I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Akshay Tandon to talk about the new releases in theatres, including the live-action “Moana,” the sport comedy “Racewalkers” and the wacky “Wizard of Oz” homage “Gail Daughtery and the Celebrity Sex Pass.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to drink a Mai Tai. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the live-action “Moana,” the sport comedy “Racewalkers” and the wacky “Wizard of Oz” homage “Gail Daughtery and the Celebrity Sex Pass.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” Zoey Deutch plays a Midwestern hairdresser who travels to Hollywood in search of her “celebrity sex pass” after her fiancée hooks up with an a-lister.
CAST: Zoey Deutch, John Slattery, Ken Marino, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Ben Wang, Sabrina Impacciatore, Jon Hamm, Weird Al” Yankovic, Henry Winkler, Elizabeth Perkins. Directed by David Wain.
REVIEW: A Hollywood farce that mistakes sincerity and commitment-to-the-bit for humor, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” stretches its “Wizard of Oz” parody to the breaking point.
The idea of a celebrity hall pass is simple. An agreement between couples, it allows both partners to get a one-time “pass” to sleep with a specific celebrity without it counting as cheating.
It’s a simple and fun hypothetical unless it actually happens.
That’s the case in “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.” Small town Kansas woman Gail (Zoey Deutch) and her fiancé, Tom’s (Michael Cassidy) relationship is put into doubt when the unlikely happens, and Tom meets and has relations with his celebrity pass, Jennifer Aniston, who plays herself.
Gail decides she must “even the scales.”
“I had a celebrity free pass thing with my fiancé,” she says, “but he took it literally. So now I need to have sex with Jon Hamm to even up the score and save my relationship.”
On her quest for some “Hammertime,” Gail and BFF Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) travel to Los Angeles in what becomes a loose riff on “The Wizard of Oz,” complete with stand-ins for Toto, The Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow and, of course, Jon Hamm as The Wizard.
Along the way they’re joined aspiring talent agent Caleb (Ben Wang), a paparazzo (Ken Marino) whose lifelong dream is to get a candid snap of Jon Hamm, Hamm’s former “Mad Man” co-star John Slattery who plays a comedic version of himself as an out-of-work, down-on-his-luck actor whose texts to Hamm always go unanswered, and a group of assassins (Sabrina Impacciatore, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel).
“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” travels its own Yellow Brick Road in search of whimsy. It’s light and frothy, a nonsensical collection of scenes performed in a heightened, upbeat way, by a cast who energetically commits to the general ludicrous tone of the piece.
The consistent tone, however, when amplified, doesn’t have enough variance from scene to scene to hold interest.
That the cast are stymied by a script that leans into its absurdist style more than presenting genuinely funny moments blunts the film’s effectiveness.
The satire of celebrity culture and the chasm between Hollywood and the small-town Gail, representing Anytown USA, should have provided fertile ground but, time after time, the script, written by director David Wain and co-star Ken Marino, goes for silly over sentiment or any kind of satire with real bite. The result is a film that wastes a hall pass.
SYNOPSIS: In “G20,” a new action thriller starring Oscar and Emmy winner Viola Davis, and now streaming on Prime Video, terrorists take over the G20 Summit in Cape Town, South Africa. American President Danielle Sutton evades capture and uses her military training to defend the captured world leaders and her family. “If you want to survive,” she says, “you’ll follow me.”
CAST: Viola Davis, Anthony Anderson, Marsai Martin, Ramón Rodríguez, Antony Starr, Douglas Hodge, Elizabeth Marvel, Sabrina Impacciatore, and Clark Gregg. Directed by Patricia Riggen.
REVIEW: It comes as no surprise that Artificial Intelligence is the weapon of choice for the “G20” baddies. Their evil plan to use AI to create Deep Fake videos of world leaders plays on Hollywood’s fear of the disruptive technology, which is odd because the movie, with its clichés and throwbacks to movies like “Air Force One,” feels like it could have been written by AI. It wasn’t, there are four “screenplay by” credits (Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Noah Miller and Logan Miller), but it certainly feels like the script originated with a prompt on ChatGPT.
Take the snarling bad guys for instance.
Little more than a list of modern grievances come to “life” they are bonded by a belief in a litany of fringe conspiracy theories and tote high caliber guns which they don’t know how to use (more on that later). Led by Rutledge (Antony Starr), they’re standard issue new world order villains straight out of central casting who use violence and AI to stage a global coup and spout meme-worthy sayings about “rebelling against world leaders who strip away the rights of their citizens.”
As President Danielle Sutton, Viola Davis delivers a standard issue action movie heroine. She can throw fists and, like so many action stars before her, is able to run through a hail of bullets unharmed. For some reason, the evildoers in movies like this shoot like their gun barrels are bent at a ninety-degree angle while her aim is true. Her character is all pluck, equally comfortable using her wits as she is pressing a hulking bad guy’s face on a hot grill.
Amid the chaos are her precocious teen kids, Serena and Demetrius (Marsai Martin and Christopher Farrar) who watch their mom kill the bad guys and joke, “Did you know she could do that all the time? Lucky we only got grounded.”
“G20” is a parade of cliches that leads up at an unlikely twist and a logic defying climax that only plays out in the way that it does to provide another opportunity for some showy action theatrics. By the time the end credits roll it’s clear that AI isn’t the only threat facing Hollywood. Unoriginality is.
