Since Andy Samberg was the only featured player on SNL, people often forget about the other guys in the group: Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. Maybe that sketchy nature is due to the numerous “Saturday Night Live” alums on both sides of the camera. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping opens Friday, June 3 and, according to the hilarious trailer, the relationship between these three won’t be almost as polite on the big screen.
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Andy Samberg’s take on the wannabe slick rap star Conner4Real makes Tap’s Nigel Tufnel look like a brain surgeon.
Along with their parodies of today’s pop songs, Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone are intelligent observers of celebrity and pop culture, which provides them with plenty of juicy material to work with. And the title of the movie obviously feels of kind of like his title, which makes it seem like it’s a lot more about him than we intended, I think, but yeah.
In Popstar, they were the Style Boyz, an influential hip-hop trio that eventually Connor4Real outgrows, and ends up striking out as a solo artist.
Schaffer and Taccone, who co-direct, get a lot right in sending up the absurdity of pop. “I used over 100 producers for just 17 tracks”, Conner notes, “to guarantee they’re all hits”.
As expected, the picture offers a mass of A-listers playing characters in cameos or making talking head appearances as themselves (everyone from Maya Rudolph to Ringo Starr to Questlove and honorary Lonely Islander Justin Timberlake). The film is jammed with a who’s-who of celebrity cameos and bit parts, like Timberlake as a personal chef with a yen for carrot preparation, and massive setpieces, like Seal presiding over a wedding proposal disrupted by a pack of wild wolves.
It’s simply hard to take any of this seriously, and even harder when it becomes apparent that they expect you to do so. With Lawrence living in exile on a farm and Owen relegated to DJ duties (which mostly involves pressing play on an iPod), Conner finds himself cast aside on his own tour by his opening act, the Odd Future-esque Hunter the Hungry (Chris Redd) and reviled by press and fans alike.
Samberg, Taccone and Schaffer work together under the name The Lonely Island.
The movie also earns kudos for the songs The Lonely Island have written and recorded for it. It is a fantastic and fantastically amusing soundtrack with songs covering various styles and topics but each and every one, even the “bad” ones, are incredibly catchy. Without giving too much away, there is one scene that results in about 20 solid seconds of full-frontal male nudity, and there’s no way they filmed that without anyone cracking up. Like the granddaddy in this comedy sub-genre, “This is Spinal Tap”, “Popstar” frames Conner’s story as a redemption lesson in getting by with a little help from your friends after fame steps out on you. While numerous comedy routines will leave you in stitches, the musical numbers stand out above all else. When the Lonely Island are doing their thing (see Dick in a Box, Jizz in My Pants, or any of their other puerile anthems), there’s an undeniable magic: their preposterous lyrics are indistinguishable from the style they’re lampooning.
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The question of whether an actor alone can bring in moviegoers continues to be asked as recently as last month, when George Clooney and Julia Roberts starred in the film “Money Monster”.
