By Robert Scucci
| Published 22 seconds ago

When a band gets too famous for its own good, it’s only a matter of time before tensions rise and the entire operation falls apart, which is broken down beautifully in 2016’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. If you’re familiar with The Lonely Island, you already know what kind of humor you’re signing up for, since the film is written by and starring Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer. Functioning as a Behind the Music–style mockumentary, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping brutally lampoons the music industry by showing just how quickly the pop culture media machine chews up and spits out its artists the second their popularity starts to wane, all while delivering consistently side-splitting results.

Like most musical mockumentaries, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping follows a fairly predictable “this happened, then this happened, then this happened” story structure, but that hardly matters here. You want to see everything that happens because whenever something happens, a PR disaster is usually right behind it. This slice-of-life delivery never wears out its welcome because The Lonely Island, or “The Style Boyz” in this case, know exactly how to command the crowd, the press, and the viewing audience watching the whole thing unravel in real time.

Boy Band Breakup And Its Messy Aftermath

Centering on Connor Friel’s (Andy Samberg) solo project, Connor4Real, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping gives us a crash course on the past collaboration responsible for his meteoric rise to fame. Back in the day, Connor was an integral part of the pop trio The Style Boyz alongside his childhood friends Lawrence “Kid Brain” Dunn (Akiva Schaffer) and Owen “Kid Contact” Bouchard (Jorma Taccone), performing under the name “Kid Connor” when things were far simpler.

When Connor’s infamous “Catchphrase Verse,” co-written by Lawrence, launches him into superstardom, Lawrence leaves the group after receiving no credit for his contributions. This effectively leaves Owen behind as well, relegating him to a de facto DJ role for Connor’s new solo venture.

Owen’s creative input is brushed aside in favor of Connor writing by committee, reducing him to pressing “play” on an iPod and serving as a hype man while Connor remains the face of the entire operation. After a series of increasingly poor business decisions courtesy of their manager Harry Duggins (Tim Meadows), Connor slowly becomes a public punchline when his sophomore album, Connquest, gets torn apart by critics.

The real nail in the coffin for Connor’s career comes in the form of an endorsement deal with home appliance company Aquaspin. Much like the U2 incident where iPhone users had an album forced onto their devices against their will, Connor4Real’s release is installed into dishwashers and smart fridges everywhere, producing exactly the kind of backlash you’d expect from a marketing stunt that wildly overestimates its audience’s patience while simultaneously blacking out the power grid.

As Connor’s career steadily flushes itself down the toilet, he’s no longer able to headline his own tour, forcing Harry to bring on an opening act in the form of up-and-coming rapper Hunter the Hungry (Chris Redd), whose popularity quickly eclipses Connor’s. Despite leaning into increasingly unhinged gimmicks in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, disaster after disaster follows, culminating in a wolf attack at his televised wedding to Ashley (Imogen Poots), who he’s only been dating for six months.

Caught between his past life with his original band and a new life that’s doing him no favors, Connor is forced to confront his own ego with help from his publicist Paula (Sarah Silverman) before his career lands in the gutter with no chance of recovery.

Standard Mockumentary Fare Done Exceedingly Well

If Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping sounds like another riff on Walk Hard or This Is Spinal Tap, that’s because it absolutely is. But it earns its keep by being completely shameless in its execution. The concert footage and musical setpieces boast surprisingly high production values, which help sell just how far Connor4Real falls from grace while refusing to listen to the people closest to him.

The celebrity cameos, including but not limited to 50 Cent, Miley Cyrus, Adam Levine, Questlove, Pharrell Williams, T.I., A$AP Rocky, and Michael Bolton, do a lot of heavy lifting. The B-roll interview segments in particular sell the Behind the Music angle far better than they have any right to, grounding the chaos in something that feels just real enough to be a VH1 special.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping also leans hard into its behind-the-scenes absurdity, especially once you learn that the pop tabloids are run by Will Arnett, Eric André, Mike Birbiglia, and Chelsea Perretti. Their entire job consists of laughing, offering half-hearted commentary, and drinking from multiple metal water bottles at the same time, because that’s all corporate culture requires these days.

In short, everything you see here has been done before, but the satire remains sharp because the film fully commits to its own ridiculous spectacle. It knows exactly when to linger on the absurdity and when to cut away before the joke wears thin.

A box office bomb turned cult classic, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is one of those movies you owe it to yourself to watch if you’re willing to embrace just how ridiculous it gets. You shouldn’t expect anything less from The Lonely Island. If you’re in the mood for sensation, spectacle, and a media-friendly fall from grace, you can stream it right now on Prime Video.

