The Napa Boys

“The Napa Boys—you’ve always known them, and they’re back.”
It’s the kind of premise you could imagine only a very tired person nodding along with, but the way The Napa Boys—the new comedy from comedians Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman, the former directing and both serving as co-writers—went from this vague concept to a wide release with Magnolia Pictures somewhat beggars belief. 
“I don’t know if [Magnolia] lost a bet…” Weitzman laughs in our interview.
The most concise description of The Napa Boys might run something like “Sideways 4: Beta House,” with all the various and contradictory associations—Fox Searchlight dramedies, frat humor, wine culture, DTV sequels—that this conjures. The film imagines a universe in which the Paul Giamatti/Thomas Haden Church vineyard romp spawned generations of sequels, some of them direct-to-video, as well as graphic novelizations, fan-hosted podcasts, and comic con-like fan events.
“I’m even baffled that I played it at the Toronto International Film Festival,” Peter Kuplowsky, programmer of TIFF Midnight Madness, where the film premiered, tells me. “The fact that its first screening was presented in IMAX…” 
“He took a chance on two young boys with a dream,” Weitzman, 42, says of Kuplowsky, who compared the film’s premiere audience to Ebert seeing Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012) shortly before his death.
Considering the aforementioned film’s (albeit abandoned) mall setting, it’s apt that Corirossi and Weitzman wrote their film at a Glendale, CA mall that’s famously advertised as a “lifestyle center.” 

“Just to lay it down quick,” Corirossi tells me. “I live at The Americana. [The mall] has live-in places, and I live here as a social experiment that turned incredibly sincere.” 
The Napa Boys, subtitled in the film “The Napa Boys 4: The Sommelier’s Amulet,” seems appropriately finely attuned to our moment in film commerce. Miles Jr. (Weitzman) and Jack Jr. (Corirossi) are the stars of the in-universe “Napa Boys” film franchise, which is secretly based on their own lewd and swashbuckling adventures in the valley. The plot points of this fourth installment are evoked with little connective tissue, conjuring the feeling of walking into a late-entry Marvel film after having taken the last few off.
“In the latest Mandalorian & Grogu trailer, they have Jabba the Hutt Jr.,” Corirossi says. “That’s what they used to do in American Pie. They’d have Stiffler’s cousin or something, then Eugene Levy would show up and explain everything.”
In The Napa Boys, no explanation is coming, but a character known only as “Stiffler’s brother” (Jamal Neighbours) does come along for the ride. The plot ostensibly revolves around a deity known as “The Sommelier” and his confounding omens, but mostly follows the Napa Boys’ quest to save Mitch’s (Mike Mitchell) Winery by besting the evil and racist Squirm (Paul Rust) and his vineyard conglomerate at an annual Napa tasting context. Sizeable detours also concern Jack Jr.’s attempts to get Miles Jr. laid, a redux of a previous film’s encounter with “the Milfonator” (Eve Sigall), and the reunion of Kevin (Nelson Franklin), a character with only few spoken lines, with his tennis-playing family (“I’m never going to miss another big game again,” he tells a group of people never seen before or again). 
Corirossi and Weitzman’s film takes aim at a studio filmmaking climate in which referentiality has all but supplanted text. Star Wars comes up frequently in our conversation, held just days after Kathleen Kennedy stepped down as president of LucasFilm (“Good for everyone,” Weitzman says). Corirossi opines about Maz Kanata, the character who found Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, explaining away the Macguffin with a wave of his hand and a “that’s a story for another time.”
“And they just never answered it!” he raged. “They exploit fandom for commerce. But we want to use that same trope [of callbacks to nothing], not for evil, but for good.” 
What the Star Wars example pinpoints, and the point is made more salient every day with revelations of Fortnite scenes for Tarantino movies, shrinking theatrical windows, and AI-generated trailers, is that there’s an eroding difference between a film that does exist and a film that does not exist. 

Corirossi has spent decades working in these borderlands. Funny or Die produced multiple episodes of Clip Cup, a fake Tosh.0-style show starring Corirossi’s Craig Healey character, which led to a single episode of a fake Louis-style dramedy (Cliplicated), before finally becoming the fake Trevor Noah-style political pundit project, Craig Fixada America. In 2012, a website appeared featuring a video entitled Miami 1996, something like a party video-turned-snuff film created by Corirossi without authorial trace. His Macguffin masterwork is Hector (2014), a film about the making of a film by one “Nick Corirossi” that becomes the last surviving relic of humankind in the year 3200. At the 2014 Borscht Film Festival in Miami, the critic Nick Pinkerton observed, “I can’t say if Nick Corirossi takes himself seriously as an artist, […] but I certainly do.” The judgement call can sometimes be difficult. “Bonjour and welcome to La Nouba Boys,” the lone episode of a Corirossi podcast begins, “the only podcast that offers weekly analysis of Cirque du Soleil’s 1998-2017 show at Downtown Disney Orlando, La Nouba.”
“The gray area of what’s real and what’s not is infinite right now,” he tells me. “We went right through that crack to launder [The Napa Boys] into existence.”  
In this regard, the film recalls nothing so much as Megalopolis (2023), that unlikeliest of films to ever transcend its unreal origins to play in theaters (and Francis Ford Coppola’s proposal to screen it nationwide every New Year’s Eve has a distinctly Corirossi-esque ring to it). Indeed, Coppola, a Napa resident and wine connoisseur himself, is a character in The Napa Boys, represented by an actor who hardly resembles him as a guest judge at the tasting contest. “Napa Valley is the closest earthly embodiment of Cesar Catalina’s Megalopolis!” he exalts. “I make wine…”
But The Napa Boys is not just a fake film for a fake world. Weitzman and Corirossi take ample joy in bringing the “They fly now? They fly now.” school of comedy writing to its airless, contextless, logical conclusion, but The Napa Boys reminds us what’s missing from this picture, as well. 
“Jokes,” Weitzman puts it simply. “Jokes based on the characters’ interdynamics, versus self-aware ‘jokes’ pulling from the writers’ viewpoints into the movie.”
Kuplowsky was struck by this interplay between comedic scholarship and industry indictment at play in The Napa Boys. 
“It’s this weird combination of dissertation and shitpost,” he tells me.

Corirossi elaborates on these problems with the Deadpoolification of comedy: “They disguise cliche as self-awareness now to skip all of these mechanics and setups and payoffs and things people actually respond to. It’s disguising laziness.”  
It’s difficult to explain how a scene showing Jack Jr. “shitting and cumming” into a barrel of wine after mixing up his psychedelics with laxatives and prophylactics demonstrates a forgotten respect for audiences, but The Napa Boys configures such setups and payoffs, however puerile, as eternal tenets of storytelling. It’s mall-moviemaking not as it is, but as it once was, and as it still could be. 
“Me and Armen wrote the movie at the Americana, and now it will play at the AMC Americana,” Corirossi tells me, sounding like a prophet. “And the DVD will be in the Barnes & Noble at the Americana as well.”
You’ve always known them, and they’re back.