Video, Film, and Television

Stupid or Clever? A Ramble on Parody and Perspective with Popstar

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

It’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever.

  • David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap is one of the greatest movies ever made.  It defined the mockumentary genre, absolutely capturing the sense of a cultural space – ridiculous metal bands in the 80s.  It was well-acted, sensitive, and also the music may have been silly but pretty good.  In fact, it was so well done that when the “band” toured, a friend who was a fan ran into people at a concert who didn’t get the joke.

Want to argue with me?  Shut up.  Look. I just like Spinal Tap.

Being such a fan of the film, I checked out a similar movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, as a friend said it was in much the same vein.  Popstar was also a mockumentary, but was released in 2016, targeting more modern pop music (with bits of boybands, the Beastie Boys, and rap thrown in).  The movie focuses on one Conner Friel (Andy Samberg) who rose to fame as part of a trio called “The Style Boys,” but being the most charismatic of the group, he ended up solo, leaving one friend traumatized and the other as his DJ.  Connor’s meteoric rise becomes a crashing-to-earth potential extinction event through various bad choices, exacerbated by more bad choices.

The film was a bomb, but I found it quite entertaining, disturbingly spot-on, and the musical performances are pretty good.  However, there were parts of it that seemed, well, stupid – over the top, vulgar, or dumb.  As I watched it my reaction was yes, it was funny, but Spinal Tap it was not.

However, as I watched, I realized that this was a film of a different time.  Spinal Tap was funny to sixteen-year old me as I knew that era of music, the stories of drummer disasters, monsters of metal who just kept going, and strange careers.  Watching Popstar i started thinking that maybe I didn’t “get it.”

Stupid or clever?  A fine line indeed as Mr. St. Hubbins would note.  So I tried to view it as best I could through a modern lens – and I’m the kind of person who hears of Maroon Five and wonders what happened to the first four.

Once I did that, my perspective changed – and with it I got a better understanding of media.

The excesses shown in Popstar were excesses that were distinctly modern – stupidity that was in most cases part of our lives.  Megastars who gain a great deal of fame very fast and do very stupid and immature things amplified by the news.  Oversharing on social media of every detail.  Dumb tie-ins using modern technology to do things no one wants but everyone tells you is cool.

A lot of the things I found stupid in the film were there in real life.  This was a fascinating realization, as well as more than a bit depressing.  Maybe the first four Maroons were in hiding from the dumb world we’d made.

In the end I came to the conclusion that of Popstar’s stupid elements, well over half were completely well-deserved.  Tell me you can’t believe a business called Party Wolves with stellar yelp reviews for providing cute wolves for events.  There’s a scene taking on Daft Punk/Deadmaus techno-costumes and bands that is hilarious as it is believable.  We really do amazingly self-destructive things on social media, especially when famous.

Clever or Stupid?  I had to come down on the side of clever.  It’s just that it was made in modern times where we have invented some incredible kinds of idiocy.

I did note where there was actual stupidity it was due to the film going from mockumentary to parody.  Mockumentaries should adhere to being as real as possible while also exploring the ridiculousness of their subject.  Parody has more of a free hand and allows – indeed may require – some excess to point out the ridiculousness of its subject.  I consider a mockumentary a sub-form of parody, a more disciplined and sensitive one, and to break out of the form is jarring – as this film does occasionally.

I wish the film had been handled with some more deftness, dare I say “more Spinal Tap like,” but perhaps that was too much of a challenge. The musical and managerial traumas in Spinal Tap were of a different time, one without social media, and embarrassing holographic reconstructions.  Perhaps our current times have so much stupidity that it’s harder to handle it cleverly – one needs their cleverness up to eleven as it were.

If there’s a point to all of my intentional rambling  it’s that mockumentaries require some careful handling, but also that audience understanding matters.  I had to take effort to put myself in the right mindset of Popstar, much as a young person might not “get” Spinal Tap with some thought.  Even if Popstar had been handled as well as Spinal Tap (and it is still pretty good) I would have had to make some effort.

Some things just are of their times.  Including me.  Besides, I’d probably throw my back out trying to do The Donkey Roll.

Steven Savage

Dungeons and Marios: Honor Among Brothers

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I consider the films Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and the Super Mario Brothers movie to be successes as good films. I found them both enjoyable, but also find that both of them work because the people behind them made similar choices.  There’s a lot of lessons there, and you know me, I’m definitely going to write it down.

Let me pause to note I do not consider them to be of equal quality.  The Dungeons and Dragons movie is fun, emotionally resonant, and both grand yet very human.  The Super Mario Brothers film is a fun romp with some clever choices, but not as deep.  But the lessons – even where they both don’t succeed – are illustrative.

So how did two different films do same things, let’s take a look.  There are of course spoilers here, so here there be dragons (or Koopas).

Be Fun and Entertaining

Both movies are actually fun.  There’s action, there’s jokes, there’s actors and actresses giving it their all.  I had a good time at both.  Super Mario Brothers was so snappy and tight I didn’t even take a break.

