Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING (Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, 2016)

Pop sensation Conner4Real (Andy Samberg) is preparing to release his second solo album and has a documentary crew around to capture every moment in POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING. Conner’s ascent started as a member of the Style Boyz with childhood friends Owen (Jorma Taccone) and Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer), but the rap trio breaks up when Lawrence gets angry about not receiving writing credit for Conner’s guest verse on an award-winning hit. Lawrence drops out of the music industry and becomes a farmer. Meanwhile Conner enjoys even greater success as a solo performer. Owen helps make beats for Conner’s tracks and DJs during his concerts, but for the next album and tour cycle Conner has reduced his contribution to pushing play on an iPod.

Questionable singles, bad reviews, and a backfiring release strategy that automatically pushes Conner’s new material to home appliances begin to erode his popularity. Album sales are suffering and his concerts aren’t selling out, so at the suggestion of his manager Harry (Tim Meadows), he agrees to take on underground hip-hop star Hunter the Hungry (Chris Redd) as an opening act. Ticket sales get a boost, but a string of embarrassing incidents threaten to damage his career even more.

POPSTAR puts a poptimist twist on THIS IS SPINAL TAP. It takes the music and the industry seriously while goofing hard on both. As outlandish as much of the lyrics and behavior can be, the main joke is that a lot of it isn’t far removed from real songs or public artist missteps. The absurdity is certainly turned up, but the humor reflects what life looks like inside and outside the pop bubble. Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone employ a lot of referential jokes but have the good sense not to make the funniness contingent on being able to spot what they’re satirizing. It’s an added bonus if you recognize the film’s analogues to Tyler, The Creator and a Macklemore & Ryan Lewis hit, among many other zingers, but the jokes still land for those who don’t read Pitchfork or Stereogum every day. Considering the broad nature of the jokes, the film tends to relatively subtle, such as how Conner adapts his real last name for showbiz.

As members of The Lonely Island, Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone are pop stars in their own right, and their ties with popular artists surely helped in getting many of them to cameo in POPSTAR. Whether appearing as themselves or playing parts, like Justin Timberlake as Conner’s approval-seeking personal chef, the presence of so many celebrities may take some of the teeth out of the comedy. POPSTAR pokes fun at the music business, but it adopts more of an insider’s perspective. That quality doesn’t make the film less funny, but it does seem like the humor is somewhat soft-pedaled. One of the most savage and funniest bits is reserved for the vultures at a TMZ-like television show, which is indicative of where the film’s sympathies are.

Still, implicit criticism is found in POPSTAR and is identified through the form it takes and the recent slew of pop star documentaries it riffs on. The title calls back to JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER. The style suggests that, at face value, the film is an unvarnished look at an artist, as if Conner or any other pop act, like One Direction, are just humble folks with ordinary origins even as such statements celebrate their excess and inspire envy. POPSTAR slyly draws attention to the fact that social media postings and theatrically-released documentaries for fans as ostensible promotional campaigns are just the current way of managing perception to keep revenue flowing. There’s a reason why artists authorize something unflattering being distributed widely. The joke may seem like it’s on the pop stars, but if we believe it, isn’t it on us?

Grade: B

Nightcrawler

NIGHTCRAWLER (Dan Gilroy, 2014)

NIGHTCRAWLER shares its title with the name of an X-Men superhero, although its protagonist has more in common with the shape-shifting villain Mystique. Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is desperate to make money, and he doesn’t much care how he earns it. What he’s selling isn’t as important as long as he’s selling. Scrap metal, bicycles, it doesn’t matter to the young man with an assassin’s deadliness in the art of negotiation. Louis also possesses a seemingly unlimited ability to adapt himself according to the situation. When he decides that the freelance newsgathering business is where he wants to focus his energies, he quickly soaks up knowledge about the industry.

Louis develops an exclusive relationship with Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a news director on the so-called “vampire shift” for Los Angeles’s lowest rated television station. Having noticed his good eye and lack of compunction, she pays him to get captivating video of crime and accident scenes. Louis is looking for someone as hungry as him but with less business savvy to help grow his news operation, so he hires Rick (Riz Ahmed) as a low-paid intern to listen to the police scanner, navigate, and watch the car while he captures the often horrific images. In no time Louis’s success leads to upgrading his gear and going from driving an old, battered Toyota Tercel to a new cherry red Chrysler SRT. Louis is never complacent, though, and he waits to come upon the story that will boost his power from the little he has as a stringer.

