I’m a firm believer in the “throw a lot of funny people at a concept and tape whatever they end up doing” school of comedy filmmaking, a time-honored tradition that’s given us Wet Hot American Summer, the works of Christopher Guest, and the best part of the National Lampoon canon. It would appear that the Lonely Island dug deep in their thick Rolodex, ringing up every one of their extremely funny friends to make an appearance in their new upcoming film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. The newly released red-band trailer is full to bursting with the biggest names in comedy, not only providing writer-directors Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone with leading roles, but snaring the likes of Bill Hader, Tim Meadows, Sarah Silverman, Wills Forte and Arnett, Snoop Dogg, and Martin Sheen, among others. Thus far, 2016 has been perilously light on good comedies. It looks like that will soon come to an end.
Samberg personally outlined the general details of the new film a couple weeks ago, but the trailer leaves a far clearer impression of the tone and comic sensibility of this project. Following in the absurdist bent of their criminally undervalued Hot Rod, the script incorporates plenty of ridiculous riffs on the tropes of music documentaries — it looks like star Conner4Real’s (Samberg) obligatory dark night of the soul includes bagpiping. The film also manages to nod to a number of real-life figures in the current world of pop music, name-dropping Justin Bieber (the clear inspiration for Conner4Real’s look), and poking fun at electronic dance music celebrity Deadmau5 with the bit about the robotic DJ head. Give the trailer embedded above a look and see for yourself, but probably not at work, unless your work doesn’t mind you watching videos containing breasts while on the clock. In which case, you may very well work in Conner4Real’s entourage, possibly as his unicorn trainer.
