john early

Irony, Sincerity, Hilarity, Clarity

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Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry.  Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.

To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.

Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.

Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Eternity (2025)

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Do movies ever premiere on airplanes? I’ve occasionally seen ads from airlines proudly declaring that they are the exclusive in-flight entertainment home for a recent theatrical release, as if there’s a customer base out there willing to book a flight on Delta instead of Southwest specifically so they can watch Predator: Badlands on the back of a headrest. Has that kind of competitive bidding on fresh in-flight content created enough of a market to support direct-to-headrest film productions, though? Could it possibly be lucrative for a traditional Hollywood movie to skip theaters entirely and instead exclusively premiere as in-flight entertainment? I ask this having just watched the supernatural romcom Eternity, which drifted quietly through American multiplexes without much fanfare but will soon make for a major crowd-pleaser as an in-flight movie selection. It’s cute, harmless, weightless, and just overall pleasant enough to make a long fight go down smooth, already evaporating from you brain by the time you walk to baggage claim.

Miles Teller & Elizabeth Olsen star as an elderly suburban couple who die within a week of each other, rematerializing as their younger, happier selves in a Limbo-like eternity. Their decades of functional but unexciting marriage are threatened to be undermined by the return intrusion of Olsen’s first husband: a noble war hero hunk played by Callum Turner, who died tragically young. Now, she has a short span of time to choose between which of her two deceased beaus to spend her eternity with, essentially choosing between bright romantic spark and long-term marital comfort. Despite all of the supernatural shenanigans that distract from the competition between her two love interests, it’s a fairly straightforward romcom dynamic, which the movie openly acknowledges by having one of the two competing husbands rush to the train station to stop her from leaving at the climax. There isn’t even much tension in guessing which of the two men she’ll ultimately choose, not if you keep in mind that hot people don’t write movies; they just star in them. Of course the more nebbish Teller is inevitably going to be selected as Olsen’s prize; no hunky Turners were invited to the writers’ room.

If Eternity has any major flaws that keep it from rising above standard-issue romcom fluff, it’s all in the casting. Miles Teller simply isn’t enough of a certified uggo to contrast Callum Turner, whose main selling point appears to be that he is tall. We’re told by the script that Turner is as handsome as Montgomery Clift, but we can clearly see that is not the case, so he plays the stand-in idea of Montgomery Clift instead of the real deal. Olsen is also a kind of symbolic stand-in, playing the torn-between-two-hunks heroine with just enough blank-slate blandness that anyone watching from home (or, ideally, from the plane) can imagine themselves in her place without being distracted by the distinguishing specifics of her character. The only signs of life among the main cast are in the comic-relief pair of “Afterlife Coordinators” played by Jon Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who are employed by the unseen corporate gods of Limbo to talk this trio of lost souls into one afterlife or another as if they’re hurriedly selling timeshares out of a brochure. They’re funny, but not too funny. Nothing about the movie is too anything, presumably by design.

A24 is reportedly looking to upscale their in-studio productions to reach a wider market, recently trying their hands at the big-budget war thriller with Warfare, the movie-star sports drama with The Smashing Machine, and the period-piece Oscar player with Marty Supreme, with other mainstream audience ploys to come. I have to wonder how much the greenlighting of Eternity was influenced by that boardroom conversation. Was its marketing potential as a surefire in-flight entertainment favorite part of the justification behind that decision? The movie largely feels like it’s set in the liminal corporate spaces of an airport lounge & bar, with Early & Randolph’s afterlife realtors costumed as retro flight attendants. My only other theory on the initial pitch for the film’s commercial appeal is that it would make a great backdoor sitcom pilot, since Olsen gets to briefly taste-test different afterlives with her potential forever-husbands as she debates which eternity to settle into. There’s some brief magical twee whimsy in her climactic sprint between those worlds as she defies the laws of Limbo to reunite with her true love that recalls previous work from hipster auteurs in the A24 mold: Michel Gondry, Julio Torres, Girl Asleep‘s Rosemary Myers, etc. There just isn’t enough budget to fully flesh out the idea, though, so it ends up being a proof-of-concept sketch for a potential Good Place-style supernatural sitcom, coming soon to an Apple TV console near you. In the meantime, enjoy this low-stakes, low-emotions romcom set at the edges of those infinite-possibility worlds, for now boiled down to simple-concept settings: mountains, beach, train station, etc. And if you can, go ahead and pair it with a complementary ginger ale and a single-serving pack of pretzels — the way it was clearly meant to be seen.

-Brandon Ledet