Hammer to Nail Presents: A Conversation with Boots Riley at the SIFF 2026 Premiere of I Love Boosters

The 2026 Seattle International Film Festival opened with a bang as a sold-out crowd filled the historic Paramount Theater to see Boots Riley’s second feature film, I Love Boosters. In honor of the film’s high fashion theme, Riley wore a comically large turquoise hat and a snazzy mauve suit. He briefly introduced the film, saying that they almost didn’t get it finished, and we would see why when it was over. I believe he was referring to not only the high concept sci-fi material, but also the ambitious use of practical effects to bring his singular vision to light. Check out my review for this explosive film, and please go see it in theaters when it opens on May 22nd. This one demands the big screen treatment.

The following is a transcript of the Q&A hosted by SIFF after the screening. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

SIFF: Boots, thank you so much for being here on opening night for the Seattle International Film Festival. We’re so grateful to be able to start our festival with I Love Boosters.

Boots Riley: Thank you

SIFF: I’d love to just have you start by talking a little bit about where this movie began. I know you have a song of the same title from back in 2006. Did you always imagine it would become a movie?

BR.: I didn’t always imagine it would become a movie. But what I wanna do before we continue with this… I wanna say thank you to Seattle International Film Festival for having us. And – this is very important – to acknowledge the volunteers and the cinema workers. I know there is a cinema workers union and they’re in the middle of negotiating their contract with SIFF and I want to encourage SIFF to give them a fair contract.

[Crowd erupts in cheers and applause]

BR: I wrote a song 20 years ago called “I Love Boosters”, and it’s based on a lifetime of experiences of… I don’t know, like, trying to stay fly while you’re broke. And as a matter of fact, there’s somebody else that has a song about that who’s here. I think Macklemore (“Thrift Shop”) is here. And another rapper that’s here was also in the movie. He plays Li Pan. Alan Z is here.

I think about characters. I start with characters. I didn’t start thinking about the world that’s around them and what I actually think about that world… So, I have to be honest with myself about what I think about the world that shapes us and why that is meaningful in a personal way. And then that kind of brings up characters. And this was a group of women that I wanted to write about again. [My original pitch was] “It’s gonna be about a bunch of boosters that find a teleporter” because what I’m always trying to do, even before writing this… I’m always hyping the contradiction. And that’s what I realized I do with song lyrics… it’s like poetry. It’s like taking an idea that that’s right here, this line really connects to this idea, to this idea, to this idea, to this, to this, to that.

You take all that theory and get rid of it, and you put those two things together and it’s like, “WHOA! That’s a bar!” you know? What I’m doing is I’m just pointing out ironies and contradictions. And I’m doing that visually, cinematically, story-wise… And so, when I first said, “I’ll do the teleporter idea, the contradiction [with retail clothing] was taking the different points of production and distribution and putting them together geographically with… someone who makes the clothes and someone who sells them. And I just got bored of that idea after I started writing it. And then I went off and finished writing [his TV series] I’m a Virgo. I finish writing these two other scripts that are going to be the next movies after this. And then I got back to this. And I was thinking about science-fiction and…how science-fiction has changed our notions of even existence…

So, here’s an example: There is only right now. There’s not really a quote unquote time. There’s right now. Everything before is just a memory of things we see, things that are written down about what happened before. But that doesn’t exist. And the future is just our imagination. Now that’s empirically provable scientific fact. However, when I say it I sound like a hippie. And the reason I sound like a hippie is because of science fiction. It’s because we think of time as this thing that’s still there because we’ve seen all these things for over a century where it’s like, “if only we had the technology that could get us there…maybe sometime in 1000 years there will be that technology” or something like that. But there won’t be, because it doesn’t exist. And, like, I’m not against mythology and people believing bullshit. You know, whatever. Sometimes it’s useful. But I was like, “OK, well, what if I [incorporate] a philosophy that I use, just without [giving] the terminology. I use the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism in figuring out all sorts of stuff, both directly in my life and in my writing. So, I was like “what if I put that into it into a machine?” Then I got excited and finished the script.

[Crowd erupts in laughter and applause]

SIFF: I have to ask you about this collaboration with Keke Palmer. I feel like she is so slept on as an actress. I was so excited to see you had her in this lead role, and on top of that she is singing on tracks in the film. What was that collaboration like? Where did that begin? And how did these discussions evolve?

BR: Since the songs came up, I should mention that the song that you heard at the end [credits] as well as two of the other [tracks] in the film that Keke Palmer sings, are primarily by my daughter.