By Jennifer Asencio
| Published 51 seconds ago

Christopher Nolan’s extravaganza version of The Odyssey has already met with some derision over some of the choices made by production. The costumes have been compared to bad Batman villains, and the dark aesthetic of the scenes that have been released to the public has been criticized for not reflecting the colorful style of classic Greek culture. The ships, an important part of a story about a sea voyage, look awful.

The casting has also caused a lot of controversy, especially now that there is a rumor going around that Lupita Nyong’O, known for Black Panther and Twelve Years a Slave, has been cast as Helen of Troy. The outcry over her is, of course, about her race, and defenders of a more classical Helen are being attacked as “racist” for supposedly not finding Nyong’O attractive.

The defense of Nyong’O’s alleged casting has been varied. One tactic has been to point out that nobody in the rest of the cast is Greek. That’s true, but it’s not like there weren’t complaints about, for example, Jon Berenthal being cast as Menelaus, King of Sparta and husband of Helen of Troy, or even Matt Damon in the lead as Odysseus. Just about every aspect of the ensemble casting of this movie has been complained about, from John Leguizamo to Anne Hathaway, not just Lupita Nyong’O.

Another angle of defense has been that it’s just fiction, so why should anyone care? Sure, it might be a fictionalized story, but there is a lot of history backing it up. Troy existed and was the site of many wars with various Greek city-states, most of which, including Helen’s hometown of Sparta, survive today. Homer wrote The Odyssey alongside The Iliad, which was the story of one such war. The mythic elements of the story, like interference from the gods and the various monsters Odysseus encounters, overlay specific historical, cultural, political, and even geographical narratives.

How Helen Of Troy Is Described In The Illiad And Why It Matters

Helen of Troy was one of those narratives. There is no evidence that she existed, but her beauty and supposedly divine origins were so highly prized that a war uniting much of Greece was said to have been waged over her. There were also political ramifications for kidnapping the Queen of Sparta that were deeply embedded in Greek notions of honor and lineage. Abducting Menelaus’s wife and mother of his child was a major humiliation that if left unanswered would have subjected Sparta to derision and attack. Greeks would not have gone to war over her if she wasn’t one of their own.

But Helen was also prized because she was the epitome of the Greek standards of beauty. Homer describes her carefully as fair, glowing skin, honey-colored hair, and deep blue eyes. This was so important to Greek culture that Homer noted it, as well as fellow classical Greek poets Euripides and Sappho. Greek art and sculpture depict her with classic Greek features based on these descriptions. We know what George Washington looks like, and paintings of him have only been around for 250 years. Physical depictions of Helen of Troy have been around for thousands of years and established an image of what her beauty represented to the Greeks.

Arguments that decry objections to Nyong’O’s casting thus fall flat when racism is invoked. The problem isn’t that Nyong’O isn’t attractive; it’s that she isn’t what the Greeks considered attractive. It imposes today’s standards of beauty not on an arbitrary work of narrative fiction, but on an epic that represented a cultural identity. Helen of Troy was more than just a character in a story, she was something like a national symbol. To this day, Greece is also called “Hellas.”

Another Example Of Screenwashing?

That, of course, has not stopped Nyong’O’s defenders from accusing detractors of racism; if anything, it’s supported the notion because who else likes blonde-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed people?

It’s not that black people didn’t exist in Greece. They called them “Ethiopians” and treated them very fairly, because they didn’t have the notions of race that have developed over the past two decades. However, they also considered them an exotic curiosity. They were very aware black people existed, even accepted them as beautiful, and still didn’t depict Helen of Troy as one. That was a matter of cultural values, not racism. If inclusivity was the goal, there were plenty of other characters from Homer’s epicthey could have chosen.

Finally, there is the argument that “Helen of Troy was hatched from an egg. Why does it matter what race she is?” This is a little different from the “it’s fictional” argument because it questions the very roots of Greek culture, the gods. Helen’s parents were supposedly Leda, Queen of Sparta, and Zeus, King of Olympus and the Greek pantheon. If she was a real person, her real father would have been King Tyndareus, and a mythic layer of folklore (the egg) was added to her story to represent why she was blessed with such ethereal beauty.