Like its main character NIGHTCRAWLER masks its primary motivation. The ostensible media satire directs NETWORK-like jabs at the sensationalistic aspects of TV news. While writer-director Dan Gilroy makes his points about as subtly as repeated pokes in the ribs, the black humor comes in the recognition that even with wider awareness of this cynical approach to informing the public, viewers continue to reward it. NIGHTCRAWLER’s final shot of broadcast towers on a hill jutting across a full moon in blackest night recalls the spires of a castle in a horror film. As much fear as they might strike in hearts, they are nevertheless alluring.

The fresh criticism aimed at the media has less to do with the content and more with the conditions in which it’s generated. Ratings-chasing news programs are just collateral damage in NIGHTCRAWLER’s mission to fire a scathing yet bleakly comedic critique of the job market and corporate practices. Gilroy unloads on an economic climate that breeds insecurity and instability in the labor force because there’s always someone else out there willing to work harder, faster, and, most importantly, cheaper. An internship system favoring the providers to a lopsided degree takes well-deserved hits . Watching Louis persuade Rick that getting a pittance for his time and efforts is in his best interest stands as one of the film’s timeliest and most wicked jokes.

Gyllenhaal electrifies with a performance that uses politeness to hide a sociopath’s mentality. He’s intimidating because he sounds so assured regurgitating business aphorisms and self-improvement language and doesn’t deviate from following what he has accepted as the one true path. While Louis has designs on being a conqueror leaving destruction in his wake, Gyllenhaal looks more like a scavenging animal as his anti-hero skulks around the wounded and killed to obtain what he needs to further himself. Wearing a haunted look, Gyllenhaal embodies the sick soul of a capitalist doomed never to sleep because there’s always a buck to be made. The scary thing is he’s destined to win.

Grade: B+

RoboCop

ROBOCOP (José Padilha, 2014)

OmniCorp is making a fortune using robotic law enforcement overseas, and CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) can’t wait to deploy it on the streets of the United States.  Sufficient Congressional and public resistance requires finding a solution to persuade the masses that his machines provide a safe method of policing.  The lack of a human element in decision-making is the sticking point for many, so the way to alleviate public fears is to enhance a wounded officer with the latest technological advancements.

With so much riding on the experiment, the perfect candidate is needed to inhabit the suit.  They find him in Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), who is just a head, hands, and thorax after being targeted in a car bombing.  His grieving wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) consents to the procedure as a way of keeping him alive but fails to consider that doing so turns him into corporate property.  As Alex’s intellect and emotional capacity prove problematic in testing, leading OmniCorp scientist Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) is instructed to program the human element out of him.

The 1987 ROBOCOP satirized corporate greed and questioned putting trust in technology.  Director José Padilha and screenwriter Joshua Zetumer’s ROBOCOP consigns the biting humor to segments with Samuel L. Jackson’s cable news blowhard stumping for the adoption of robotic security forces.  Reflecting the times, the challenge in this version isn’t whether such science should be used for law and order but who is controlling it and to what end.  For instance, in the near future drones are almost certain to become more widely employed, so the question becomes how they are incorporated without infringing on the rights and safety of citizens.  Other thematically relevant information is lobbed into the new ROBOCOP, but overall the film plays as though it lacks a point of view.  It seeks to get credit for providing food for thought without digesting.

The talented cast, which also includes Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jennifer Ehle, and Jackie Earle Haley, add class to what has the potential to be savage material.  Like the new, shiny ROBOCOP with the latest special effects and slick production values, the actors are simply adornments.  Respected actors, snippets of sociopolitical commentary and flashy computer effects are collected badges to claim something vital is present.  It looks good but lacks the personality or depth.  

With more focus placed on the forces manipulating him behind the scenes and the family that misses what he was, it can seem like the RoboCop character is an afterthought in his own film.  Part of the appeal of Peter Weller’s version was seeing a cyborg lawman push around the city’s scumbags in ways a mere man would be incapable of doing.  Through no fault of Kinnaman’s, this RoboCop isn’t cleaning up the city so much as he’s trying to solve his own murder and get his emotions to override his programming.  What Murphy looks like when the suit is removed is a great and disgusting reveal, yet there’s little identification with what remains of the man who’s an unwilling tool of the powerful.

