Goofy ensemble comedy riffs on The Wizard of Oz
Sunny summer flick features several celebrity cameos
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Unabashedly all over the place, this amiable ensemble comedy from director and co-writer David Wain (known for the sketch show The State and the Wet Hot American Summer movies) delivers a nonstop, hit-and-miss stream of dirty puns, slapstick gags and absurdist non sequiturs.
The plucky, self-deprecating cast manages to pull off some good comic moments. And as with the old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies, when a bit doesn’t land, you can just wait 45 seconds or so for the next one.
Still, the film is riffing on The Wizard of Oz (with added sex jokes!). While’s there’s no need to go to David Lynch levels of obsession with this touchstone of Americana, it might help if all the funny stuff added up to something more.
Sony Pictures Classics
In Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, (from left) John Slattery, Ben Wang, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Zoey Deutch and Ken Marino are loosely inspired by characters in The Wizard of Oz.
The titular Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is a peppy, optimistic gal from rural Kansas, best known for penning an essay for her community newspaper titled Why I’m Never Leaving This Town.
A former head cheerleader, she is currently engaged to the former football captain, Tom (Michael Cassidy), and already mapping out their perfect marriage, their perfect home and their three perfect children.
Because Gail Daughtry is meant to parallel The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale — note the switched-up similarities in the names — her carefully planned life is about to be blown off course by an erotic tornado. She and her fiancé have a casual conversation about a hypothetical “celebrity sex pass” — if either of them encounters their famous crush, they’re allowed to break the monogamy rule — and then Tom immediately runs into his celeb pick. (Look out for a good-sport appearance here by a well-known actress.)
After happening on Tom and his actress mid-sex act, Gail decides the only way to get her universe back in balance is to hook up with her own celebrity crush. Thanks to repeated teenage viewings of Mad Men, this is Mr. Don Draper himself, Jon Hamm.
Soon Gail is off to Los Angeles to see the great and powerful Hamm, along with her best friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley). (Get your anagram solver out for that character’s name.) The pair encounter Caleb (Ben Wang), an eager but inept assistant at the talent agency CAA; Vincent (longtime Wain collaborator Ken Marino, who also co-scripts), a washed-up People magazine paparazzo; and John Slattery, also of Mad Men fame, playing a scruffy has-been version of himself. (The film claims at one point that Slattery hasn’t worked for over a decade, which would be news to anyone who saw last year’s Nuremberg.)
These three guys are equivalents — kind of — to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. Meanwhile, thanks to a mix-up involving identical pieces of luggage at LAX, the gang gets pulled into criminal hijinkery in a What’s Up, Doc?-type subplot, ending up on the wrong side of a (metaphorical) wicked witch (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her hapless flying monkeys (including Joe Lo Truglia).
Sony Pictures Classics
Gail (Deutch, left) and her best friend Otto (Gutierrez-Riley) take a trip to L.A.
Any brief written summary of all this silliness suggests more structure than the story actually achieves on screen, where we mostly watch the characters noodle around L.A.
There are random encounters with Los Angeles cabbies and concierges and crooks, often played by alums from previous Wain projects (including Richard Kind, Michael Ian Black and Thomas Lennon).
There are also several famous people playing versions of themselves, including a predictably polite and adorable Henry Winkler, a heavily armed and angry (Weird Al) Yankovic and a game Elizabeth Perkins. Paul Rudd drops in for a silent cameo as an ideal wedding guest (because of course).
The film has a flat, cheap, 1990s movie-of-the-week look, and there are slumpy sections where the hit-and-miss ratio skews toward the misses. The Oz references can be cute — keep an eye out for some ruby slippers — but they never seem necessary. Some of the cameos feel gratuitous, as if Wain were on the phone calling up old friends and offering them walk-ons.
Still, there’s a goofy enthusiasm here.
We’ve got Gail’s sunny Midwestern naivety, effortlessly embodied by Deutch, and Hamm’s bubble-wrapped self-involvement, which demonstrates — as many of the actor’s post-Mad Men gigs do — a sly self-awareness about his celebrity image.
Sony Pictures Classics
Jon Hamm plays a version of himself in Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.
And while the out-of-towners premise could come off as a clear showdown between the American heartland and the Hollywood elite, Wain and Marino clearly have affection for both sides. More sweet-natured spoof than pointed satire, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is an aimless, funny saunter down the yellow brick road.
winnipegfreepress.com/alisongillmor
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
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Movie review
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
Starring: Zoey Deutch, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Ken Marino, Jon Hamm
● Polo Park
● 93 minutes
★★★ out of five
Other Voices
“The tourism board should study how Wain sells a tacky California vacation. Hollywood Boulevard hasn’t looked this fetchingly sleazy since Pretty Woman.”
— Amy Nicholson, Los Angeles Times
“Every other line of dialogue is at once ridiculous and brilliant, the sheer irrationality of the material looping back into the most perfect punchline.”
— Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail
“Both goofy and edgy, the film may not land every punchline, but it satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not.”
— Richard Lawson, The Hollywood Reporter
“There’s not much to latch onto here except the faint flickers of the better film this one, with more care and attention to detail, might have been.”
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
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