But let’s go with the idea that she was hatched from an egg and Zeus is her father: either Sparta was ruled by an Ethiopian queen, which is very against Spartan and Greek character (and Homer’s era), or people handwaving the egg story are ignoring that it implies that the entire Greek culture is actually black. In Greek mythology, Zeus was the template Prometheus used when creating the Greek people. That Zendaya, another black actress, was cast as Athena, who is also Zeus’s offspring, makes you wonder what it’s really trying to say.

Maybe I’m defensive because half my heritage is not only Greek, but Spartan in particular. Maybe it’s the literature major in me that is annoyed that Christopher Nolan is treating a classic text of Greek literature like it’s nothing more than a Michael Bay action blockbuster.

But I can’t help but feeling that the oddly specific casting of Helen of Troy, which has yet to be debunked, is yet another attempt at subversion of Western culture and values through screenwashing. Nolan and his backers are trying to redefine concepts of beauty that have existed for thousands of years. And this time, rather than attacking through modern popular culture like video games and Star Trek, they’re “making a statement” by going after its honey-haired, fair-skinned roots.

screenwashed (adjective) — When something seen on a screen completely changes how someone thinks or feels, as if their old beliefs were erased and replaced by what they just saw.

I’m sure The Odyssey will have an audience who will pay for the fancy $250 million spectacle of effects or to see their favorites in some roles. Homer’s classic work will be absorbed into the blob of pop culture, while the Greek people it truly represented will barely merit a second glance because it was part of the foundation of a way of life many people think should cease to exist. I hope I’m not catastrophizing, but I expect that even if it’s bad, its failure will be blamed on “internet Nazis” and not on justified complaints about the vandalism of a staple of Western civilization.

We’ll find out this summer on July 17, 2026, when The Odyssey is released in theaters.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

Starfleet Academy, the latest Star Trek spinoff, has proven to be controversial for many reasons. One of them is the use of profanity-laced modern language, all of which sounds wildly jarring coming out of 32nd-century mouths. This is clearly Paramount’s desperate attempt to appeal to modern audiences, but diehard fans and even Trek icon Robert Picardo keep going out of their way to make excuses for the inclusion of this slang-filled language.

However, the blunt truth is that the character’s use of contemporary language makes no sense, and I can definitively prove it. What are the excuses fanboys have been making, and why are they wrong? Why does the use of such language contradict long-established lore, and why is it bad for Star Trek as a whole? Keep reading to find out! 

The Universal Translator Explanation

Before we really dive into the problem with the modern language on Starfleet Academy, I figured we’d discuss the most common excuses that fans have made for it. Perhaps the most prevalent excuse is that Star Trek’s famous Universal Translator is working for the benefit of the audience watching at home. That is, these characters are likely speaking some sort of otherwise indecipherable space slang to one another, and the UT is conveniently translating that to modern speech for the viewers.

As excuses go, this is a fun one, and it gets full points for integrating the franchise’s most famous technology. But at its heart, this claim is more of an explanation rather than a justification. In other words, it explains why we might hear characters like Caleb casually discuss “toilet wine,” but it doesn’t really justify why that language is in the show.

That’s basically the crux of the matter here: Star Trek fans can sit around all day awarding each other No-Prizes for efforts to explain why the 32nd-century Starfleet cadets talk like 21st-century zoomers. But the core issue is that this modern language in a futuristic show is distractingly jarring, robbing otherwise moving scenes of any real drama even as it instantly dates the show.

The “Kids Will Be Kids” Excuse

The other major justification for Starfleet Academy dialogue being overly modern is that the characters are young and don’t speak like the more seasoned veterans of the franchise. Even Robert Picardo (who reprises his role as the Doctor for this show) offered this up as an excuse in a recent interview with Collider. There, he noted that “the cadets talk like kids in the present-day world and in their own vernaculars” and that they would need to learn to code-switch into the kind of “mid-galactic speech” necessary for “marshaling an argument in a diplomatic situation.”

There are two basic problems with this argument: the most obvious is that Star Trek has had plenty of younger, non-Starfleet characters (including Wesley Crusher, Jake Sisko, early Nog, and even Naomi Wildman) who didn’t speak almost exclusively in then-modern slang. If they had, we might have had Jake describe his latest story as “all that and a bag of chips,” or Nog describing how Starfleet Academy is “the bomb.” Heck, how did Voyager even make it seven seasons without anyone telling Captain Janeway, “You go, girl!”

You know that instant cringe you felt upon reading that? That’s just a small taste of how contemporary slang can ruin Star Trek stories that are meant to be timeless. Now, just think how goofy you will feel hearing Starfleet Academy characters using phrases like “I’m Khionian, b*tch!” and “nah, she chose the War College, bruh” in about 10 years.

