Director: Akiva Schaffer
Cast: Andy Samberg, Isla Fisher, Jorma Taccone, Bill Hader
Have I Seen It Before?: I have a dim memory of watching it on DVD during some hazy buying jag I went on shortly after the release, and the only thing I can really point to remembering is the “ancestors protect me” chant from earlier in the film, so much so that I could have sworn it appeared throughout the film
Did I like it?: Had the movie come about under its original conception as a Will Ferrell vehicle of the era, it probably wouldn’t have been terribly memorable. Similarly, had it come about later in the storied career of The Lonely Island, people would think that their other films would be better. As it stands, a bland movie about arrested adolescence released in a period where feature comedy was a sea of movies about arrested development, I found myself laughing profoundly at any number of moments. I may be a sucker for non sequitur, and so those moments where the film eschews logic and is content to thumb its nose at its own structure work the best.
I wish those films had been more omnipresent, and I also wish that the filmmakers had been allowed to go deeper with their own voice, as they were with their latest film together, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016).
And yet, it’s sort of a strange miracle that the film exists at all. Lorne Michaels used his influence to give complete creative control to comedic voices that had barely gotten SNL sketches on the air at that point. We often complain how safe that show plays it with material, and while there’s some legitimacy to that criticism, it’s hard to deny that Michaels hasn’t spent some of his show business influence to develop new comedic talent.