[Audience collectively awwwwwwws]

BR.: And I was on set, and I was playing [for] Keke, my daughter‘s demo for “Cassandra”, and she was crying, and she was like, “We gotta put this in the movie.” I thought maybe [it was] too slow or something… I met with Keke and… I think of what people know about her is… it’s kind of a character, right? And a lot of [directors], they want a certain cadence from her because it works. And she’s a comedic genius. But we started talking about some of the things [for that character] that were [based on] how she really relates and communicates when she’s not “on” and being the character that she’s creating. I’m saying this because she says this. And the whole idea was to get to things in a different way. And she said to me, “You know, everyone always says this to me. But then when they wanna make the money, then they’re like, ‘Do that Keke Palmer shit’.” And I mean… she is doing…  I mean all of it is her, right? But it’s really cool because she is so smart and she reads a lot of stuff… I didn’t know [that] before meeting her… Just her philosophy of how she operates in the industry…

Read the rest at Hammer to Nail!

May 26, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions, Seattle . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail Review: I Love Boosters

As someone who doesn’t much care about designer clothes, I had no idea that the titular Boosters in Boots Riley’s new film were based on a real underground profession. Moreover, they’ve been around for a while. Riley wrote an ode to them in 2006 with his band, The Coup. When Riley introduced, I Love Boosters before a sold-out screening at the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival, he explained that Boosters perform the valuable service of “helping broke people look fly”. As the song goes…

A booster is a person who jacks from the retail
And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale
In these hard times, they press on like Lee Nails
In all of my experience, their sex has been female

The film, I Love Boosters, opens with a bang and never lets up. Riley’s follow-up to 2018’s Sorry to Bother You is even more uncompromising than his debut. The frenetic opening credits (which use a custom font that is instantly iconic) zoom you through the Bay Area, to witness some of the most striking class disparity in the country. It’s the perfect setting for an allegorical anti-capitalist comedy. Our guide in this fashion underworld is Corvette (Keke Palmer), the leader of a prolific band of boosters called The Velvet Gang.

Early on, the film establishes the mechanics of a boost. The Velvet Gang, which also includes Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Sade (Naomi Ackie), assemble outfits from past boosts so that no one is suspicious of them when they’re in these high-end stores. Their outfits have lots of pockets and/or storage space. There’s a new outfit (and wig) for each boost. The production clearly kept costume designer Shirley Kurata (Everything Everywhere All at Once) VERY busy. Each ensemble is more outrageous than the last. Some of the looks are giving The Fifth Element on ayahuasca (complimentary). Whatever they wear, our leading ladies have no trouble slaying while they steal. Once in the targeted store, one of them creates a distraction while the other two cram their garments with as many designer threads as they can hold without busting the seams.

After safely absconding with the goods, Corvette hits the Oakland house parties to find people in need of a designer glow-up. The first sale we witness occurs after a guy goes home with her, expecting to hook up. He’s a little frustrated when she first reveals her ulterior motive. Still, he does not leave before buying some sick new shoes at a great price.

The Couture Robin Hood gig hits a snag when the mogul behind one of their frequent sources, Metro Designer, catches wind of the Velvet Gang and makes it her personal mission to bring them down. What Christie Smith (Demi Moore) doesn’t realize, or at least pretends not to know, is that Corvette had beef first. Corvette once showed Smith some of her own designs. Smith rejected a collaboration and sold the designs as her own. Corvette frequently sees her work in Metro Designer stores, which only fuels her rage and determination to get compensation one way or another.

Despite The Velvet Gang’s prolific heists, they are all still struggling to make ends meet. For Corvette, this financial anxiety is manifested through a growing Katamari ball of debt that lurks around every corner. It’s far enough away to not pose an imminent threat but always menacing and inching ever closer…

Read the rest of this review at Hammer to Nail!

May 22, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions, Seattle . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail Review: See You When I See You

The Duplass Brothers were quite prolific in the early aughts, releasing eight features between 2005 and 2012. Jay Duplass took a break from directing features after 2012’s The Do-Deca-Pentathelon. During Pandemmy Times, he (like a lot of folks) did some soul searching and found two projects in rapid succession. The Baltimorons came out in 2025. See You When I See You is the second film from the newly invigorated Duplass. Coincidentally (?) both films are comedies centered around suicide. They don’t sound particularly funny, but those Duplass boys are masters of tone juggling. Their films often pack an emotional punch but soften the blow with built-in humor along the way. The jokes mostly don’t come from the circumstances, but from the characters themselves. There’s an extra layer of comedy in See You When I See You, because the scribe who based the screenplay on his own memoir (Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragic-Comic Memoir), is comedian Adam Cayton-Holland.