Grade: C

The Dictator

THE DICTATOR (Larry Charles, 2012)

With the tyrannical leader in THE DICTATOR pushing for his country to develop a nuclear energy program, the fictional North African nation Wadiya could be the region’s next target of United Nations sanctions and military intervention.  Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen) insists that such technology would be employed for peaceful purposes.  His giddy denial that nuclear power would absolutely, positively not be used to bomb his hated enemy Israel hardly eases international concerns.

Aladeen travels to New York City to address the UN but soon finds himself on the outside looking in.  Aladeen’s trusted adviser Tamir (Ben Kingsley) arranges for his abduction and murder.  While the magnificently bearded ruler manages to escape from his captor, Aladeen emerges from a literal close shave that renders him unrecognizable as the Wadiyan dictator.  With Aladeen missing and presumed dead, Tamir replaces him with a simpleton look-alike who promises the world community that he will draft a constitution and make Wadiya a democracy.  Tamir will then be free to sell the drilling rights to the country’s highly coveted oil fields, which Aladeen has refused to do.  

When Aladeen makes a scene at a protest, Zoey (Anna Faris) mistakes him for a fellow activist and a political dissident.  Zoey clothes the bedraggled monarch and offers him a job at her Brooklyn co-op.  He initially rejects her offer but accepts after learning that her business is catering the Wadiyan constitution signing ceremony that he hopes to disrupt.  

Baron Cohen’s composite despot changes the language as he sees fit, surrounds himself with female virgin guards, and fills his home and nation with artwork bearing his venerated likeness.  The buffoonish Aladeen is a poke in the eyes of past and present world leaders who abuse power and their people.  There’s nothing funny about this dictator’s real life counterparts, but seeing them mocked provides a touch of catharsis, even if the satire is kind of tame.

Aladeen’s hair trigger orders to execute those who anger him provides the film with one of its best running jokes.  Unknown to him, those he condemns to die are shuttled out of the country, a fact he discovers upon entering an anti-Aladeen restaurant in New York’s Little Wadiya.  Among those who have escaped his wrath are Nadal (Jason Mantzoukas), the former head of his nuclear program now working as an Apple Genius, and a cow who earned his ire.  (The cow ends up served as a steak on a plate, but at least it didn’t meet its end as a political victim, right?)

THE DICTATOR is funniest when at its most outrageous.  A decapitated head used as a puppet is a grotesque highlight.  Aladeen’s rampant racist and sexist declarations, as when he delivers a baby and asks for a trash can upon seeing it’s a girl, bring the edge to Baron Cohen’s style, which seeks to risk, if not welcome, the chance to offend viewers.  He’s most likely to bruise sensibilities when Aladeen draws equivalence between dictatorship and current American politicians and the financially powerful.  One of the most pointed jokes is presented less furiously but is no less sharp.  Aladeen pays for countless celebrities to come to Wadiya and sleep with him, which brings to mind those entertainers who have been in the proverbial beds with oppressive leaders who give them sizable checks.   

Although a fair number of jokes hit their marks, THE DICTATOR tends to be as comedically erratic as Aladeen’s decision-making.  Baron Cohen, his three credited co-screenwriters, and director Larry Charles take a scattershot approach that produces several successes but leads to an often choppy result.  The burgeoning love story between Aladeen and Zoey offers equal opportunity insults by taking progressives down a few pegs but otherwise is an ill fit with the dark humor.  The danger for Baron Cohen is having made his name as a confrontational comedian but delivering something that, while occasionally provocative, feels too conventional.    

Grade: C+

The Invention of Lying

THE INVENTION OF LYING (Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, 2009)

In the alternative world presented in THE INVENTION OF LYING everyone tells the truth to a fault. While honesty all the time might sound ideal, it can produce brutal results. For screenwriter Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais), it means being subjected to insults and uncomfortable interactions.

After losing his job and facing eviction, Mark asks a bank teller for more money than is in his account and receives it. Like the rest of society, the banker has no mechanism for recognizing dishonesty. Mark uses his newly discovered power to lie and improve his life, but the consequences of his lying eventually catch up with him in ways he couldn't have anticipated.

