Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
Josh Lewis

Review by Josh Lewis Pro

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping 2016

★★★★

Watched 03 Jun 2016

TERRORIZE THAT PUSSY

The Lonely Island's greatest gift to SNL was that as comically moronic and lowbrow as their lyrics could be the amount of genuine effort they put into indistinguishably replicating music production/video styles and making legitimately good, catchy pop music is as pretty astonishing. (So much so that their work is honestly a useful historical record of 00s/10s trends.) That gift finally found its fullest expression in this parody of the rising trend of behind-the-scenes popstar concert docs, which has to be the most consistently funny, ruthlessly cutting and well-made industry satire since Tropic Thunder. Like that film, the way it's formally assembled to frequently function like the real thing it's making fun of is fantastic and yet that doesn't stop it from pushing the boundaries of what this type of movie can be for a ridiculous and stupid out-of-nowhere gag. And the fact that this coheres those gags into such a tight whiplash package while simultaneously sneaking in a kind of moving look at their own friendship and artistic process while doing so is very impressive. People will regret not being there on Day 1 for this in 10 years.

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