Entertainment
Review: In 'Dune: Prophecy,' women lead and vie for power
Even before Denis Villeneuve’s big-screen, two-part 2021 film introduced it to moviegoers who had missed David Lynch’s enjoyably bonkers 1984 adaptation, Frank Herbert’s “Dune” had become exploited IP.
Herbert completed six novels before his death in 1986; 17 more have been written by his son Brian and Kevin Anderson. But it was the Villeneuve film that launched the brand into the franchise-mad universe of 21st century show business, where any well-performing work of sci-fi or fantasy — and “Dune” is both — is practically required to breed a network of sequels spinoffs and merchandise (Lego Atreides Royal Ornithopter, $164.99; Funko Pop! Paul Atreides, $11.99).
If you’re not familiar with the films or the books, the new HBO series, premiering Sunday, will not do you the favor of supplying much context. It does take place 10,000 years earlier, yet in most respects, life in this far-flung network of planets seems to have changed little in 100 centuries. On either side of that temporal divide, we’re in an essentially feudal society of royal houses and hereditary emperors, clothed in the medieval trappings that have ruled science-fiction fantasy from “Flash Gordon” to “Star Wars” and beyond.
Spice, a super-duper special element that has mind-altering, mind-enhancing powers and is the key to space travel, is already the most valued substance in the universe and is at the bottom of what drives the story’s antagonisms, skulduggery and power plays. It’s “Game of Thrones,” with spaceships and sandworms.
The Sisterhood, later known as the Bene Gesserit in the “Dune” universe.
(Attila Szvacsek / HBO)
The main, and most interesting characters, not to say the star power, in this space opera are Valya Harkonnen, played by Emily Watson, and her sister Tula, played by Olivia Williams. The Harkonnens (the bad guys in “Dune,” or maybe just the worse guys) are, in this era, a disgraced house, banished to a far off, snowbound planet because great-grandpa deserted in the war against the “thinking machines.” (I do appreciate the anti-AI stance.)
In what counts as the present day — there is an earlier timeline in which young Valya is played by Jessica Barden and Tula by Emma Canning — the sisters have lifted themselves to positions of influence by way of the newish Sisterhood, later the Bene Gesserit; they’re nuns, basically, who have learned to bend minds. Such supernatural activity is accompanied by extreme close-ups of an eye, occasioning thoughts of Sauron, and sometimes an unintelligible voice that occasions thoughts of the Beastie Boys’ ”Intergalactic.”
Valya has become the Mother Superior, Tula a Reverend Mother. The two don’t agree on everything, or many things. Valya, a by-any-means-necessary, push-ahead sort, is continuing the late founder’s plan to use a “genetic archive” to implement a long-term plan to breed “better leaders” — which is to say, “leaders we can control.” (The name for this is eugenics, and it is a bad thing that imagines it’s a good one.) Tula, the more sensitive sister, reckons the human cost of their multiple machinations.
The little sisters of the Sisterhood — the novices are an appealing, heterogeneous lot when they get a little screen time — are being trained as “truthsayers,” provided to the heads of different houses to act as human lie detectors. There’s also, per the title, a prophecy, a deathbed vision by Valya’s predecessor of an apocalyptic “red dust” storm that will wipe out … something. The order, or maybe everything? Prophesies are, of course, endemic to these sorts of stories, but they are a poor basis for governance and rarely do anyone any good. Just ask Oedipus, or Macbeth.
Mark Strong plays Emperor Javicco Corrino, ruler of the “known universe,” who is busy completing the arranged marriage of his daughter, Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) to a 9-year-old princeling from another house, which will earn him a dowry of rocket ships he can use to destroy the Fremen. (Ynez is also, confusingly, going off to train with the Sisterhood.) The Fremen, whose home planet is Arrakis, where Spice is mined, bedevil the miners and the troops that protect them and, as the indigenous population battling imperial usurpers, are the faction you should root for. I can’t say whether they’ll make an actual appearance in “Prophecy” — only four episodes of six were made available to review — but they’ll still be fighting this fight 10,000 years hence, when it becomes the main business of the original “Dune,” and you can catch them there.
Emperess Natalya (Jodhi May) and Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) in “Dune: Prophecy.”
