Are We Having Fun Yet?

Is the world ready for an absurdist comic riff on The Wizard of Oz in which Zoey Deutch plays a nice young woman from Kansas who arrives in a strange new land to bang Jon Hamm after her fiancé sleeps with a famous actor who may or may not represent the Wicked Witch of the East?

I mean, I think it is. I certainly was, at any rate. And director David Wain and co-writer Ken Marino, two members of the legendary comic troupe The State, are here to give it to us: Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.

So there’s this sweet-natured and only slightly naïve hairstylist, Gail Daughtry. Her fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) has just cashed in his hall pass, and she’s conflicted about it. To buy some time to think, Gail tags along with her best pal and co-worker Otto (Miles Guttierez-Riley) to a hair conference in Los Angeles, where a psychic (Kerri Kenney-Silver) informs her that the only way to make peace with the hall-pass thing is to use her own, and have sex with the aforementioned star of Mad Men. Assembling a collection of pals – a kind but hapless talent agent (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Marino) and the coward John Slattery (John Slattery), Gail and Otto set off down the Hollywood Walk of Fame to find the man who can get her where she needs to go.

The Witch of the West? That’s the imperious Ludovica (The Paper’s Sabrina Impacciatore), whose distracted henchmen (Joe Lo Truglio, Matthew Jayson Cwern, Mather Zickel) accidentally swapped suitcases with Gail at LAX, leaving her in possession with something Ludovica wants very badly. But honestly, it’s not that important. Gail banging Jon Hamm is the goal here.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is entirely of a piece with Wain’s other projects – your Wet Hot American Summers, your Role Models, your Wanderlusts, your They Came Togethers. It commits to its bit, and then it commits to deconstructing that bit. He hates cliches and hack setups, but he loves to set them up so he can turn them inside out.

Wain delights in the comedy of denial; he loves it when characters refuse to follow through on the dumb stuff the movie sets up for them. And he loves digressions and short-fused retorts and general meta-foolishness, like having Fred Melamed as an omniscient letter carrier who grudgingly explains things to both us and the people around him. (There is also the inevitable celebrity cameo, and it’s pretty good, though not as good as Michael Shannon turning up swinging a sword around in They Came Together.)

A quarter-century after Wet Hot American Summer combined comedy and anti-comedy to create whatever it is that Wain does, he’s still doing it, which probably means anyone who doesn’t love Wain’s films is unlikely to find Gail Daughtry as funny as I did. What can I say? They have my sympathies.

For what it’s worth, Jackass Best and Last is chaotic and subversive in an entirely different way. The fifth feature spun out of the MTV series in which ringmaster Johnny Knoxville and his ever-increasing gang of clowns put themselves in harm’s way – gleefully! – is, once again, 90-odd minutes of stunts, pranks and dares, broken up with little blackout sketches and the odd thoughtful moment. We even get to see one of the very first Jackass pranks, shot for the TV show and so catastrophic that it never made it to air.

But they’ve been doing this since the late ’90s, and time is finally catching up with Knoxville and his dumb little buddies. Their bodies can’t take the abuse any longer. As Steve-O observed in Jackass Forever, “Concussions aren’t great. But as long as you have ’em before you’re 50, it’s cool. And Knoxville is 49, so it’s good!” Thus, Best and Last takes the form of a celebration, mixing favorite clips of past installments with some new material that finds alternate ways to abuse and torture Team Jackass. They do lip injections and escape rooms. And, God help them, they play Twister after chugging colonoscopy laxative.

After a screening of Jackass Number Two in 2006, my colleague Jason Anderson observed that these movies were the truest execution of the Dogme 95 manifesto. With Best and Last, Knoxville and series director Jeff Tremaine pivot to a riff on Michael Apted’s Up series, folding the past into the present and showing us the ways in which the host and his “dumb little buddies” have pulverized one another into a fine paste in order to reach a new level of support and compassion.

There’s a sweetness to that, a beautiful redefinition of bro culture as something honest and encouraging. These hammerheads have watched one another be electrocuted, catapulted, smashed, flipped and firecrackered – it’s a thing – and carried off on spinal boards. Their scars have scars, and do not ask what they’ve done to their butts. (The entire Jackass project might well be an elaborate study of the premise that butt jokes are never not funny.) And after a few years, they stopped razzing each other and started cheering. These people love each other, and root for each new stunt to go off well, and it’s really nice to see.

Also, a lot of this stuff is really funny, with the qualifier that we laugh so we do not barf. Although as we see more than once, barfing is not only allowed on the Jackass set but actively encouraged. Give the people what they want, I suppose.

The only extra on Paramount’s Jackass: Best and Last Blu-ray is a reel of deleted and extended scenes, running about 20 minutes; nothing essential is missing, but it’s clear the newer players had a lot more to do during the shoot than just stand around cheering the veterans on. I can’t blame Tremaine and his editors for shaping the movie around the lifers, though; watching them grow up, such as they have, is absolutely the point.

Sony’s Gail Daughtry disc offers nothing beyond the theatrical trailer, which is disappointing since Wain has recorded audio commentaries for all of his other features. (I poked around to see if one was hidden as some sort of Easter egg, but no dice.) Maybe he’s saving it for a Criterion edition. Stranger things have happened, right?

Speaking of stranger things, let’s talk about One Night Only, aka “the Sex Purge movie.”

Speaking of stranger things, let’s talk about One Night Only, aka “the Sex Purge movie” because of its high-concept premise. And it is a doozy.

