Click on a picture to enlarge it




















Turtles in Movies
 
Popstar: Never Stop Neverstopping (2016)
 
Spoiler Alert !

Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
 
Popstar Popstar Popstar
Popstar Popstar Popstar
This is a funny mocumentary that parodies fame and the music industry, made by Adam Sandler and his Lonely Island group. Adam Sandler plays Conner, a big popstar whose solo career flops after he releases a song about gay rights in which he emphasizes how straight he is. (It's a parody of Macklemore's song "Same Love.") Conner also has an embarrasing wardrobe malfunction that doesn’t help. But he finally makes a comeback when he and his original band perform on a huge music awards show called The Poppies as a last-minute replacement for Taylor Swift, who can't perform because she has been arrested for murder.

For many years Conner has kept a pet tortoise named Maximus that he was given as a birthday present when he was a boy. (Tortoise can have very long lives. Some outlive their owners.) We see Maximus several times throughout the movie. He's probably in the movie to humanize Conner as well as to show that he’s still kind of a lonely nerd despite his fame and fortune who likes to hang onto sentimental things from his past. (It’s also meant to be a parody of Justin Bieber’s pet monkey.)

Unfortunately, Maximus gets sick with “soggy bones syndrome.” Connor tries to drive him to an animal hospital, but the papparazzi block his car so he can't get out, and Maximus dies. Conner performs a funeral for the tortoise, setting him afloat on his swimming pool, then setting him on fire. Immediately afterwards his guests jump in the water and have a wild pool party around the floating burning corpse. At the end of the movie we see that Conner has a new hatchling tortoise that he calls Maximus 2.

Maximus looks like he could be a Desert Tortoise. Coincidentally (or maybe not) the largest recorded desert tortoise was a pet in the 1970s that was also named Maximus, according to the California Turtle & Tortoise Club's Turtle Trivia.