Faithful BooFers. One of our most anticipated films of this year is finally in (a few) theatres. One of the show's all time favourites and agent provocateur of American independent cinema Gregg Araki is back, and he wants your sex.

With I Want Your Sex, Araki's "sex positive note to Gen-Z" comes one of the year's most predictably bawdy, brash and borderline vexatious releases. But does the sexual satire have anything insightful to say about Gen-Z's celibacy, or has Araki become like the litany of older critics from whom he used to gleefully draw ire?

We will be reviewing the new film in the context of Araki's oeuvre to see how it fits in the filmic canon of a man who has inspired mass festival walkouts and shrieks of "pure fascism" from figureheads of hetero hysteria (we're looking at you Ebert).

With this release we have been pondering the cinematic legacy of other sex-based coming of age narratives. With this in mind we will be applying our retrospective gaze to the poly-tical road trip of Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) and at Hanif Kureishi/Stephen Frears class-conscious My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).

Music from Medicine.

Bonjour Boofies. This Thursday we will be traversing through fragments of time and memory, dipping down through the uncanny valley before landing in… Cornwall?

Mark Jenkin has emerged as a forerunner in the new heritage of British independent cinema, capturing the nostalgic and other-world imaginary with his retro-technical formalism. Shooting exclusively with Bolex handhelds on 16mm developed by hand and with all audio overdubbed, his practical style is peerless in contemporary film.

His new feature Rose of Nevada, starring George McKay and Mr. Dua Lipa uses these mechanisms to meditate on the hauntological erasure of the present and future of his native Cornwall. This ghost story takes the strange shape of grief, transference and the uncanny double.

We decided to further erode the barrier between our conscious and unconscious. In doing so we’ve gotten tripped out on two films which evoke the double or the doppelgänger to obfuscate between these shifts in consciousness. We will be exploring the melancholy and sensuality of Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the ultimate in expressionism and interiority, Bergman’s Persona (1966).

Music from Jenny Hval.

Fizzy Bum Gang. The film event of the year is here. To mark the occasion we will be embarking on an odyssey-like journey in this weeks episode, using the full hour to discuss both Chistopher Nolan’s and Homer’s the Odyssey.

With the whole world Homermaxxing we decided it was appropriate that we too dance the Homeric beat, using the film to ask what about the text has endured to remain so ripe for adaptation. With ancient themes of ‘Nostos’ to contemporary interpretations of the Pyrrhic Victory - what can one of humanities oldest texts tell us about the collective human experience?

We will be examining with arrow like precision the good and bad from the film and it’s deviations from the source material. The cyclopean spectacle, woefully written women, far right Trojan horsing, IMAX elitism, the reanimation of practical effects, poor puppy yeeting and dialogic exposition more nauseating than wine-dark seasickness.

The summer blockbuster is back. Come celebrate with us tomorrow at 5, or join us after on streaming through the link in our bio.

Music of the Greek variety from Thanasis Papakonstantinou.

Fizzy Bum Gang, you are cordially invited to BooF's couple counselling night. You can join us along with three other couples who are in need of serious intervention. We will also be serving jamón.

Our first candidates are Joe and Angela who come to us courtesy of The Invite, Olivia Wilde's dramedy about a marriage running long beyond its expiration date. Featuring Seth Rogan and Olivia herself armed with a lexicon of millennial cringe and weaponized therapy speak. We will devour the collective subconscious of our hosts as the possibility of a "dinner" party rears its seductive head. Who's Afraid?

Next on the docket are Francois and Therese Chevalier, peering at us from beyond the impermeable membrane of time, in France, 1965. Shockingly, this couple couldn't be more happy! That is, until Francois falls in love with a second woman. Agnès Varda contemplates on the concept of Le Bonheur, or for us anglophones, happiness. This is French new wave as you've never seen it - actually good.

Finally we have Tom and George and Gilda. A trio of will they, won't they...oh? They will? Nevermind. We find out how to manage a menage a trois in Ernst Lubitsch's licentious pre-code comedy, Design for Living (1933).

Much like The Invite, we will have music from Blood Orange.

We've boofed Maddie's Secret to avoid tasting it, but we'd recommend that you try it the standard way. The directorial debut of John Early boasts an impressive cast of freak comedians that will surely satisfy your hunger if you've been as starved as us for a high camp indie takeaway.

If you've already gobbled this up and are looking for an even richer, more melodramatic masterpiece de resistance, may we recommend John Water's Polyester (1981)? Leads with notes of foot stomping, raucous sensuality, and astringent alcoholism before finishing scorchingly sweet.

