The Media Tourist

Rollicking, randy all-star-cast comedy puts a naughty spin on “The Wizard of Oz”

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
Starring Zoey Deutch, Ken Marino, Jon Hamm & John Slattery
Directed by David Wain
R

In theaters Friday, July 10

A multi-layered concept comedy with a motley crew running all over Los Angeles, Gail Daughtery and the Celebrity Sex Pass is the latest absurdly raunchy, ridiculously hyper romp from director David Wain.

Wain’s previous films—like Wet Hot American Summer, Role Models and They Came Together—skewered big-screen tropes with satire and a smirk, and this one’s in a similar vein. It follows a young Midwestern hairstylist, Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), who takes a fish-out-of-water trip to sunny California.

You see, Gail and her fiancé, Tom (Michael Cassidy) made a far-fetched deal, sort of, agreeing that if either of them could have a booty call with their celebrity crush, the other would be free to do the same—in other words, a celebrity sex pass. When Gail finds Tom bonking Jennifer Aniston in the back room of a bookstore, she heads to Tinseltown to hook up with actor John Hamm and “level the playing field.”

Yes, it sounds crazy. And it is, packed with bawdy jokes and bonkers celebrity cameos. In addition to Aniston and Hamm, who play themselves, there’s Henry Winkler, Weird Al Yankovic and Penn Gillette. And isn’t that Paul Rudd as a wedding guest, giving a wink to the camera? Yes, it is!

Actor/comedian Richard Kind is a cab driver. Elizabeth Perkins and Elizabeth Banks have cameos you might miss if you get up to get popcorn. Hamm’s Mad Men co-star, John Slattery, plays a version of himself, one that’s surprisingly well-versed in the art of self-defense. Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Jo Lo Truglio is an inept thug. There’s a map-of-the-stars salesman (Michael Ian Black) and Fred Melamed’s a mailman, narrating the tale looking into the camera…and sometimes into the mailbox. There’s a guy (Robert Herjavec) from Shark Tank! Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon is a rock-star hairdresser, the master of the whip curl, who knows how to use his curling iron as a weapon. Sabrina Impacciatore, from The White Lotus, hams it up as an evil mastermind.

But the real standout here is Deutch. The daughter of actress Lea Thompson and director Howard Deutch embodies the movie’s enthusiasm, its embrace of wide-eyed adventure and its self-assurance that all the wacky comedy is hitting a bullseye. She “sells” it, hammering home the silliness with dynamic self-confidence. She’s come a long way since Disney’s The Suite Life on Deck in 2010!

There’s also a fateful briefcase switcheroo in an airport, a plot to collapse the world economy, bad guys chasing good guys, an abandoned Wild West set and a roll of 35mm camera film that becomes an inspirational touchstone. It feels like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World meets with The Naked Gun, with a Mad Men reunion to boot.

On one level, it’s a sweeping, sexed-up mock-tail toast to Hollywood, with actors playing themselves, paparazzi (The Residence’s Ken Marino, who also co-wrote the movie) lurking in the bushes, bodyguards, a movie pitch and agents from Creative Artists Agency. To top it off, it’s also a loopy salute to one of the most classic films of all time.

You don’t have to dig deep to see the connections to The Wizard of Oz. Gail is the Kansas girl, like Dorothy Gail in the 1939 film, who ventures into a place full of wonder and danger, on a mission with a posse of characters, trying to avoid pursuers—and wearing a pair of ruby red slippers. If you have trouble figuring out who, exactly, is standing in for the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, Dorothy’s dog Toto, the Wicked Witch and the flying monkeys, stick around for the credits.

As for the Wizard himself, well, you’ll make the connection when one of the characters admits his insecurities about pretending to be someone he’s not, living “behind the curtain” of his fame—and certainly when he drops in later, via hot-air balloon.

