Gail Daughtry and Celebrity Sex Passhybrid/supply
Gail Daughtry and Celebrity Sex Pass
Works directed by David Wayne
Written by David Wayne and Ken Marino
Starring Zoey Deutch, John Slattery, Jon Hamm
Classification not applicable. 93 minutes
Released in select theaters from July 10th
critic’s choice
Film director David Wayne’s career is reminiscent of musician Brian Eno’s oft-repeated, perhaps false, statement: In explaining the influence of the Velvet Underground, Eno said that the rock band’s first album “only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”
The same domino effect can be felt in Wayne’s uniquely absurd and highly influential work. This work has its roots in the MTV sketch series The State, and has also metastasized to his comedy troupe Stella (along with The State principals Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black) and the 2001 comedy Wet Hot American Summer. That final project was a bomb when it arrived – “so depressing that it brought me to tears,” wrote a review in the Washington Post – but gradually it took on a second life, and audiences were hooked on its surreal, almost Dada-like silliness. And some of those fans just so happened to be the next generation of comedy all-stars. Wet Hot’s legacy can be felt in Adam McKay’s (Anchorman) goofy comedy, and in almost everything that’s aired on Adult Swim to date (particularly Tim and Eric).
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But while the world of modern comedy owes Wayne a debt, at least his excellent 2014 comedy They Come Together, if not Wet Hot, a romantic parody that essentially erases the influence of romantic comedies past and present, the industry doesn’t exactly pay him that debt.
Sure, the director has been busy with television, with Netflix giving him not one but two Wet Hot spin-offs, but it stands to reason that he’ll at least have the same level of success as Stella’s compatriot Showalter. (Spoiler alert, though, who knows what Wayne thinks of Showalter’s post-2020 work, which includes trickling features like The Idea of You and Oh.What.Fun.)
So will Wayne’s new comedy, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, his first feature in nearly a decade, be the project that finally gives the director a zeitgeist-defining responsibility? So it probably isn’t, considering a) the title is a mouthful, b) it’s been totally mismarketed by Sony Pictures Classics, a distributor that isn’t even close to Wayne’s wavelength, and c) it’s opening in theaters on one of the busiest weekends of the year, a likely back-programming strategy that seems doomed to fail.
But for Wayne devotees and those who crave comedy that sharpens and pushes the format, Gail Daughtry is a goofy delight. The odds are in favor of Wayne’s film, as it’s a comedy that delivers gags with the force and speed of a batting cage gone awry, ready to make you lose control. Even if you don’t understand one visual punchline, a series of non sequiturs follows. The question is not whether you laugh, but how much you laugh.
Audiences accustomed to the rhythms of Wet Hot and They Come Together will no doubt get the most out of Gail Daughtry, but Wayne also tips his hat early on, introducing the main character, a naive small-town hairdresser (played by Zoey Deutch), who, as evidenced by an on-screen exchange of love letters, is engaged to a supreme idiot named Tom (Michael Cassidy).
The couple eventually concocted a “hall pass” system in which they agreed to a possible relationship with a celebrity in case the unlikely opportunity materialized. Well, it doesn’t take long before Tom meets Hall Pass’s Jennifer Aniston (a veteran of Wayne’s 2012 comedy Wanderlust). Aniston happens to be in town to read her painstaking cookbook, which prompts Zoe to travel to LA to fulfill her own sexual conquest – Mad Men star Jon Hamm.
Gail’s journey is filled with strange ups and downs and, oh, and coincidences, reminiscent of Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc?, but sped up and beyond the point of resemblance to reality. The story features shady Hollywood moguls, Italian gangsters, former heyday paparazzi photographers, and even Hamm’s former Mad Men co-star John Slattery, who plays a deeply disheveled figure.
It’s all fun and nonsense, but it’s conceived and executed with a neurosurgeon’s level of care. Every other line of dialogue is simultaneously ridiculous and brilliant, the sheer absurdity of the material looping back to the most perfect punchline. And Wayne once again brought together an all-star cast from State and Wet Hot, including Joe Lo Truglio, Thomas Lennon, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Perkins, and Ken Marino, who also co-wrote the screenplay. (Stella’s Michael Ian Black also appears, but, oddly, Showalter does not.)
The super-genius Hamm, who in another life might have been a little less handsome and a mainstay on Saturday Night Live, makes the most of his role as the object of affection, with no sense of vanity or pride. If you think you already know how Gail Daughtry’s story ends, Wayne assures you that his sense of transgression extends from the single sentence to the construction of the story. No one is playing by the rules here, and that’s exactly the point.
But don’t worry if you miss Gail Daughtry in theaters. Eventually you’ll hear about this from someone else, someone cooler.
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