Category: comedy

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016, dir. Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer)
Popstar is in theaters now

Never Stop Never Stopping is the second film from the comedy collective known as The Lonely Island. And it is a funny film. You will laugh a number of times. But, like cotton candy, it will be dissolved and forgotten by the time you walk out of the theater.

The film is mockumentary based around Connor4Real (Andy Samberg), an obvious Justin Bieber/Justin Timberlake analog. Connor was once a member of a boy band in the late 1990s/late 2000s that fell apart when he went solo. He still keeps band member Kid Contact (Jorma Taccone) as his DJ while Kid Brain (Akiva Schaffer) clumsily runs a farm in Colorado and still holds a grudge. Connor’s latest album has dropped and the conceit of the film is that we’re watching a mega popstar on the downfall.

I have never been a huge fan of The Lonely Island. I can imagine had I been a bit younger, watching them in my dorm room, but I think I was a little past their peak. I’ve found their music and accompanying videos to vary in quality. It’s often pretty sophomoric humor, with the occasional interesting progressive edge, but usually dick jokes. They are one of those comedy groups that are seemingly obsessed with nostalgia for the 1990s and so their humor, like Family Guy, is more referential than actually satirical.

This means Popstar becomes a missed opportunity to create a This Is Spinal Tap for the modern pop music industry. You’ll likely see this film being compared to that seminal mockumentary but it is nowhere near as cutting. If you were to create a scale for these types of pictures you’d have Spinal Tap on the satire side, Walk Hard in the center, and Popstar on the inoffensive end. And this has been my issue with the comedy coming out of Saturday Night Live for a few years now. Even when the humor is based around political events, the writing seems scared to actually approach a point. So the humor is derived from a shared recognition of a mannerism or voice, instead of making a point about an ideology.

If you go to see Popstar to laugh, they you will get what you paid for. Don’t expect any relevant insight into celebrity or the music industry. Nothing is truly mocked beyond “Hey, aren’t holograms silly” or “Rich people can be silly with their money, right?”. The Lorne Michaels produced comedies as of late have this as a common theme. In the need to appeal to everyone, they lose any relevant voice that comedy should always have. They aren’t bad, they’re just light, fluffy, irrelevant comedy.

In the last 15 years, the Apatow film troupe has become a dominant force in American film comedy. We won’t go a year anymore without one or two films produced by Apatow and starring one of his regulars (Seth Rogen, James Franco,etc.). And it is very understandable that the viewing public has gotten to a point where they feel a bit..annoyed at a perceived repetitiveness in the work being produced. I’ve managed to watch a large number of these films, not due to a strong love of Apatow’s work, but due to that previously mentioned prevalence in our culture, and I’ve come away with some mixed thoughts and feelings about them, Neighbors 2 being a prime example.

Neighbors 2 continues the conflict between Mac and Kelly (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) with Teddy (Zac Efron). This time a sorority moves next door just as Mac and Kelly have gone into escrow on their house in preparation for a new baby. The sorority is led by Shelby (Chloe Moretz) and they all end up in a series of comedic set pieces where characters go over the top and slapstick comedy ensues.

Much of Neighbors 2 is a retread of the first. We just have a new organization, this time made up of young women, who are causing the exact same sorts of problems. Mac and Kelly enlist their friends for help. The couple deal with their own feelings of inadequacy as parents. Thematically they are the least interesting part of the film. From a larger perspective, this is almost a meta-commentary on these actors being pushed aside for the more interesting ideas and themes that come out of what Zac Efron and the sorority members are doing.

Hands down, it is Teddy, Efron’s role, that makes the film worth watching. I wouldn’t say I am a fan of Efron, his choice in films has led us down very different paths. But here he is presenting an examination of the very type of person is likely perceived to be. Early on, we have a scene between Teddy and his former frat brothers from the first film. Everyone is growing up with steady jobs, careers even, and now getting married. Teddy still works at Abercrombie & Fitch and, due to the criminal record he got from the first film’s exploits, has a difficult time finding work beyond customer service. While the film plays this for comedy, Efron manages to bring some levity into these circumstances. Teddy is a dudebro still clinging to his past while everyone around him is moving on. He doesn’t cling to his fraternity days for a sense of glory, we are very quickly shown he wants to be part of a family.