Fun can be forgotten, especially when you already have other things on your mind like adaption.  But you have to give people a reason to pay attention beyond “hey I adapted this.”  Be it Chris Pine being a charisma bomb or a brain-twisting Mario scene where the infamous Rainbow Road is realized, give people a reason to enjoy it.

You can also tell people enjoyed making them, both have a joy to them.  Which probably says a lot about why they work as well.

Don’t Run Away From What You Are

The Dungeons and Dragons film is just like the games – not the books.  A group of confused dumbasses get into trouble and save the day.  It feels like a gaming session, right down to bad luck and unwise choices.

The Super Mario Brothers movie is colorful, bright, and strange. There are moments it has homages to the games and gameplay, but outside of those it runs on a kind of game logic.  It feels like a game and doesn’t apologize at all.

This is what people came for.  I do not come wanting an explanation of Mordenkainen’s magic or how to use a Fire Flower.  I want to see hypercompetent stupidity and someone yelling “wahoo” he stomps on evil turtles.  And I got it.

Use It But Don’t Overexplain

Dungeons and Dragons brings decades of history, rules, rules changes, rules arguments, novels, adaptions, and more.  What do you do with that?  Well, it’s raw material but you tell a story first – ten minutes of rules are boring but the sorcerer Simon struggling to “attune” to a magical item is interesting because it’s about a person.

Meanwhile the Mario film inherits a disjointed series of games and events without an exact timeline or even consistency.  The film takes a pile of stuff and forges it into a setting but also doesn’t explain it much.  Power ups just exist – what matters is how you use them.  An industro-solarpunk kingdom of apes just exist – what matters is if you can make them allies.  Tell a story – besides people already bought into the premise of plumbers teleported to this cartoony realm anyway.

The stuff you adapt is fuel for an actual story.

Get A Cast That Works

Want a good adaption?  Get a cast that will embrace the roles and bring things to life so people feel and enjoy the film.  Even the best script is nothing without the right cast.

Dungeons and Dragons cast is stellar.  It’s like a movie filled with leads that just happens to center on Chris Pine’s bard, Edgin.  From the humor to the pathos, the cast brings you into the film.  A few characters might have been used better or given more depth, but everyone used what they got and then some.

Super Mario mostly does the same thing.  Jack Black owns his role as Bowser and brings pathos to the character (more later).  Anya Taylor-Joys Princess Peach is fantastic, badass, and charming enough she’s sort of the main character at times.  Charlie Day is terribly underused as Luigi, but clearly brought is A game.  I could compliment others, but you get the idea.  The film is inherently ridiculous but the cast is game, as it were.

Now Chris Pratt is the elephant in the room.  Regarding his problematic statements, I looked into them for this article, and it appears he’s not bigoted, but is not always thoughtful or good at reading a situation.  Regarding his acting, he can “phone it in” but can really shine when he sinks his teeth into a role.

That being said, his Mairo performance was extremely generic.  It was enough to move things along and make Mario human, but he didn’t add anything to the role.  Whether it’s his fault or the scriptwriters, I’m not sure.  I also noticed the animators did some amazing expression work with Bowser and Peach and wondered if they were more restrained with Mario.

Either way, lesson learned – get a cast that’s good and let them go.

Give Us Real Emotional Arcs

The Dungeons and Dragons movie brought tears to my eyes, once during That Scene at the end (if you saw it, you know), and once afterwards when I realized how I related to a character’s speech.  The movie has multiple emotional arcs that bring it to life, give characters reasons to do things, and help you connect.

This is not consistent among the cast or characters, and I blame the script.  It’s a perfectly fine script, but a few more scenes could have done wonders.  But what is there is good.

Believe it or not Super Mario Brothers does this too, multiple times.  In fact, there’s a scene where Mario and his original nemesis Donkey Kong find out they’re a lot alike.  When a cartoon plumber and a big monkey share parallel emotions, you’ve done something right.

However Super Mario Brothers also doesn’t dive into the emotional arcs as well as Dungeons and Dragons and is poorer for it.  There’s some unused potential, from Mario feeling defensive about Luigi to Princess Peach’s isolation as a lone human in her world.  There’s unexplored character motivations, such as Toad’s heroic drive that differentiates him from his fellows.  I feel there’s 5-10 minutes of cut footage that made it a better movie.

But the lessons stay the same.  In fact  . . .

Give Us Relatable Villains

Hugh Grant, playing con-man Forge  charms his way through the Dungeons and Dragons movie in a way only he could.  Daisy Head’s creepy sorceress Sofina is something out of a horror film, and you believe she’d like nothing more to murder the idiots surrounding her.  Both get scenes that aren’t just villainy but humanity – Forge finds a joy in adoptive fatherhood, and Sofina snaps over how annoying Forge is in a relatable way.

