GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS. Wet Hot American Summer (2001) is as much a tenet of my marriage as any of the shared values upon which it is founded. For a quarter century, it has been a source of solace, celebration and common ground unlike any other for my wife and I. It is also, of course, one of the greatest film comedies of all time, a product not just of its moment, but of great, goofy minds coming together under trying circumstances to create something legitimately greater than the sum of its parts. As much a gleeful ’80s throwback as tail-end, transgressive, ’90s indie-core, it propelled a number of its stars to present-day mega-stardom and, less showily, secured seemingly comfortable, if not always game-changing directing careers for its co-creators Michael Showalter and David Wain.
The former has parlayed this into a series of ever higher-profile, for-hire gigs, with the upcoming Verity suggesting a new, darker, more prestigious chapter. Wain, meanwhile, has stayed the ridiculous comedy course, with Role Models (2008) the lone crossover hit. Co-writing with Ken Marino (co-conspirator on The State and Wet Hot American Summer), he made The Ten (2007), Wanderlust (2012) and now Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, all irreverent, kindhearted slapsticks that may or may not rise to the level of Showalter’s apparent academic-mindedness.
While none of these projects possess exactly the alchemical incandescence of Wet Hot, they are all clearly of a piece, founded in an inimitable brand of parody/satire/nonsense that has informed subsequent generations of comedy, big-screen and small. With a deceptively slouchy mien, the movies, to a one, overstuff workaday scenarios with cartoonish extremity, creating a deconstructed and reconstructed version of regular life that, defined by irregularity and populated by weirdos, feels bizarrely naturalistic, provided one doesn’t attempt to measure it against “real” life. Gail is a prime example (if not the funniest of the lot), capturing some of the early-days quickness and charming perversity of Wet Hot and The Ten, while also situating itself quite comfortably in a present day those movies couldn’t have imagined.
In honey-hued small-town Kansas, Gail (Zoey Deutch), a well-liked hairdresser and decidedly nice girl, is engaged to be married. When she brings her fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) along to a reading and book signing for Jennifer Aniston’s simple suppers cookbook, though, the road to wedded bliss gets a little bumpy. Tom decides rather precipitously that Jen is, in fact, his celebrity sex pass. She’s amenable, and so Gail is left to make her way to Hollywood, bed Jon Hamm and square this inequality in their relationship. So begins a kinda-sorta Dorothy to Oz odyssey, complicated by an internecine plot by the diabolical Ludovica (Sabrina Impacciatore) to destabilize the global economic structure.
As crucial parts of Gail’s retinue, newish faces Miles Gutierrez-Riley and Ben Wang stand out, embellishing the comfortingly familiar cast of favorites with an au courant brand of quirk.
There can never be another Wet Hot (not even the two Netflix follow-ups), and I will reluctantly accept that, but it’s still hard not to see Wain-Marino projects through the lens of that masterwork. And Gail, with its loving embrace of outlandishness and naivete, links itself even more indelibly to its great ancestor than their intervening projects. So, though I enjoyed the experience, it may suffer in my estimation for its concurrent proximity and distance. It reminds me of an irreplaceable movie from the same creators and because it is not that movie, I may have overburdened it with the responsibility of changing my life, which it did not. R. 93M. STREAMING.
THE END OF OAK STREET. When my wife revealed, 18 hours before I was to see it, what I presumed to be the twist of David Robert Mitchell’s latest, I was nonplussed. Fortunately, that “twist” is actually the central premise, so no harm done whatsoever. That the high-concept set-up of the piece is not all it has going for it speaks to the abiding quality and excitement of The End of Oak Street (the title certainly doesn’t give anything away, nor will I do so here).
One late summer night, a pretty major swath of fairly idyllic-looking suburban Michigan is temporally transported. At the center of this seismic shift, Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan MacGregor) Platt, with their marital troubles very much intact, find themselves and their teenaged children (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) in a desperate struggle to survive.
The End of Oak Street comes after It Follows (2014), Mitchell’s breakout — about which I think I was unfairly skeptical — and Under the Silver Lake (2018) — which I still have yet to see — and demonstrates the writer-director as an even more capable interpreter of genre and builder of atmosphere than at least the former suggested. Transportive but firmly grounded, it is paced and shot with a combination of bravado and humility, and studded with enough surprises that I couldn’t help but smile. PG13. 100M. BROADWAY.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
NOW PLAYING
AMERICAN MARTYR: THE STANLEY ROTHER STORY. Martin Sheen narrates a documentary about the first American recognized by the Catholic Church as a martyr. NR. 123M. BROADWAY.
CASTLE IN THE SKY (1986). Ghibli Summer continues with a 40th anniversary showing of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated adventure. PG. 129M. BROADWAY.
THE END OF OAK STREET. A family’s home gets cosmically relocated to a whole different neighborhood they might not survive. PG13. 100M. BROADWAY.
HOUSE OF WORSHIP. Church singin’ with some 25 performers. BROADWAY.
INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER. A young mother (Amelia Eve) accidentally brings demons into the world of the living and I guess the rest of the movie is sending Stephen Miller back. PG13. 106M. BROADWAY.
THE MAGIC FARAWAY TREE. Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy play parents bonding with the kids through a leafy portal to other worlds. PG. 110M. BROADWAY.
MINIONS AND MONSTERS. More animated workplace adventure with the little yellow henchmen. PG. 90M. BROADWAY.
MUTINY. If you thought we were getting through this summer without Jason Statham shooting a harpoon gun, you were mistaken, mate. R. 95M. BROADWAY.
THE ODYSSEY. Matt Damon takes a boatload of Greeks on a 20-year Dunkin run in director Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic. R. 108M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
PAW PATROL: THE DINO MOVIE. The franchise takes a turn for the Jurassic. PG. 88M. BROADWAY.
SPA WEEKEND. Comedy about stressed friends (Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris and Leslie Mann) finally relaxing until their chaotic friend (Isla Fisher) shows up. R. 97M. BROADWAY.
SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY. Peter Parker (Tom Holland) faces his own evolution in a city where nobody remembers him. With Zendaya. PG13. 145M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. Things get weird between a young director (Hannah Einbinder) making a slasher sequel and the original “final girl” (Gillian Anderson). R 112M. BROADWAY.
TONY. Drama about the life-changing summer when the late chef, author and raconteur Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) was a 19-year-old kitchen grunt. R. 106M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in Reports from the Grand Jury.