Three years ago, we’re told, the US government passed a “mandate” declaring premarital sex illegal. Every citizen over 18 is stamped with a biological marker that indicates their status: Red is unwed, green is hitched and good to go. As a compromise, one night each year the reds turn green and everybody can bang their hearts out for precisely twelve hours. It’s known as The Night, because I guess The Merge was deemed actionable at some point.

When the trailer for One Night Only first came out, I just assumed Will Gluck was messing with us: Surely he’d made a stealth Purge spoof where the central couple is so hot they inspire a city to overthrow the government, right? One Night Only is not that – not at all – but it’s still so weird and artificial that you keep waiting for the other authoritarian shoe to drop. It never does. And then you find yourself wondering whether Will Gluck has seen Starship Troopers, because this is the kind of movie Paul Verhoeven’s dead-eyed patriots would have been raised on.

I mean, it is profoundly weird to watch Callum Turner lumber around an idealized New York City looking like no one’s told him what to do with his hands. I’ve seen this guy be interesting in stuff! He’s great in Rose of Nevada! But as the co-lead in a romantic comedy, he’s a dud. Or maybe he’s just so good that he disappears completely into the role of Owen, a total stiff whose girlfriend tells him she’s going to sleep with someone else on Purge Night because he’s just too boring and conventional. Neither the character nor the guy playing him will do anything to disprove that for the rest of the picture.

Meanwhile, Monica Barbaro – who earned an Oscar nomination for acting circles around Timothée Chalamet in that Bob Dylan movie, you’ll remember – puts everything she has into making sense of her contrived character, the hot girl who doesn’t know she’s hot. Allie is a great singer, but is too scared to perform for an audience so she works in commercials! She’s insanely smart – she can do math and chemistry problems on the fly – but she’s also a daydreamer! She got ghosted a year ago and hasn’t dated since, which her bestie Jacinta (King Princess) helpfully tells everyone when they go to a bar looking for a hookup!

Turner may come off as an inanimate object here, but Barbaro has enough charisma and presence for the both of them, which would be great if the film kept Owen and Allie together … but it doesn’t. In the supplements, Gluck talks about One Night Only as a film that refuses to follow conventional rom-com beats, with a structure that deflates its couple’s meet-cute and sends them on different journeys, with different potential suitors, only to keep crashing back into one another over the course of the Night. And if the casting worked, that probably would be okay; god knows it’s worked before. Part of the fun of such movies is watching perfectly matched characters figure out what the audience already knows, and earning their happy ending. Hell, Gluck just did that with his Glen Powell-Sydney Sweeney comedy Anyone but You! But this time, the central joke just seems to be that Allie and Owen have terrible judgment, constantly ending up in humiliating situations with awful dates. Which can also be part of the fun, except that all of these scenes are so dull that our minds keep wandering back to the rules of the game.

For instance, “protection” is the night’s sole restriction, in order to set up a running gag that finds both Allie and Owen running around looking for the last condom in the West Village – and Gluck hits that button often enough that we have time to wonder what’s happened to the other birth-control methods. Were the birth-control pill and the morning-after pill outlawed three years ago as well? Why isn’t anyone angry about this? Another weird thing is the overbearing heterosexuality of the situation, which is sort of waved off by Allie’s roommate Arya (Quintessa Swindell) quipping that queer people have been “working around” straight rules forever. But how, exactly? And what’s with the biomarker thing? Are we to assume, in a world that’s supposed to be one degree off from our own, that Americans were all fine with the government literally branding every adult citizen? That shit wouldn’t even fly in Canada.

I did like the score by Este Haim and Christopher Stacey, though. It’s a weird synth pan-pipes thing that evokes ’80s movies without leaning too hard on nostalgia. That was cool.

The supplements on Universal’s 4K/Blu-ray combo of One Night Only may only amount to 20 minutes of material but the team at No Roads Productions do manage to answer the most important question: Yes, it was very cold during the shoot. Both Barbaro and Turner can be seen spend most of the behind-the-scenes footage swaddled in a heavy robe or a puffy parka.

As for the second most important question, yes, Barbaro sings her own songs live and even does her own piano playing. In the fleet making-of featurette “Feeling Sparks,” both Gluck and producer Jacqueline Monetta attest to the difficulty of doing that; Turner, by contrast, went to pizzeria boot camp to learn to flip a pie, as we see in the two-minute “Pizza 101 with Callum Turner.” There’s also a guide to the various cameo players (“The Plus Ones”) and a little celebration of the director’s run-and-gun approach to the production (“No Glucks Given”), which pivots to a pretty interesting look at the world-building. Production designer Scott Kuzio and art director Marci Mudd turn up to discuss the subtle and not-so-subtle set dressing that supports the story’s “alternative reality” … even as it raises questions the movie can’t support. Still, when future cineastes study One Night Only – and trust me, they will – they’ll find an excellent record of its construction.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass and Jackass: Best and Last are now available on Blu-ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment, respectively. One Night Only is available Tuesday, October 20^th in a 4K/BD combo from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. A BD-only edition is also available.

Up next: Pennies from Heaven and Little Shop of Horrors are still in the pipeline, as are Frankenhooker and The Pope’s Exorcist. It’s tricky juggling all of these while also cramming in the October flood of theatrical releases for my weekly What’s Worth Watching column. Speaking of which, did you miss my reviews of You Can See Everything, Musk and Sense and Sensibility last week? Upgrade to the paid tier and catch up in the archives!