BEFORE: If this were a typical Movie Year, I'd be closing up shop right about now, so I could focus on getting some Christmas cards mailed out, and some catalog browsing to at least start thinking about gifts for family and friends. But it's not a typical year - I took time off for a vacation in addition to two Comic-Cons this year, so I've still got another week and a half of movies to hit 300. With 21 days left in 2017, I'm sure I can make it - the trick will be finishing with enough time to do those other holiday things.
Shorter feature films do help, this one's just under 90 minutes long. But I'm going to do something I only do a couple of times a year, and watch a short tonight before the feature. My only rule for this is that the short must be on topic. It won't increase the count or affect the linking, I'll just mention it here as an extra - but it does star Andy Samberg, who's also in today's feature. It's "Tour de Pharmacy", a 40-minute mockumentary spoof that's about the Tour de France, only it's set in a year where nearly every cyclist was caught using drugs, so all were banned from the race except for 5 non-dopers. And this is quite topical, considering the Russians were just banned from the Winter Olympics for a drug scandal. But this short is all in fun, with tons of guest stars and a bunch of inside jokes about the world of sports and fame. Check it out on HBO if you get a chance.
Now that's out of the way, and Imogen Poots carries over from "Jimi: All Is By My Side" to another film about a famous music star, only it's another spoof.
THE PLOT: When it becomes clear that his solo album is a failure, a former boy-band member does everything in his power to maintain his celebrity status.
AFTER: I'm sure it was quite easy to take some of these potshots at the world of today's pop music, everything from the ridiculous boy bands of the 90's (the Style Boyz here) to the way that musicians feel the need to reinvent themselves for each new tour - after the band breaks up, the lead renames himself "Conner4Real" to the constant need to over-hype and outdo the last album. Conner is a pastiche of Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, and let's say Justin Timberlake (who also came out of the boy-band scene, and appears here in a role as Conner's personal chef).
So every aspect of being a pop-music star is taken to its extreme and illogical conclusion - in much the same way that "Tour de Pharmacy" oversold every joke. A cyclist isn't just doping, he's super-doping, taking every steroid and drug known to man, because a longer list is (theoretically) funnier. And so Conner's new album can't just do poorly, it's got to do phenomenally horribly just to over-sell the joke. In reality, you've got to imagine that an album doing slightly worse sales than expected is probably a lot more common. The concert arena can't just have a few empty seats, it's got to look like there were zero tickets sold, and so on.
I try to follow pop culture, but watching this, I wish I knew a bit more about current pop music, just so I could understand all of the references. Probably that just means I'm too old to fully enjoy this film. I sort of got that Conner's song "Equal Rights" was a dig at Macklemore, but if I didn't know that, it could have come off as really homophobic, since Conner drops in the line "I'm not gay" as many times as possible in a song calling for gay marriage rights. Of course, Conner finds out that his protest anthem hit the stores just a bit too late, after gay marriage became legal, because in this film, everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Conner owns a large turtle, and I guess this is supposed to a reference to Justin Bieber's pet monkey - the one that he tried to take to Germany, which got confiscated. Hey, did he ever get that monkey back? Just wondering, the news doesn't always do proper follow-ups on things like this. Ah, I guess it lives in a zoo in Germany now, that probably draws a few extra people in, to see a famous person's ex-monkey.
I didn't really get the joke about putting Conner's new album into appliances like refrigerators and microwaves - apparently this was a dig at U2 for having their album installed for free in everyone's phones, which I guess people didn't appreciate. I knew about the U2 thing, but the joke was too different from reality for me to make the connection. I would guess it's a lot of work not only to do parody work, but to strike the right balance between reality and fiction - how far into left field should a spoof go?
Also starring Andy Samberg (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 2"), Jorma Taccone (last seen in "Neighbors"), Akiva Schaffer (ditto), Tim Meadows (last seen in "Trainwreck"), Sarah Silverman (last seen in "A Million Ways to Die in the West"), Chris Redd, Maya Rudolph (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Bill Hader (ditto), Joan Cusack (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), James Buckley, Edgar Blackmon, Justin Timberlake (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Danny Strong, Kevin Nealon (last seen in "Cecil B. Demented"), Will Arnett (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Mike Birbiglia (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Chelsea Peretti, Eric André (last seen in "The Internship"), Paul Scheer (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Will Forte (last seen in "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"), Joanna Newsom (last seen in "Inherent Vice"), Derek Mears (last seen in "Live by Night"), with cameos from Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Carrie Underwood, Nas, Usher (last seen in "The Faculty"), 50 Cent (last seen in "Southpaw"), Simon Cowell, Ringo Starr (last seen in "George Harrison: Living in the Material World"), Adam Levine (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Mario Lopez (ditto), Akon, Mariah Carey (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan"), Pink, DJ Khaled, A$AP Rocky, Danger Mouse, RZA (last seen in "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), T.I. (last seen in "Get Hard"), Pharrell Williams, Seal, Jimmy Fallon (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Steve Higgins (last seen in "Ghostbusters"), Martin Sheen (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Emma Stone (last seen in "Irrational Man"), Katy Perry (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Snoop Dogg (also last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Michael Bolton and "Weird Al" Yankovic (last seen in "Sandy Wexler")
RATING: 4 out of 10 quick costume changes
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