If you'd prefer to be berated by your selection, we'd recommend you try Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover of 1989 vintage. It's finally time to take this one out of the cellar, admire it's beautiful label, and tuck in. We hope you're hungry for revenge.

We’ve decided to investigate the intersection of two very different queer films released this June; Adrian Chiarella’s homophobia horror Leviticus and Hayley Kiyoko’s transmedia bildungsroman Girls Like Girls.

With both these releases we will be analyzing how frameworks provided by genre can be used in very different ways to explore identity and queerness - and how both horror and the coming of age genre has historically been well placed to do so. With this we will be looking at the lycanthropic cult classic of CanCon horror Ginger Snaps (2000) while also touching on Julia Ducournau’s full throttle cvntfest Titane (2021). The generic framework of Celine Sciamma’s genderqueer coming of age masterpiece Tomboy (2011) will also get the full BooF treatment.

Curry Barker's foray into film, Obsession, has been the belle of the boof this summer. It's traditional Monkey's Paw makeup has defied expectations by showing Hollywood can still produce interesting and profitable projects, and that not all YouTubers are unemployed.

We will be asking what insights we can gain from this and other tales of amour fou. Where does it fit in the canon of romance-gone-wrong horror films. Do these films have more to tell us about the manifold manic female love interests on screen, or perhaps more about the often divorced men who direct them.

With this in mind we will be exploring Cronenberg and Zulawski's divorce horrors the Brood (1979) and Possession (1981). With these, plus Kim Ki Young's the Housemaid (1960), we will explore how the genre has more broadly been used as a vehicle to explore relationships breaking down and breaking up. On top of that we will be assessing the obvious imprint of Possession and Pulse (2001) on Inde Navarrette's powerhouse performance.

This week the BooF Brigade are celebrating the release of the year's second school-shooter comedy. Oscar Boyson's directorial debut Our Hero, Balthazar was one of our favourite films shown at VIFF last year, and so we invited Oscar onto the show to talk about the film and it's release in Canadian theatres.

Oscar has been a stalwart in the New York independent film circuit, working as a producer on some of the definitive independent films of the last fifteen years, such as Frances Ha (2012), Good Time (2017), Uncut Gems (2019) and Funny Pages (2022). With Our Hero, Balthazar he has carried the torch in creating another darkly comic and original work, punctuated with the anxious aesthetic of his peers.

The debut charts a wealthy teenager who tries to gain his crush's attention by posting videos pleading for stricter gun laws. As an online troll begins mocking his videos, he becomes convinced the troll is a mass shooter, and travels to Texas to confront him. Balancing a sardonic tone with radical sincerity, the film chronicles the corrosive experience of coming of age in the digital economy.

We will be discussing the films manifold influences such as Larry Clark's Bully (2001), Gregg Araki's the Doom Generation (1995) and Olivier Assayas's Cold Water (1994), as well as our chat with Oscar which focuses on challenging central characters, guerilla marketing strategies and shitting your pants.

It seems the movie-going market has been cornered by socially conscious fashion-focused films. We have keenly boofed the newest films of this nascent trend and are ready to undress them.

With Boots Riley filtering the colonial world of high fashion through his surrealist, marxist-motivated lens in I Love Boosters, and the Devil Wears Prada 2 waging war on the technologization of fashion, journalism and the soul, we decided to ask - has Dadaism been sewn deeply into their filmic outfits? Does… the Devil Wear Dada?

In short - probably not. But as a pair of technophobic luddites we decided it would be good to look at how the legacy of Dada and AI anxiety lives in the seams of some cult-favourite films. With this in mind we decided to dizzy ourselves with Alejandro Jodorowski’s spiritually surreal The Holy Mountain (1973), before endorsing the technophobia inherent in Mick Jackson’s anti-war dirge Threads (1984). As well as this we will be looking at two of 1995’s cyberpunk selections in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell.

Music from potential candidates for psyop summer 2026 in Angine de Poitrine, TAGABOW and more.

Everyone and their mothers have been boofing Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, marking his second cancel culture comedy of this decade.

We decided to review the film (without spoilers), and then look past the aggressive marketing strategies and ask what compels the edgelord writer/director to tell these stories. Perhaps it has something to do with an essay published by the director on an age gap relationship from his past. Perhaps not, all will be revealed.

We will be taking the non-rom-coms story of secrecy and using it, as always, to look back and around the world at other films which have likewise explored the secrets and lies of it’s central characters.

We will also be looking at Michael Haneke’s classic psychosexual drama The Piano Teacher (2001), Asghar Farhadi’s divorce drama A Separation (2011), Todd Hayne’s May December (2023), and Denis Villeneuve's Incendies (2010). Music from PJ Harvey, Mess Esque, Jason Molina and more.