Don't Stop Beliebin'

Year: 2016

Director: Jorma Taccone & Akiva Schaffer

Cast: Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I’ve never been a fan of The Lonely Island. I think many of you probably wouldn’t blame me for that. Their celebrity-packed rap-sung songs featured on SNL were designed for 12-year-old boys to get detention for singing them in the classroom. It’s no beef against them, that’s just not my demographic.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch their movie and it was actually kind of awesome. The cumbersomely titled Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping was directed by Jorma Taccone and Akiva Shaffer (the Lonely Island guys on either side of Andy Samberg), and written by them and Sandberg, so this is a pure, undistilled vehicle for their comic stylings, but perhaps the focus required to make a feature-length film brought out the best in them.

Their talent is out of the box, so to speak.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a mockumentary, a comedy genre that has finally been reclaimed from the network sitcom trenches. It follows Conner Freal (Andy Samberg), a young pop savant who got his start in a boy band called the Style Boyz along with his friends Owen (Jorma Taccone) and Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer). He has now struck out on a solo career under the name Conner4Real and had massive success with his first album. The film picks up just before his second album drops. Owen is now the DJ on his world tour and Lawrence has abandoned the scene to become a farmer and grumble about Conner claiming credit for a famous verse he wrote.

We join Conner, his manager Harry (Tim Meadows), and his publicist Paula (Sarah Silverman) as the album drops… Straight off the face of the Earth. It turns out that abandoning his songwriter and beat mixer has resulted in a widely hated album, leaving Conner and his team scrambling to pick up the pieces.

Oh, and his team also includes Bill Hader for like 5 seconds.

Popstar is very much a Lonely Island film. Absurdity and filth rub shoulders here like they’re the finalists in an All-County Shoulder Rubbing Contest. It can be very juvenile and sophomoric, but if that’s your style, it hits some spectacular highs. My biggest problem with the trio has typically been the music itself, and Conner4Real’s tracks do share some of their biggest weaknesses (a tendency to repeat the central joke until it has been jackhammered into oblivion and a certain lack of musicality in the verses), but they frequently transcend themselves to become biting pop culture satire.

My personal favorite track is “Equal Rights,” a scorching parody of Macklemore’s “Same Love” that highlights the hypocrisy of straight white men inserting themselves into minority corners. And that sense of no-holds-barred mockery spreads throughout the entire film. It’s very Of The Now, so certain jokes won’t translate well even a year form now (a joke about hoverboards catching fire is already a bit dated), but the best kind of satire is birthed from a very specific cultural context.

Popstar’s net is cast wide, and almost no piece of cultural ephemera escapes its laser gaze: Justin Bieber (an easy target, and Conner4Real’s most obvious analogue), reality shows, awards shows, surprise album releases, vapid celebrity couples, TMZ (with a particularly funny Will Arnett cameo), and even the movie Flatliners for some reason. Plus, there’s more than a little bit of the real life narrative of The Lonely Island snuck in for flavor. It even goes so far as to mock the very type of movie that it is, all while skewering the self-involved social media culture that has been defining the charts in the 2010’s.

You can find more of such criticisms on my Twitter page.

That’s not to say that Popstar is a life-changing comedy. It’s not. It’s frequently just as shallow as the artists it parodies, but it’s a mostly intelligent piece of light fun that breezes by without overstaying its welcome. Sarah Silverman and Maya Rudolph shine on the sidelines, it keeps the laughs coming, and only in the final shot does the trio finally indulge in the worst kind of over-the-top absurdity that has come to define their brand.

If you’re up for a heaping helping of R-rated frat boy antics, then see Popstar immediately. It’s a shame the box office kind of ignored this one, because it certainly deserves better. It’s an excellent light snack of a comedy, and that should never be underestimated.

TL;DR: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a surprisingly sharp satire of modern pop culture.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 776

Snorty Forties

Year: 2015

Director: Jason Moore

Cast: Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Hey, remember Sisters? It’s that movie that you haven’t seen yet because it came out the same day as Star Wars. Well, it happened, and the triumphant reunion of comedy soul sisters Amy Poehler and Tina Fey has commenced. Throw in newly minted comedy star John Cena, the director of Pitch Perfect, and a massive quantity of cast members hemorrhaged from Saturday Night Live, and you have a movie that couldn’t help but be funny in spit of itself. Unfortunately, it’s almost exclusively funny in spite of itself, but this is 2016. We takes what we gets.

I mean, between this and, say, Ride Along 2, it’s not exactly Sophie’s Choice.

Sisters tells the story of the Ellis sisters, Maura (Amy Poehler) and Kate (Tina Fey). Maura is a nurse who has her life together, except for the fact that she’s still reeling from a messy divorce. Kate is an abrasive screw-up with no home, no job, and a teen daughter (Madison Davenport) who gets fed up with her and has been living away from home for several months, not telling her mom where she is. Which Kate gets angsty about rather than calling the cops, because this movie was written by somebody who clearly doesn’t have children, or possibly is only vaguely aware that people tend to care about the smaller humans that grow inside them.

Anyway, the sisters find out that their parents (James Brolin and Dianne West in what might not be the laziest performances of their careers, but certainly the drunkest) are selling their childhood home and decide to throw one last house party to relive the glory days of high school. Maura hopes to let her tightly wound hair down and get with hunky neighbor James (Ike Barinholtz) while Kate is looking to forget her troubles before she has to face her sad, 30 Rock-less reality once more.

Blerg.

As a story, Sisters is pretty routine. Two different people learn to accept one another’s realities and face the challenges of growing up. It’s not Shakespeare. Actually… Come to think of it, it’s kind of like Taming of the Shrew. There’s nothing new under the sun, man. It gets points for going with a climax far different than the course of the movie was suggesting, but it loses those points immediately because that climax is idiotic and raises the stakes ludicrously high for a party comedy. Plus, it’s mighty embarrassing when the predictable ending you don’t go with is actually better.

As a scripted comedy, Sisters is pretty routine. There are a series of gross-out gags, somebody accidentally ingests way too much of a certain nasal narcotic, and hijinks ensue. Comedy thrives on the unexpected, and there’s a crippling drought of surprise to be found in the film’s comedic structure. And while I’m thinking about it, the denouement is as idiotic as the climax, so there’s that.

Don’t you just love movies where you can fall asleep for the final half hour and not miss anything?

As a string of gags, Sisters is not pretty routine. Betcha you weren’t expecting that. While the structure is unambitious swill, the moments where it lets the cast breathe and be themselves produce a bevy of bite-sized gags that are invariably the best thing about the movie. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are comic sweethearts for a reason, and when they can break from the script and scrounge up loose laughs, it absolutely works. Sparkling improvisations and clever line readings pepper Sisters, rendering it funnier than it really ought to be.

A lot of the film’s best comedy comes from the juxtaposition of men and women in their 40’s in a typically high school-based narrative style. You’d think those would be the entire point of the movie, but you would be wrong. Luckily, converting what should have been front and center into a sort of stunted B-story concentrates those moments into fewer but stronger nuggets. It’s like an Easter egg hunt for laughs. There might be long segments of searching, but when one appears, it’s always received with a burst of elation. Also, it is way the hell too long.

Without its cast (especially Bobby Moynihan, Maya Rudolph, and John Cena), Sisters would be lost in the dark. But it just goes to show how much the right group of people can elevate flat material. Unfortunately, that material is, necessarily, still wholly present in the film, which is why Sisters is charming but mostly a dud. Have it on in the background while you’re folding laundry or something. It’s amusing but it doesn’t demand your full attention.

TL;DR: Sisters is an unambitious comedy saved by a strong cast.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 801