This is great, they’re enjoyable.  They get human moments – but only the acting covers the fact they’re otherwise paper-thin characters.  Both could have shown more depth with just a few tweaks or an extra scene or two.  The actors clearly work with what they have, but there could have been more.


Meanwhile let me commit blasphemy – Jack Black’s Bowser in Super Mario not only gets to be relatable, his character is better handled than the villains in Dungeons and Dragons.

Yes I went there.

Black’s Bowser is a terrifying warlord and a hopeless romantic.  Madly in love with Princess Peach, he hopes to impress her and marry her instead of conquering her kingdom (sort of).  Throw in Black’s performance with excellent animation, and Bowser becomes sympathetic, a kind of ridiculously Shakespearean character of extremes.  If anything, I felt there was more to explore.

Both films add villains with some understandable traits.  Super Mario does it better.  Forge and Sofina aren’t interesting enough on their own, but Black’s Bowser feels like he could carry an entire film.

Do A Film Not A Preview

As I’ve said before, I will compliment the Marvel movies on sheer competency. However, I’m also extremely tired that the interlinked nature of stories seems to “wash out” the films.  There’s that need to keep the mega-franchise going, and there’s a certain “safety” in choices that wears thin.  Make something that stands on its own – like these films!

Dungeons and Dragons and Super Mario Brothers are delightfully standalone.  They do their job, they deliver.  Sure you may care due to the games – in fact it’s the only reason to care about Super Mario Brothers.  But both stand on their own quite well and in a satisfying manner.

There’s just that thrill of being able to “close the book” and move on with each.  Both deserve sequels of some kind, but its nice to see them deliver and be done.  It helps the people making them focus, and it means each film is reliably complete.

In Conclusion

So there you have it.  Both of these adaptions based on games, both wildly different, really succeed due to the same choices.  Embrace what you do, don’t overexplain, get the right cast and real emotional arcs we feel.  That’s it.

It feels unnecessary to explain this, but maybe the fact I feel this says volumes about the poor media I’ve seen – and how I enjoyed these two pieces.  Let’s learn from them, and maybe apply these lessons to things beyond giant big budget movies.

Steven Savage

It is Weird.  It is Art.

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

If you were to ask me who are the greatest musical artists of the past 100 years, I’d first wonder why the hell you asked me.  But, as I answered, I would have to say Prince and Weird Al Yankovic.  Prince’s place is obvious – talented, a supporter of musicians, etc. – but Weird Al also fits the definition of artist.  He’s a musicologist in a jester’s outfit, a man who gets music and truly reaches you – art that makes you laugh for many different reasons.

His “biopic” Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is also art.  In fact, it’s art in the sense of James Joyce’s quote that the emotions art produces are where “The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”  Art takes you out of yourself, and this movie – also a comedy – definitely does that.

Weird is a fictionalized telling of Weird Al’s career, but that doesn’t do it justice.  It takes the all-too familiar beats that many a bad biopic shoved a real person’s life into and does it with Weird Al’s life (which is often rather tame).  The result is the movie version of one of his songs – taking one thing and making it about another.

However this is not a song, but a movie about a real person, real events, played by real people.  It’s also done with a straight face, except for a few over-the-top moments and sly lines.  The result is surreal, jarring, and funny – where familiar faces and situations appear scrambled inside an often misused story framework.  We know Weird Al didn’t have an affair with Madonna, but the film has that happen because a bad romance is a common biopic trope.

As these falsehoods occur on the screens, the actors sell it with sincerity.  Daniel Radcliffe is exceptional as Weird Al, capturing both his sweetness and going off the rails in service of the plot.  Rainn Wilson does an almost disturbingly good Doctor Demento.  Evan Rachel Wood’s life-ruining Madonna is basically one of Madonna’s old personalities brought to life.  Even when he has but one scene as Wolfman Jack, Jack Black embraces it with a passion to be both the man and the bad biopic role he fills.

It’s all very wrong, all done with a straight face.

Watching Weird is funny, but the more you know about Weird Al (and I’ve been a fan of his, especially into the 90s) the more the experience keeps taking you outside of yourself.  It’s so gloriously wrong about everything that you don’t know what will happen next.  It’s also so familiar in its use of bad biopic beats that it’s a savage mockery of tropes we’re used to.  A Fauxumentary if you will, where you’re both unsure of what is to come but completely sure you’ve seen it before.

Thus I really have to consider this art – because it keeps knocking you outside of yourself.  Is that a trope or real?  Wait why is that history out of order?  Isn’t that plot twist something every bad biopic pretends happens anyway?  How can these people say these stupid and false lines without laughing themselves silly?  Wait, aren’t a lot of these supposed real-life documentaries just this dumb?

It is perhaps the perfect film to falsely sum up Weird Al’s life as it’s, well, just like his songs.  But it’s not just appropriate or a good jab at the media.  Weird is a reminder that art doesn’t have to be staid and dignified – it can wear a Hawaiian shirt, have an affair with Madonna, and eat LSD-laced corn chips.

Steven Savage