The other problem with Picardo’s defense of the contemporary language is that the older characters on the show also talk like this. Chancellor Ake, for example, tells Nus Braka to “blow it out your a**,” and Cadet Master Lura Thok describes a situation as a “dumpster fire.” Heck, in the same episode, Picardo was helping to hype up, his character says that “speech and debate is not for the chickensh*t.”

Long story, not very short? The “kids will be kids” excuse doesn’t really work for the modern language on Starfleet Academy when we see the older characters using the exact same language, essentially proving that age will not magically cause Starfleet characters to stop talking like zoomers. 

Why Profanity Should Be Relatively Rare In Star Trek

Now, time to address the elephant in the room, which is that Star Trek characters have used vulgar language before. Starfleet Academy didn’t magically introduce cursing to the franchise: Dr. McCoy is famous for his various “damn it, Jim,” phrases, and Kirk memorably said “Let’s get the hell out of here” at the end of “City on the Edge of Forever.” This level of mild cursing persisted through the golden age of Star Trek, and even Captain Picard once said “sh*t” (albeit in French) onscreen in an episode of The Next Generation.

However, Trek’s traditional use of vulgar language often reminds me of something my favorite professor once said. Much like the Doctor on Starfleet Academy, he was known to curse in class, and much like those hapless cadets, we asked him about why he spoke like that in the classroom. That was when he said something simple that has always stuck with me: “A gentleman never curses unintentionally.”

His point was that people shouldn’t blurt out foul language out of impulse or anger but should instead only use it for maximum impact in a conversation. This is why Star Trek saved its first “oh, sh*t” for Data when the Enterprise was about to crash in Generations: the rarity of the vulgarity and the extremity of the situation arguably merited the four-letter word. While it was used to increasingly weaker effect in NuTrek, the vulgarity (including F-bombs) in Discovery and Picard was generally spread out to maximize their rhetorical impact.

InStarfleet Academy, characters constantly call each other b*tch, use terms like “fish d*ck,” use “sh*t” as an adjective, and so on. The problem isn’t that Star Trek characters shouldn’t curse; rather, the problem is that if they do so all the time, the four-letter words lose any real meaning or power. Just like that, the vulgar language used to make these youthful characters sound more adult has them sounding like petulant children trying to show off!

Most Modern Profanity Should Be Completely Incomprehensible In The Future

Perhaps the biggest reason there shouldn’t be so much vulgar, modern language inStarfleet Academy goes back to one of the most popular movies in the franchise:Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. One of the best running gags in that movie is that Kirk and Spock didn’t really understand the vulgar language of the 20th century. This is why Kirk responds to someone calling him a “dumba**” with the memorable rejoinder “double dumba** on you!”

Later, Spock (who amusingly tries his hand at such language with phrases like “these are not the hell your whales”) describes such language as “colorful metaphors,” and Kirk says that profanity is “simply the way they talk here” (meaning the 20th century). He sums up his thoughts on the matter by saying that, in this relatively primitive time period that McCoy compares to the Dark Ages, “Nobody pays any attention to you if you don’t swear every other word.”

It’s not that Kirk didn’t know what these words meant, exactly; anyone with a fascination for the 20th century (like Captain Pike enjoying old sci-fi movies) would have a passing familiarity with profanity. But even minor variations on old slang (like putting “dumb” in front of “a**”) completely confused him. Furthermore, it was quite clear that the practice of constantly cursing to get someone’s attention was completely alien to him, someone born a couple of centuries later.

That’s the ultimate problem with the vulgarity in Starfleet Academy: rather than talking like 32nd-century characters who are studying to be the best of the best, they are swearing every other word like characters in the 20th century. Kirk himself identified this as behavior so archaic that visitors from the 23rd century can barely understand the vulgar phrases people are saying. But in Starfleet Academy, characters alive nearly a millennium later are constantly cursing like sailors and generally reminding us how much this franchise has regressed.

Star Trek fans, it’s time to get real: the distractingly modern dialogue has already dated Starfleet Academy, and the constant cursing makes no sense within the canon of the franchise. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the show on its own merits, but it’s far past time the fandom stops making excuses for poor writing. The bottom line is that this show doesn’t sound like Star Trek on any level, making it increasingly difficult for anyone who has seen a single episode of The Original Series or The Next Generation to take any of this very seriously.

Or, to put this in a way that the writers of Trek’s newest series might understand: “Kurtzman and Paramount at the Rizzing. Skibidi, when the subscribers fell!”