Cayton-Holland’s 2018 memoir is about how his family fell apart and came back together after his little sister’s suicide. He adapted it into a slightly less autobiographical screenplay and gave it to producing pals Emily v. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani to shop around. Gordon and Nanjiani are no strangers to this genre, having made their own reality-based tragic-comedy, The Big Sick. Duplass was hesitant to accept their directing offer because he’d never made a film that he didn’t write himself. But when he read the screenplay, it reminded him of the genre-straddling films he loved in his youth like Terms of Endearment and Kramer vs Kramer. Duplass did give the script an overhaul with his own proverbial pen, adding visual illustrations of internal conflict that are very effective, without being too expository or heavy-handed.

We first meet the Whistler family as they’re in the process of cleaning out the house left behind by Leah (Kaitlyn Dever), the baby of the family. Robert (David Duchovny) and Page (Hope Davis) are the grieving parents, arguing over how much of Leah’s childhood art they should keep. Emily (Lucy Boynton) is the oldest sibling, and we can tell right away she’s the one running the show. Inside the house, Aaron (Cooper Raiff) gets lost in the memory of a family photo taken on the dock of a Lakehouse. Right away, we know so much about who these people are. They’re close, but they also have trouble talking to each other about hard things and get bogged down in details. Aaron is too paralyzed by grief to be any help. His journey into the photo memory also hints at a recurring story device, which illustrates his despair and PTSD in profound ways. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like it…

Read the rest of this review at Hammer to Nail!

May 20, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail Review: Among Neighbors

Early on in the compelling historical documentary, Among Neighbors, Polish journalist Konstanty Gerbert advises that if you want to hear the real stories about what happened to the Jewish people of Gniewoszów, Poland, you must be “willing to invest the time and the effort and the understanding that it takes… Nobody will talk to you on the first day. Not on the second, not on the third.” Ultimately, documentarian Yoav Potash (Crime After Crime) spent a decade interviewing the octogenarian residents of this rural town who still remember what it was like before, during, and immediately after World War II. But before the narrative gets mired in the past, Potash reminds us that history is really more of a flat circle.

In 2018, the Polish government passed a law outlawing any speech, written or spoken, that implicated the country or the people in holocaust atrocities. Potash had already been visiting Gniewoszów for four years and recognized this legislation as nationalist propaganda and historical whitewashing. Make Poland Great Again, if you will. Those who had lived in Gniewoszów through WWII, once again found it a dangerous prospect to tell the hard truths of their childhood experience. More determined than ever, Potash continued to invest the time, forging relationships that would become the spine of Among Neighbors. Though several town elders give their testimony about the rise of antisemitic culture, two people propel the narrative: A Christian woman named Pelagia Radecka and a Jewish man named Yaacov Goldstein were both teenagers when the Germans first occupied their town. Not only do they remember what happened, they can’t forget.

Potash first visited Gniewoszów in 2014 with friends Aaron Friedman Tartakovsky Anita Friedman to film the rededication of the Jewish cemetery in their ancestral town. This cemetery had been ravaged during the war and Gniewoszów was making amends for their part in it. Potash had no designs for a bigger project, and no clue that what he would find would consume the next decade of his life. He interviews some non-Jewish townsfolk who happen to have a Jewish headstone laying on the ground in their garden. They tell him they bought it for pennies at a market and plan to use it in an industrial capacity. They are at first confused as to why Potash wants to know about such a common practice. If you look around not just Gniewoszów but many other towns across eastern Europe, you will find these headstones paving the streets, propping up pillars, fashioned into grindstones for workshops, and even sometimes flipped over to memorialize another (non-Jewish) decedent. They never questioned it, and they didn’t know why these gravestones had been removed from the cemetery. This discovery is merely the top of the rabbit hole that contains a vast secret history of antisemitic violence in Poland. The very history the government was attempting to erase in present day.

