The Lonely Island's POPSTAR: A Hilariously Breezy Piece Of Comedy Gold

Opening today at a multiplex near us all:

POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING
(Dirs. Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone, 2016)

The first original feature film from the comedy trio The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer) who cut their teeth making over 100 Digital Shorts for Saturday Night Live, is the funniest musical mockumentary since THIS IS SPINAL TAP.

Mind you, the genre of musical mockumentaries isn’t very large, but the sheer volume of big laughs in POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING indeed makes it worthy enough to be compared to that highly acclaimed comedy classic.

Samberg stars as Conner4Real, a pop/rap superstar who was previously the front man for the hit group the Style Boyz, which included his childhood buddies Lawrence (Schaffer), and Owen (Taccone).

The band broke up after infighting led to a stage meltdown which resulted in Lawrence leaving to become a farmer, while Owen stayed on as Conner’s DJ/producer (which basically means he just has to press play on an iPod).

The film follows Conner on tour in support of his second solo album, Connquest, which is off to a shaky start because of bad reviews - Pitchfork gives it a negative 4.5, while Rolling Stone abandons their star rating system to give it a shit emoji, which Conner thinks is a misprint. The only good review our not-too-bright protagonist finds is from The Onion, which, of course, he doesn’t know is a satirical site.

Joining Conner and Owen on the road is Sarah Silverman as Conner’s publicist Paula, who has one of the film’s funniest lines: “I don’t listen to Conner’s music in my personal time, but he makes so many people so much money,” SNL veteran Tim Meadows, no stranger to pop parodies as he appeared as a band member in WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY, is on hand as Conner’s manager Harry, and Imogen Poots plays Conner’s girlfriend Ashley.

In true Spinal Tap style, the tour is beset with problems. Firstly, Conner’s promotional deal with Aquaspin, an appliance company that programs their products to play Conner’s new singles whenever the owner accesses them – i.e. music blares whenever people open their refrigerator, microwave, laundry machine, etc. – gets a lot of negative backlash – i.e. people smashing their appliances (this plays as a delicious send up of the debacle over U2's deal with Apple which had their last album uploaded on every iTunes user's playlists, but Taccone has said in interviews that they had written this storyline before that happened).

Then Conner gets hugely upstaged by his opening act, Chris Redd as the up-and-coming rapper Hunter the Hungry, who may be behind an ultra embarrassing wardrobe malfunction that makes Conner look like he has no genitalia – the movie’s Stonehenge perhaps.

In an attempt to put a positive story out into the nonstop negative news cycle, Conner stages a romantic proposal to Ashley involving a performance by Seal, and a pack of wolves, but somehow things don’t go as planned.

After this series of public humiliations, Conner has hit rock bottom and it looks like the only way to get back on top is to reunite with his former band mates for an awards show performance.

POPSTAR is stuffed with hysterical cameos by the likes of Samberg’s SNL pals like Bill Hader, Will Forte, Maya Rudolph, and Jimmy Fallon, as well as many big names from the music world such as Questlove, Mariah Carey, Snoop Dog, Adam Levine, 50 Cent, Nas, Usher, Pink, and even ex-Beatle Ringo Starr.

There’s also a scene stealing appearance by Justin Timberlake as Conner’s chef, and an uproarious satire of the tabloid TV show TMZ, called CMZ, which has Will Arnett, satirizing sleazy celebrity gossip monger host Harvey Levin, laughing, with a room full of snarky bloggers, including Eric André, Chelsea Peretti, and Mike Birbiglia, like maniacs at Conner’s every misstep.

There are very few gags that don’t land big in Sandberg and Co.’s terrific takedown of celebrity culture in the internet age. It feels like they might have taken the Monty Python route and cut everything that didn’t get a laugh in test screenings judging from the high ratio of screamingly successful jokes-per-minute on display. Even when I expected to cringe at the juvenile, crude humor bits like the aforementioned wardrobe malfunction and an extended flaccid penis rubbing up against a limo window gag, I ended up giggling my ass off.

A hilariously breezy piece of comedy gold that shines as bright as Conner’s bling-bling, POPSTAR is The Lonely Island’s greatest achievement. If you’re not a fan of their SNL Digital Shorts, or of Samberg’s shtick in general (including his Fox sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which I love), you may want to skip it, but if you are then you’re in for a very filling, and funny as f*** treat.

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MACGRUBER: The Film Babble Blog Review

MACGRUBER (Dir. Jorma Taccone, 2010)



MacGruber! Making a movie out of a flimsy SNL sketch!

MacGruber! Which will most likely be clobbered by SHREK FOREVER AFTER's opening weekend grosses!

MacGruber! His movie actually doesn't suck!

MacGruber!!!!!

The first film derived from a Saturday Night Live sketch in a decade (the last being 2000's THE LADIES MAN) accomplishes something surprising - it's much better than the sketches on which it's based.

With a few exceptions, like when Betty White famously appeared as MacGruber's grandmother earlier this month, I've found the sketches to be irritatingly repetitive. They always concern a countdown in a control room in which Will Forte's MacGyver take off fails to halt a bomb's detonation because of whatever neurosis of the week he's dealing with.

Of course, you can't make an entire movie out of repeatedly blowing up the hero so borrowing heavily from the 80's action movie handbook we get a something resembling a plot. Which is - the ridiculously over decorated special operative MacGruber is called out of retirement because his arch nemesis, named...wait for it...Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), has stolen a nuclear warhead and threatens to, in his words, "turn Washington D.C. into a pile of ash."

Brought back into action by the always welcome Powers Boothe as Col. James Faith, the mulleted MacGruber assembles a team of beefed up "American heroes with over 100 years of combined combat experience." The early fate of this team is one of the better jokes in the film so I'll just say MacGruber has to make do with Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) as his second in command, and Forte's fellow SNL-er Kristen Wiig as Vicki St. Elmo who is just as stuck in the '80s hairstyle and fashion-wise as our uber-unlikely hero.

There's a back story involving Kilmer's killing of MacGruber's fiancee (Maya Rudolph) 10 years previous which ups the stakes - MacGruber threatens Kilmer with his signature "throat rip" among other, uh, unsavory things. Apart from that it's what you'd expect, not that that's a bad thing, from an over the top action comedy directed and co-written by one of the minds behind SNL digital shorts like "Lazy Sunday." It's a hard R with more F-bombs than actual bombs, scads of crude juvenile humor, and the most hilarious sex scene since TEAM AMERICA.

By no means a comic masterpiece since it's a little too sloppy and choppy to qualify; MACGRUBER is funnier than it has a right to be.

Forte's fearless gusto - which means he'll even go nude for a laugh - and his mock egotistical line readings make for a performance that's maybe not a tour de force, but certainly a minor comedic triumph.

As his meek but eager love interest, Wiig registers much more favorably than in her recent blank slate roles such as EXTRACT, WHIP IT, and DATE NIGHT. This is sort of odd due to the purposely shallow nature of Wiig's character, yet she has some of the funniest bits in the film.



Kilmer comes off beautifully as the oily bad guy in Euro trash threads sporting a slimy smirk. It's the kind of role he's perfect for as it tweaks his former 80's it boy status and gives him big artillery backdrops to chew on.

Phillippe, apart from some celery silliness which I won't spoil, plays his role straight as if he's in an actual action movie and that's the right idea.

True satire movie-wise is hard to come by these days so don't really expect any of it in MACGRUBER. It has spoofery in its genes, but it's more content to exist in the margins of immature buffoonery.

For folks looking for a mindless summertime diversion with more than its share of decent jokes, it should do just fine.

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