I want to go there.
Photo: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Every week, in the near future, Vulture will select a film to watch as part of our Friday Night Movie Club. This week’s selection comes from Vulture writer Jackson McHenry, who will begin his screening of Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar on February 19 at 7:00 pm ET. Go to Vulture’s Twitter to hear your comment live and look at next week’s movie on here.
In this long, cold, dark winter of 2021, I don’t laugh more, or more unexpectedly, than the first time Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar. Given the film’s cautious trailers, I expected a tone more like the kind of Sundance comedies that Kristen Wiig did in the following decades. Bridesmaids – mildly funny, but dumb. Needless to say, I wasn’t prepared for Kristen Wiig’s arrival in a few minutes of the movie playing a maniacal supervillain with the intention of killing everyone with mosquitoes, or Jamie Dornan’s whole secret agent trick, or the fact that that the film sets a scene where Dornan, Wiig and Mumolo get lost, dance and then make a trio with a club remix of “My Heart Will Go On”.
Barb & Star is one of those films that are pure nonsense, in an intentional and hilarious way. As Bilge Ebiri put it in our analysis, it seems destined to be a cult classic from the moment of its release. Has a sense of humor that changes into relentless pastel colors and non sequiturs, as if Plane! they were written specifically about and for middle-aged white women, or as if Lonely Island had been created specifically around the concept of breathable summer clothes. Although, in fact, it seems totally indebted to the specific sensibilities of Wiig and Mumolo, who built the script by altering the characters and eventually had to be instructed to reduce the number of talking animals. It is a niche tone; you dig or not. Among the Vulture team, the answers have been divided, but I cannot help those who do not welcome Trish, the water spirit, into their hearts.
To bring this discussion back to Céline Dion, as everything must be a trend, that scene with the remix club of “My Heart Will Go On” is a glorious example of all the sensitivity of the film in action. Barb, Star and Edgar, the inept spy, decide to share a pirate’s treasure at the bar, discover that the treasure in question is some kind of powerful drug and then leave for Jimmy Buffett’s “Cheeseburger in Paradise” shortly before from the trembling solo of the catapult flute to the specific cover of the film “Heart Will Go On”. According to Mumolo, she and Wiig had the idea to search for songs that could be funny on YouTube, and then commissioned their own version when they failed to obtain the rights to the club-specific remix they found (there is, to be fair, a much options out there).
While Barb and Star dance wildly with Edgar, the scene returns to their little “talking club” at home, where Vanessa Bayer has boring conversations with relentless efficiency and everyone is talking about wicker chairs. It is all a very idiotic and idiotic view of breaking free from two intrinsically idiotic characters, who, however, end up dating Edgar. Barb & Star she is delightfully positive about their sex lives and barely bothered to present the conflict between the two over Edgar later – Star is equally, if not more, angry after learning that Barb almost got on a banana boat without her. My main complaint about the scene is that the remix version available on Spotify is only one minute and six seconds long, which is too short. Lionsgate, release an extended cut so that I can insert it into the playlist whenever I go to parties at friends’ houses (whenever it’s safe to do it again …).
If, perhaps, you like the Technicolor nonsense of a scene like this, or even if you’ve seen the film, join Vulture (pronounced Vul-TAR) on a trip to Vista Del Mar with Barb and Star this Friday at 19h. ET through our Twitter account. Let’s all look for our brilliance together.
Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar is available on PVOD via Prime Video, Google Play, YouTube and Vudu.
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