[Note: a discussion of the ending of the movie is at the end of this post.]

Having been largely shielded from the internet discussion of Backrooms, I went into the film and my subsequent reading of its Wikipedia page as a mostly blank slate. I had completely forgotten the “Backrooms” internet meme, but as a premise for a horror movie it’s a great one. What is this image if not an unintentional movie poster:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with building a movie around a poster, but I’m not sure you can, as the Wikipedia page suggests, build a web series, a feature film, and a potential television series around a poster. The film itself keeps the audience on edge with plenty of mood and tension, effectively using the repetitive but creepy settings for background dread and active scares. It works as a horror movie from start to finish and I saw it in a packed theater with a crowd that was dialed in.

But . . . the Stranger Things vibe is unavoidable. Weird creepy places that eerily mirror our own are always more interesting the less we know about them and Backrooms wants to fix that. The terrifying pirate captain who seems to be an id of trauma come to life is actually a creature that some scientists are trying to gas. The film closes with exposition from Phil the Science Guy about there being more doors opening up into MRI World, about how he’s gonna have to figure it out, and like, please don’t? As a meme and a horror movie this works best without explanation. One fears for the film’s monster; will it, like the Demogorgon on Stranger Things, be reduced from terrifying to henchman as the content piles up?

Sitting in the theater as the credits rolled, I was giving it way too much thought, wondering about grand metaphors of trauma echoing through generations, but no, it seems to be they want to keep exploring and and looking for answers. There will be some thrills to be had as they do, but sequels, prequels, and other properties will never match the unknown depths of this one, the soul deep dread of staring into something bottomless within yourself starts to wear off pretty quickly once you know that what’s really behind the walls are people who want to charge you to keep visiting.

Top Line: This movie should have been called “Keke and the Clothes Factory”, it’s weird, bright, funny, and very moral.

Box Score:

Bottom Line: The first question to ask about I Love Boosters is, “did you see Sorry to Bother You?“, Boots Riley’s first movie. If you have seen Sorry to Bother You, then I Love Boosters is the clear second effort, funnier, tighter, and with a far more polished and less tonally ruptured ending. There is plenty of weird shit in this movie, but it’s mostly very playful and fun, including the standout stop motion effects by the delightfully named Mystery Meat Media (two guys from Phil Tippit’s shop).

If you have not seen Sorry to Bother You, this will take more explaining. This is a sort of brightly colored dream world where Demi Moore is an Elizabeth Holmes esque tech mogul/fashion queenpin whose office is in a skyscraper that’s at a 30° degree angle. Ludicrous concepts like teleportation and practical applications for philosophy are instantly accepted. Characters have theoretical real world responsibilities (children, bills), but the movie wisely keeps those off screen (except as giant katamari metaphors) so we can see our gang conduct cool robberies, hang out at their abandoned chicken shack headquarters, and make alliances with dopey white lefties and Chinese factory workers. The girls are kicking ass, getting away with it, and having fun (most of the time).

Riley has a few clear points here – tech overlords fan media panics, conspire with other rich assholes abroad, and hurt people without any more consequences than an unpleasant press conference – and those are delivered within a Tim Burton/Guillermo del Toro style weird fantasy/sci-fi movie. How well that lands with you, the audience member, is gonna depend on how many of the jokes go over and how sensitive you are to abrupt shifts in music, scenes, and overall vibes. The film comes to odd stops for things like the reveal about LaKeith or some of the grosser looking “deconstructions”, then it’s back to candy cane robbery funstuff. If you can roll with that, it’s fun. If you can’t, it’ll be a slog.

Back in 2012, one of this coolest things this blog ever did was score free tickets for commenter Hank Pumpkins to see Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play in Washington DC. You can read his review here.

Well, it turns out the play (by Anne Washburn) is getting made into a movie (by Boots Riley). I found this out clicking on Boots’s IMDb just now before going to see I Love Boosters this later this afternoon. No cast or timeline according to this, but I never saw the play so this announcement is music to my ears.

You can probably guess what the first of my promised movie posts is going to be about. For those who remember my failed Ann Arbor Review of Books site, I’m bringing my favorite thing from there over to here: Box Score Cinema. Basically, it’s a one page movie review that’s hopefully as fun to read as it is to write. Don’t know if that’ll be tonight or tomorrow, I’m trying to set things up to make these easy to post in way they certainly weren’t during AARB days.

And for all my bitching about WordPress, this (I assume) rewritten classic editor plugin is so much faster than the old one. There is still a nice blog architecture underneath all the Squarespace bloat.

The site is starting to look like itself again, baby steps, but progress.

The first of ten preview posts for We Kicked Their Ass is now up. This one contains the preface, the author’s note, and the first section of chapter one. A new post/section will be added every Wednesday and Saturday until Fourth of July. There is an email address box for those who might later like to order it (but no pre-orders yet).

Work on this book actually predates DHS. I was most of a year into the book and kinda stuck when I decided I needed a blog and that blog might as well be the Simpsons one Mad Jon and Dave and I had been discussing. So having the two projects come back together now is a little weird, but here we are.

The first (shitty) version of the book was done in 2010, and I spent that summer (deep in the bowels of the Great Recession) soliciting literary agents and getting nowhere. I put it down and started working on Zombie Simpsons, which was published here in 2012. In 2016 I rewrote the book for the first time, getting it to a state where two agents wanted to represent it. After I picked one, we spent a couple years sending it out only to have it continually rejected due to my lack of “platform” (as in, literally every rejection cited this as the reason). Even if I spoke with an editor who loved it, the boss would always say no: “platform”.

This is the catch-22 of our monopolized publishing industry in our monopolized economy. The conglomerate book publishers have publicly announced that they don’t know what sells and doesn’t, that the only way they can survive is to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. That’s why they give absurd advances to celebrities and anyone else they think can attract attention; their own marketing is monetarily trivial and totally ineffective, so they need authors who can market the books as well as write them (or “write” in many ghostwritten cases).

Well, this little project has lasted most of my adult life at this point, and I’m not going to let it be someone else’s toss on a roulette wheel.

So we’re doing this gonzo style, and you can start reading right here.

“Tis a fine barn, but sure tis no pool, English.” – Amish Guy
“D’oheth!” – Homer Simpson

From an ironic distance it’s impressive how WordPress as a platform has retained its ability to be worse than it was in 2009. As a user it is more frustrating, but on the internet someone else has always had the same problem, and god bless everyone who works on the “Classic Editor +” pluigin and the “Regular Blog” theme because this looked and functioned like shit and now that is less so. Further improvements, hopefully to come.

Also, my thanks to everyone for the kind comments on the first post. For calendar reasons, tomorrow is a deadline for me to post the first excerpt from the book, which does not have a cover yet but does have a title: We Kicked Their Ass: A New and Better History of the American Revolution.

I think you’ll enjoy it. I hope you do.