The story of Shelby and her sorority is also set up right away with a ton of empathy. In an orientation meeting for an established sorority on campus, Shelby learns that by-laws make it impossible for women to throw parties so they are forced to attend frat parties. A visit to one leaves Shelby turned off by the exploitative nature of these parties towards women and she ends up finding some strong friendships among fellow female party goers. This is the impetus for their move next door to Mac and Kelly. By the end of the film, I didn’t have much sympathy for Mac and Kelly who, if we look at the generational lines laid by the film, would be the characters I was expected to side with. They are my contemporaries experiencing many of the same life changes I am.

However, Shelby and her friends’ struggle to carve out a piece of the college experience that represents their ideals of female empowerment and to not be viewed as “Hos” for the “Bros” is a much stronger theme. There is a moment in the film where Teddy begins to reminisce about the parties he threw and quickly realizes women were literally labeled “hos” at every single one. His personal realization is played both for laughs and with some poignancy. While he and Shelby are only separated by a handful of years, ideologically and sociologically, they were light years apart. Never once is Shelby’s point of view used to lampoon social justice or feminism, the sorority sisters are funnier than the older characters and evoke a greater sense of empathy.

Neighbors 2 will not change your life. It will likely make you laugh a number of times. What I came away with was a sense of freshness to the Apatow films. Director Nicholas Stoller is responsible for what I believe is the criminally overlooked Forgetting Sarah Marshall, another film that deals in a grown man not blaming women for his problems, but learning to admit his own part in why a relationship crumbled. These films are often marketed with an emphasis on the slapstick, over the top, gross out humor present in them. But given a chance, I think you’ll find something much more thoughtful and refreshing than presented in the marketing.

I honestly never thought much good would come out of MadTV. The series debuted when I was 14 and it quickly became that show I watched the first half hour of until SNL came on at 10:30. Key and Peele weren’t in that original line up, they came around by the time I was in college and lost interest in watching any of MadTV. I was a little surprised when Comedy Central announced in 2012 that Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele were getting their own series I was pretty surprised. Not anything against them, I just didn’t think of MadTV as producing anyone or any material that was all that lasting. I was very wrong.

Now that their five season run has wrapped, the duo is trying to bring their distinctive comedy style to the big screen. Their first outing is Keanu, a very strange little film that is deeply inspired by John Wick. Peele plays Rell, fresh off a break up who is encouraged by his friend, Clarence (played by Key) to get himself together. Rell’s relief from grief comes in the form of an adorable kitten he names Keanu. What he doesn’t know is that Keanu has ties to both the Mexican and Los Angeles crime cartels and this send our two protagonists into a comic-ly absurd tribute to action movies.

It is very obvious that both men and the director love movies. Early on, Rell is making a calendar featuring Keanu in iconic film scenes each month. Posters cover walls referencing 1990s action and gangsta films. When Keanu is taken by Cheddar (Method Man) he’s renamed New Jack. Two murderous brothers are featured throughout the film and they harken back to both Boondock Saints and the early work of Robert Rodriguez. However, this is not a parody of those films but more a tribute mixed with the banter of Key and Peele.

The key to the film lies in the interaction between our leads. Key and Peele have such excellent chemistry together that I could sit through a long drawn out dialogue just between them and be perfectly happy. The film even manages briefly to recreate the road trip moments from the television series. They also play with the idea of “blackness” for a large majority of the film. Both men have addressed through their comedy how being biracial was a challenge to them growing up. In Keanu, they must journey into Blip territory (all the people who got kicked out of the Bloods and Crips) to a strip club with a rather unfortunate name. Once inside, they have a conversation about how to talk to the people their and they devolve into movie studio “blackspeak”. So, while tipping their hat to early 1990s crime films they enjoyed they also take time to acknowledge the absurdity of the portrayal of “black thugs” on the screen.

The film does have its lulls and can sometimes feel like a sketch from their series drawn out for too long. The third act gets very messy and lacks clear plot focus. There are a couple character setup to be the villains who fizzle out and the film pulls someone out of left field to serve as the big bad of the climax. Our main characters get satisfying endings, though a romance subplot feels forced onto us but isn’t too terrible. Keanu is a great first outing in feature films for Key and Peele. I think they have a lot of potential, given some more tighter plotting, to produce some very watchable and re-watchable comedies.