adults Only
If Peeping Tom and Videodrome and Don't Torture a Duckling had a bastard child this might be the sleazy result.
The plot hinges around a series of snuff videotapes circulating Tokyo's underworld, and both a private investigator and the janitor in a porn video arcade are obsessed with discovering the source. But that's not the film's priority, which seems twofold, pretentious and prehensile both: to indulge the filmmaker's obsessions, which include celebrating his influences (Powell's vivd color palette, Cronenberg's body horror) and attempting to transcend them without a comparable budget; and adhering to the strict conditions of the genre's format-- a sexual encounter every ten minutes, a precisely titrated amount of gore, and (above all) no genital exposure.
That lack of a real budget is frustrating. The videos themselves when viewed aren't all that transgressive with POV footage recording fuzzy imagery and some clumsily executed onscreen mutilation (there's a bowl of spaghetti however that's bluntly effective, easily the most horrifying shock cut in the picture). The sex is more entertaining, and the fact that Sato has to come up with something kinky with the actors not exposing their crotch or even shedding their underwear becomes a real challenge-- just how much pleasure can you get out of sucking at an erection through cottonwear?
The cumulative blueball feel does get to you-- at a certain point you find yourself fastforwarding to the more interesting-looking stuff and rewinding to make sure you've squeezed out all the juices; you also, I suspect, find yourself more susceptible to Sato's more incidental effects. Perhaps his most satisfying moments aren't the scenes of extensive skin contact (or rather skin-through-silk contact), or the faintly risible sight of the killer swinging a spring-loaded knife mounted on a video camera mounted on a tripod like an ax (the weapon seems more threatening when the metal-tipped tripod legs are used as a spear) but the transitional images, the gliding shots through ultramodern cityscapes to end at a chainlink fence, behind which we see an abandoned fridge door gaping wide, inside of which lies a severed hand clutching a videotape (might as well throw in Bunuel as one of the director's sublimated heroes). Perhaps my favorite is a nothing image, a throwaway shot of buildings standing against brilliant sky, the harsh sunlight flagellated by tree branches in a stiff wind. Light me a cigarette, honey, I could use the postcoital smoke.
(Postscript: pause before the rabbit hole and enter at your own risk. Turns out Criterion Channel only showed one of Sato's more palatable films, and if you do a little googling to specific websites you can see his darker (if still genre-constricted-- no genitals!) work, some of them unabashedly queer. Secret Garden (1987) is a neat reworking of The Story of O with payback ending ingeniously appended, and Silencer Made of Glass is a lurid bit of sadomasochism with flash suppressor attached. Nothing wishy-washy here, only fetishes and fixations being thoroughly indulged)