As Potash speaks to anyone in town who was old enough to remember what it was like there before WWII, he is shocked to learn that Gniewoszów once had many Jewish residents and even a thriving Jewish culture established centuries earlier. They had once peacefully co-existed with their Christian neighbors. Potash wants to take his time handling such delicate material, but there is also an undercurrent of urgency because the people who witnessed this history first-hand are dying before they can tell their stories. Janina Jaworska, who was born in 1934 remembers playing with her Jewish friends as a child. She still has photos of them in school. Henryk Smolarczyk, born in 1926 remembers that his mother knew how to speak Yiddish. Jan Zieba, who was born in 1924 fondly remembers attending Jewish weddings and other celebrations. But when pressed about why there are no Jewish residents there today, their memories become hazy.

Even without watching the film, you can probably venture an educated guess as to what happened to the Jewish people of Gniewoszów. “Nazis” is the simple answer. But the whole truth is much more complicated. Especially when Potash meets Pelagia and learns that the most horrific violence she witnessed was perpetrated not by Germans, but by other people from Gniewoszów six months after the war ended. The victims were Pelagia’s neighbors. Their son was her friend and possibly her first crush, Janek Weinberg. She found small comfort in the fact that she didn’t find Janek’s body among his slain family that night, but she also knew there was a slim chance he had survived. She wrote down everything she could remember but never told another living soul. When asked why she is finally speaking out now, she says, “now I am not afraid because I am old, and I have seen too much.”…

Read the rest of this review at Hammer to Nail!

May 19, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail Review: Again Again

Again Again is an official selection of the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival!

For their feature debut, co-directors Heather Ballish and Mia Moore Marchant unquestionably drew inspiration from the time loop film that defined the genre, but Again Again completely upends the premise of Groundhog Day by daring to ask the heady philosophical questions. What if the person stuck in the time loop is not a selfish, curmudgeonly, white cis man who needs to learn to love someone other than himself, but a young trans woman who can’t love herself? Moreover, what if after the loop breaks, she doesn’t just get the girl and live happily ever after? Instead, their relationship picks up in the messy place where it left off pre-loop; only now one half of the couple has acquired a decade’s worth of baggage that the other half blissfully forgets with the dawn of each new day. What this fantastic genre bender presupposes is, maybe the looper would have intense PTDS from this experience, that would only be catastrophically exacerbated by the sudden and unexplained end to the phenomenon.

We first meet Agatha (Marchant) on her 2863rd go-round of a day that follows a traumatic event. She spends a lot of time in bed in a yin-yang configuration with her unaffected girlfriend, Tessa (Aria Taylor, Charlie Says). Aggie is painfully aware of how long she’s been stuck because every day she writes the new number on her hand in permanent marker. This is a brilliant story device (not to mention a powerful repeated image) because it helps orient the audience as Aggie’s story unfolds through flashbacks. In fact, Marchant’s entire script is exemplary at metering out exposition. It’s not just what you learn, or how you learn it, but also when you learn it. As we jump through time with Aggie, we learn details of her and Tessa’s history at the most emotionally impactful moments. I don’t know how many drafts there were of this script, but it feels controlled and fine-tuned in a way that is very rare for debut films.

I’ll try to keep plot details to a minimum because everyone should be able to experience the thrill of discovery that Marchant’s script provides. But what we know pretty much right away is that these two young women were childhood best friends since before Aggie’s transition, and now they’re in love. But Tessa, who is cis, is also engaged to a cis man. Most of the film takes place in a tastefully and lovingly adorned camper van where the two women have circular conversation about their past, present and future. Most of these conversations have already taken place many times, but Tessa can’t remember. On day 2864, Aggie wakes up, looks at her hand baring the number of the day before, and realizes she’s free. But her freedom from the loop creates a whole new prison of uncertainty, as Aggie and Tessa attempt to figure out what this means for their future.

Again Again was filmed in and around Aberdeen, WA where Marchant grew up. Aberdeen is best known as Kurt Cobain’s hometown. Much of Kurt’s work was informed by the experience of growing up a sensitive, nonconforming artist in this backwards industrial burgh. The song title “Come as You Are” is a reference to the ironic “motto” emblazoned (to this day) on the sign that welcomes you into town. “Something in the Way” is about the deep despair that Kurt felt when he hid under the Young Street Bridge, which overlooks the “Muddy Banks of the Wishkah” (also the name of a live Nirvana album). A pivotal scene in Again Again takes place under Kurt’s bridge, which has since become a shrine emblazoned with fan-scrawled messages and even a plaque. Marchant’s deft utilization of this location is subtle. No character calls out its historical significance. But if you know, you know, you know?

