THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
In the desolate landscape of American cinema, torn between the morbid inflation of blockbusters and the standardization driven by platforms, Boop, Jordan Peele’s third feature film, released without fanfare in the middle of the summer, provides a euphoria as rarely felt in recent times. It will have been enough for him to invest the field of the big Hollywood spectacle with a real aesthetic ambition (but not only), to restore faith even a little bit in his destinies. After the burst of get-out (2017), followed by a Us (2019) more half-hearted, the comedian behind the camera accomplishes with Boop a real dream of popular fiction, mixing the depth of the fantastic with the horizons of the epic, revisiting Hollywood mythologies to breathe new life into them, returning to the primitive sources of cinematic pleasure and wonder.
The success of the film is first and foremost due to very simple, even elementary things, but which Hollywood seemed to have forgotten: taking the time to set a scene, to summon characters, to set up a situation in order to explore all of them possibilities, before pushing it to its limits. The story of Boop, an untranslatable onomatopoeia meaning a flippant refusal (“nan”), revolves around a family of horse trainers, the Haywoods. They work for the film industry and are the descendants of the first black immortalized in the movement, a jockey appearing astride a famous series on photographic plates by Eadweard Muybridge (The Horse in Motion1878).
The story of “Nope” revolves around a family of horse trainers, the Haywoods
Following the accidental death of their father, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), the first introvert and the second, quite the opposite, hold the family ranch at arm’s length, in the small town of ‘Agua Dulce, on the edge of the Californian desert. Due to a patent lack of conviction, they lose the last contract that still bound them to film sets. Alas, OJ sells one of his latest beasts to the local “western” theme park, run by Jupe (Steven Yeun), a former child star of sitcoms converted into an amusement cowboy.
One evening, OJ sees furtively in the sky what looks like a flying saucer. Brother and sister smell an opportunity here: if they manage to capture a usable image for television (ideally for the Oprah Winfrey talk show), then fame and fortune would be at hand. They enlist the services of a technician, Angel (Brandon Perea), who equips the ranch with a battery of surveillance cameras, as well as Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), chief operator specializing in filming in extreme conditions . The four of them set up a small commando operation, but soon realize that the “thing”, camouflaged behind a motionless cloud, sometimes causing violent tornadoes, is not quite a UFO.
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