Gervais is not one to let pride get in the way of a good joke at his expense, and as star, co-writer, and co-director of THE INVENTION OF LYING, he gleefully sends the cruelest barbs his way. The film gets off to a rollicking start with everyone spouting their uncensored opinions.

Clearly all truth all the time has its down sides despite what our parents taught us about lying. Similarly, the film amuses in how unquestioning people are in accepting Gervais' untruths and the problems this creates. Falsehoods can be damaging, but telling lies can be the right or civil thing to do and can spur creativity. After all, what is fiction, which is something that doesn't exist in the film's art-less universe?

Gervais is an avowed atheist, so he uses THE INVENTION OF LYING'S concept to explore what he views as the deleterious effects of religion. The satire is nowhere near as biting and isn't as dismissive as would be expected from a comedian who specializes in humor of discomfort. Gervais and co-writer/director Matthew Robinson also struggle to balance the headier notions floating about in THE INVENTION OF LYING. The philosophical musings can drag down the lighter elements and lend an uneven tone to the film.

Gervias is funny throughout and well-matched with Jennifer Garner, who delivers a guileless performance marked by chipper, unyielding logic as Mark's love interest Anna. Gervais may put no stock in religious belief, but via Garner's character he presents an implicit riposte to leaving everything merely to reason.

Gervais has helped craft a funny but inconsistent film, yet I'd be lying if I didn't mention that I appreciate the ambition and humor put into what could have been a one-note premise.

Grade: B-

Zombie Strippers

ZOMBIE STRIPPERS (Jay Lee, 2008)

George W. Bush, topping a ticket with Arnold Schwarzenegger, is reelected to a fourth term as President, albeit with some well-placed assistance from faulty Florida voting machines and Supreme Court justice Jenna Bush. Congress is dissolved. American war expansion rivals McDonald's franchises for global ubiquity. Public nudity is declared illegal. What a future. And then there are the undead pole dancers that give ZOMBIE STRIPPERS its title.

With wars being waged on so many fronts, the number of available soldiers is dwindling. To combat the problem scientists develop a chemo virus that will reanimate troops killed in action. This battlefield technology enters the general public when an infected soldier escapes from the research lab to an underground Sartre, Nebraska strip club.

Headlining and Nietzsche-reading stripper Kat (Jenna Jameson) becomes his first victim, but as it goes for more reputable artists, dying is a terrific career move for the topless dancer. Kat's zombie stripper act drives the men crazy and rakes in the money. Seeing how successful it is when the undead can dance, club owner Ian Essko (Robert Englund) chooses to keep her around while many of her fellow strippers also opt for this latest biological enhancement.

As if the title ZOMBIE STRIPPERS isn't enough of a tip-off, lead performances by a porn star and the guy who played Freddy Krueger let it be known that this is Z-grade schlock usually sent straight to video, even though the film is getting a limited theatrical run. True to the title, there's plenty of brain and viscera munching and an abundance of stripping. Neither will get pulses racing despite the second act being almost nonstop stripper routines. The bigger question is whether there's more latex covering skin or silicone underneath it in the film. It's probably a toss-up.

Like so many exploitation movies, the name of the film is more enjoyable and memorable than the actual product. Unsurprisingly ZOMBIE STRIPPERS is poorly acted, written, directed, edited, and lit, but it is so tedious to watch that this might be the first movie that would be improved if Uwe Boll were calling the shots. At least the oft-derided director would have dropped the pretense of shoehorning in political subtext in an attempt to bring class to such a trashy film.

Writer-director-cinematographer Jay Lee strains to make a statement about the Bush administration, but his clumsily integrated rants are as politically and intellectually juvenile as those of an anonymous blog commenter. Zombie movies, particularly George A. Romero's, may function as mirrors of current events, but just because something is an allegory doesn't mean it has anything to say. Using the word "ontological" in dialogue doesn't make it smart either.

ZOMBIE STRIPPERS is also plagued with excessive self-awareness of its campy qualities. When the film isn't annoying with its pseudo-braniac act, it's irritating with the nudge-nudge acknowledgement of its intentional badness.

Forget high art. Assessed on its own terms, ZOMBIE STRIPPERS takes it all off only to reveal nothing's there.

Grade: F