Marchant’s Aberdeen is also sometimes quaint and inviting, such as when she visits Boom Town Records and flirts with the trans woman (Abigail Thorne, HBOs House of the Dragon), who works there. And because it’s the Pacific Northwest after all, the scenery is sometimes arrestingly beautiful, such as when Aggie kicks along the beach in her combat boots and flannel in the cloudy, cool morning. This town, like it’s inhabitants, contain multitudes.

Read the rest of this review on Hammer to Nail!

May 13, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions, Seattle . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Really Weird Stuff: A Twin Peaks Podcast – The Return Part Nine, “This is the chair.”

On episode 40 of Really Weird Stuff: A Twin Peaks Podcast, we’re discussing Twin Peaks the Return: Part 9 – “This is the chair.” This episode was written by David Lynch and Mark Frost, and Directed by David Lynch. It’s best known as the one where we (sort of) find out what happened to Major Briggs and his twenty-five year plan to thwart evil. Diane receives a cryptic text from Mr. C, and Chantal and Hutch do real good. Special guest Chris Brugos joins us to explore such mysteries as: 

HOW do we always forget that Kyle MacLachlan plays Mr. C, too? 

ARE Chantal, Hutch, and Mr. C Kitchen Table Poly goals? 

HOW did Matthew Lillard nail his interrogation room scene so hard, despite claiming that he has no idea what any of his lines meant?

PLUS: Albert & Constance vibe weirdly, and a woman (Sky Ferriera) has a supernatural rash. 

Listen to the episode!


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May 8, 2026
Categories: Hug Your Television, Pod People . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail Review: Mārama

Mārama is an official selection of the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival.

Writer/director Taratoa Stappard didn’t set out to make a horror film for his feature debut. But as he researched Māori history and his personal connection to it, the horrors emerged on their own. He discovered so much colonizer-perpetrated violence, that one thing became painfully clear. Any film that truthfully reflects Māori history is inherently a horror story. And, as with most historical horror, women get the worst of it. Mārama is a powerful film in every respect. Even though the villains in Mārama are exploitative, Stappard worked very carefully to ensure that the viewers don’t feel complicit. The narrative presents and honors the culture, while simultaneously conveying how it feels for wāhine Māori to see it ravaged by predators.

Set in 1859, Mārama follows the eponymous young Māori woman (Ariāna Osborn) as she leaves behind her adopted parents in New Zealand and travels to the coast of Yorkshire, England seeking answers about her birth family.  As Mārama walks down the dark corridors of her past, what she discovers sheds a blinding light on the grotesque ways the English decimated her culture and her people. The film lives in an accessible intersection of gothic horror, revenge drama, and historical fiction. It’s not an “easy” watch, but the rewards of sticking with it are immense.

With the opening, Stappard imparts a powerful thesis written in Māori and English on a black screen: “This story is grounded in the colonized history of v New Zealand. It contains disturbing scenes of the violation and desecration of the Māori culture. To move into our future, we must understand our past.”

After this, there is no narrative handholding. Stappard trusts his film and his audience. Next, we’re dropped into a dark, sparse room, looking down on a woman in a plain nightdress on her knees. Behind her is a broken chair. She drops a chisel to the ground and blood drips from her chin. But when she looks up, her eyes are filled with defiance. Through her garment suggests imprisonment, she has given herself moko kauae, a traditional tattoo for Māori women to honor their ancestors and heritage. She lets out a growl that is filled with the pain and vitriol of the thousands of wāhine Māori before her. It’s clear by her surroundings that this woman is not with her people. This is the only way she can reclaim her identity after everything else has been stripped from her. Upon rewatch, I am so grateful for this bold opening image, because it sets the tone for what’s to come. We will see colonizer violence galore, but the victims of it will not go quietly to that good night…

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May 7, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail Review: The Life We Leave

The Life We Leave is an official selection of the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival.

Since its inception in 1882, The National Funeral Directors Association has essentially offered two choices for decedents: burial or cremation. Within those parameters, there are customizable options, from expensive ornate caskets and headstones to cardboard urns; from grand funeral processions to intimate services. But the transactional nature of it taints every aspect and is very much contingent on what the families can afford. J.J. Gerber’s directorial debut, The Life We Leave, is a documentary that takes an in-depth look at one of the first companies in the world to offer a whole new way. Human composting is not just a green alternative. The “Return Home” model also involves and supports the grieving families every step of the way.