Of course, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy didn’t sing about being “off to see the Wizard” to hop into the sack with him. But Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass doesn’t want us to think too hard about that, or about anything. It just wants to nudge us into some chuckles at its outlandish premise, its random randy-ness, its cavalcade of in-jokes, and its weird, wonderfully wacky spin on someplace way, way over the rainbow—where sex with the stars is a thing, some dreams really do come true, and Weird Al Yankovic hops off his golf cart to chase interlopers away with an Uzi.

–Neil Pond

Johnny Knoxville and crew fire a final salvo of gonzo stupidity

Jackass: Best & Last
Starring Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Preston Lacy & the rest of the Jackass crew
Directed by Jeff Tremaine
Rated R

In theaters Friday, June 26

It’s so painful, you gotta laugh. The new Jackass movie—the fifth film to spin off the gonzo prank series that started two decades ago on MTV, later becoming a pop-culture franchise—is a final-bow salvo of slaps, slams and other shocks that fans of the show have come to expect.

It is—supposedly—the parting shot from creator Johnny Knoxville and his cast of Jackass collaborators, mixing new material with stunts that never aired in previous movies or on TV. And ending with a giant grocery cart, filled with the cast, rolling slo-mo through explosions, pelted by debris, and ultimately plunging over a cliff to the tune of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.”

It’s a ballsy move to open the same weekend as Toy Story 5, but Jackass has always been ballsy—in more ways than one. Like the bit when Knoxville, in a clip from his 2013 movie Bad Grandpa, airs out his alarmingly distended (artificial) “old man” parts in a male strip club. And speaking of toys, there’s a bit from 2011 with a little toy car that becomes, ahem, lodged in the colon of Ryan Dunn, one of the show’s original collaborators.

Jackass has always courted discomfort, built on a foundation of dangerous, pointless and sometimes unhinged—and frequently scatological—setups meant to surprise, shock and awe. Like strapping Steve-O into an overly “full” porta potty and sloshing it up and down on bungee cords suspended between two massive cranes, or a group of Jackasses bottoms-upping mega-doses of laxative, then playing a game of Twister. In another moment, we watch Sean “Poopies” McInerney trying to walk on a balance beam with a shock collar attached to his, well—it’s inside his underwear.

Oh, and there’s a four-foot-tall robot, giving a rectal exam.

The barrage of self-inflicted abuses includes an early staged clip that caused MTV to temporarily cancel the show, as Knoxville, dressed in escaped-convict orange, goes into a hardware store and begs for help to saw through his handcuffs. It ends up with a confrontation by Los Angeles police.

There’s something perversely entertaining in watching other people willing to abuse themselves strictly for entertainment—especially when they look like they’re having such a great time doing it. Part of the appeal is being “in on the joke,” unlike a lot of the onlookers while they’re filming—like the customers at a L.A. food stand who watch as “guest star” Brad Pitt is whisked into a black van, apparently kidnapped. Cut to the inside of the vehicle, with Pitt and the Jackass crew laughing hysterically at the disruption they’ve just caused.

Knoxville and his cohorts (including co-creator, and longtime director Jeff Tremaine) know that their creative anarchy fills a certain niche and a need, lodged deep in our primate brains. Like Maximus (Russell Crowe) taunting the cheering arena crowd in another movie, Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?

Jackass: Best & Last opens with Knoxville, in a 1998 bit that never aired, shooting himself in the chest point-blank with a handgun and padded only with a T-shirt and a Kevlar vest. A warning comes onscreen: “Do not attempt this. It’s extra stupid and could kill you.”

Knoxville survived that early brush with danger, and death, and stunts of jaw-dropping stupidity became the show’s calling card. And Jackass became a kind of institution, a daring dose of unruly chaos to spice up the pedestrian mundanity of modern life, a vicarious way to live outside the prim and proper, watching others do what we’d never dare.

“The worse an experience is,” says Steve-O watching Knoxville get flipped into the air and knocked unconscious by a bull, “the better it looks onscreen.”

Laughter may be good for the soul, but Jackass: Best & Last gives us a final reminder that it can be hell on a body. Especially when toy cars, bulls and porta potties are involved.

—Neil Pond