In 2019, Washington state became the first to legalize human composting. Return Home founder, Micah Truman saw a chance to get in on the ground floor of an emerging industry. He had recently left the tech world and initially entered the venture with that bottom line mindset. He came across a youtube video by Dr. John Paul, PHD, who explained his agricultural innovation for composting cows. Truman invited Dr. Paul out to lunch and didn’t even give the man a chance to bite into his sandwich before he got down to brass tacks. “Could you do it for people?” Though taken aback, Dr. Paul considered the question carefully and concluded that it was worth trying. What Truman didn’t know and would soon come to learn is that there is so much more that goes into funeral services besides body disposal. Or rather, there is so much more that should go into it. What “Return Home” offers is a way to reunite lost loved ones with the very elements of creation.

As of this writing, fourteen states have legalized human composting, and the companies that have sprung up accept clients from out of state. Most seem to charge comparable, if not significantly reduced rates as traditional funeral homes. Yes, the traditional places answer the phone and gladly retrieve your loved one at all hours, but after that, your involvement becomes very removed and transactional. When my own mother passed, she had chosen a place I never even visited. They picked her up, took my credit card info, followed her cremation wishes from her will, and mailed the remains. $2000 and a whole life burned into a box of ashes. The vessels provided, beyond the “basic cardboard box” cost extra. To have a service there cost extra. If you lose someone unexpectedly, these costs can feel limiting and blindsiding. But it used to be the only way to go…

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May 5, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail Review: Forbidden Fruits

The newest addition to the toxic female friendship cinema pantheon is here and it’s called Forbidden Fruits. The film’s aesthetics recall classics like Heathers, The Craft, and Jennifer’s Body. But you’d better believe those comparisons are entirely intentional. I was not at all surprised to learn that Diablo Cody has her phrase-coining producer paws all over this thing. The debut feature for director and co-writer Meredith Alloway is based on the stage play, Of the women came the beginning of sin and through her we all die by Lily Houghton. The tag line on Houghton’s website reads, “a final girl writing plays/TV/films in a Lisa Frank journal”. If that means anything to you, you just might be the target audience for this film.

The success of Fruits really does rely on finding its target. But those they’re aiming for will be thrilled. The play’s lengthy original title (tough to fit on a movie poster) is a bible quote (Ecclesiasticus 25:25), which, in so uncertain terms, blames women for everything that’s ever gone wrong in this world, including the existence of death. Naturally, the film’s protagonists embrace this blame by forming a witch coven in the stock room of the high-end fast fashion mall store where they also work. In the play, the store is Free People (ironically named given their labor practices) because that’s where Houghton worked, at a mall in the suburbs of Houston, when she was inspired to write it.

For the film, they further evoke biblical themes by changing the name of the store to Free Eden and peppering the set design with snake and apple imagery. The leader of the coven is, in fact, named Apple (Lily Reinhart, Hustlers, TV’s Riverdale), as in the forbidden fruit that Eve eats in Genesis, gaining worldly knowledge. God punishes her and everyone else for the disobedience, thus inventing the patriarchy.

The other coven members likewise adopt produce-based names. Victoria Pedretti (TV’s You) is Cherry, and Alexandra Shipp (Barbie) is Fig. Lola Tong (The Summer I Turned Pretty) is Pumpkin, the group’s latest interloper. They do, in fact, have an opening after the mysterious departure of Pickle (Emma Chamberlain), but they’re hesitant to open their beaded curtain to a lowly pretzel sample girl from across the food court. Pervasive Pumpkin won’t take no for an answer, and soon, they’re initiating her in their stock room using a bejeweled cowboy boot, blood, tears, and a hilarious string of magic words…

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March 26, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Paid in Puke 2026 Oscars Special

It’s our annual Oscars episode, with our resident Oscars Scholar, Denise Rodriguez*! Despite the fabulous “Sinners” getting a record 16 noms, we found some egregious snubs to discuss: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, and “Sorry, Baby”; Jesse Plemons for “Bugonia”, Jennifer Lawrence and “Die My Love”, to name a few.

We get hot and heavy about the new casting category (only one man nominated here), “Sinners” and the other films/performances nominated that we loved. Plus, the perpetual injustice of the Diane Warren nomination, and why it’s time for a Best Performance By a Non-Binary Actor category. 

*Denise has recently launched an exciting new service: Menopause Doula! She explains that menopause starts much earlier than you might think. And traditional medicine is not cutting the mustard on diagnosis and treatment. Check out her website for more information and also connect with her and other middle-aged uterus owners on instagram and facebook. 

Listen to the episode!

March 6, 2026
Categories: Filmpinions, Pod People . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

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