(Attila Szvacsek / HBO)
Attaching himself to Corrino is Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), the sole and miraculous survivor from a campaign on Arrakis — the Iraq war of “Dune” — who has gained special powers that make him dangerous to cross, like Billy Mumy sending people to the cornfield in that “Twilight Zone” episode. He’s one of those sci-fi characters whose normal Earthman name distinguishes him as a plebe among patricians. Which does not mean he’s not a horrible, fanatical person. Other male characters include Ynez’s half-brother Constantine (Josh Heuston), with whom she does drugs on the night before her wedding; the Harkonnens’ cousin Harrow (Edward Davis), who has some whale fur he’d like to sell you; and Corrino’s “swordmaster” Keiran Atreidas (Chris Mason), who fences and flirts with Ynez. Ten thousand years later, Paul Atreides will become the messianic hero of “Dune.”
Sisterhood is powerful. In a nice change from recent Earth history, women are the series’ defining force, before and behind the camera. Diane Ademu-John developed the series; Alison Schapker is its showrunner, Anna Foerster the primary director. Its many female characters — so many, good, bad and mostly in between — not only demonstrate power, but, so you don’t miss the point, talk about it. Along with the Harkonnen sisters and their young trainees, who are not shy about expressing an opinion, there are Ynez, who is no pushover, and her mother, Empress Natalya (Jodhi May), who tells her emperor husband, “There was a time when you took my views seriously and the Imperium was stronger for it.” She seems ready to make herself heard again.
The TV series is made in the image of the Villeneuve film, with downward adjustments for budget and such. In the episodes I’ve seen, the action takes place largely indoors — it’s less “Lawrence of Arrakis” than it is, you know, a premium cable show. Like the movie, whose commercial and critical success suggests people approve, it’s pokey and self-serious and almost entirely devoid of humor. There are a few lower-depths, bar-set sequences to change the mood, and some HBO-brand sex scenes that feel imported from a different known universe altogether. But as they involve characters talking about revolution — once again, it’s the Rebels vs. the Empire — they don’t exactly lighten it.
As is the case with many films in which classically trained actors are called upon to elevate genre material, “Prophecy” comes across as simultaneously grand and silly — which, after all, didn’t stop “Star Wars” from taking over the world. (Probably, it helped.). Watson and Williams, respectively aggressive and deceptively passive, attack their roles with commitment. It isn’t Shakespeare, but they play it as if it were.
Comedy is a matter of taste and preference — it’s a deeply personal thing. Which makes it hard for a critic to give a blanket assessment of a specific kind of comedy, especially if it didn’t work for them, but clearly worked for others (the laughter or lack thereof is the indication). “It’s not funny,” the critic says, “well I had fun,” someone else can reply, and then we’re at an impasse.
Which is the dilemma one finds oneself in with “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” a very strange and shaggy Hollywood satire of sorts from David Wain and The State crew, still riding the goodwill of “Wet Hot American Summer” after all these years. If only this were as funny.
“Gail Daughtry” lives in the same world as that iconic summer camp spoof, as well as Wain’s 2014 rom-com parody, “They Came Together,” in that he’s playing with genre convention and expectation, taking well-known norms to the goofiest extremes. But those films hewed more closely to their respective genres, while “Gail Daughtry” is totally scattered, combining crime and spy movie tropes with a fish-out-of-water comedy and a Hollywood send-up. It has far too many ideas for its own good, and yet no ideas that are good enough to sustain this bizarre curio of a comedy.
What’s ironic is that one of the problems driving this wacky plot forward is the characters have to come up with a movie idea to pitch to star Jon Hamm (playing himself of course), leading them to do some pretty inane and shockingly violent things. It’s almost as if Wain and co-writer and co-star Ken Marino had no idea for a movie, then baked their search for an idea into their script, and then turned it into a madcap adventure about a woman on a quest to have sex with Jon Hamm. What an ouroboros!
OK, about the sex quest. Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is a chipper hairdresser from Kansas born without the part of the brain that recognizes sarcasm or irony. She’s a cheerful, Pollyanna-ish naïf whose literal-mindedness is almost as extreme as Amelia Bedelia. Her childhood sweetheart and fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) is the same. She tells him about the concept of the “celebrity sex pass” as a joke, and he promptly boinks Jennifer Aniston at local book reading.
(Nitpicky aside: why didn’t they use the common nomenclature “hall pass”? Is it copyrighted? “Celebrity sex pass” is clunky and sounds like an off-brand version of the well-known slang.)
That infidelity crisis is how Gail ends up in Los Angeles determined to bang Hamm, collecting a motley crew of similarly clueless helpers along the way. There’s her best friend Otto (Miles Guttierez-Riley), her salon bestie; Caleb (Ben Wang), an overly ambitious intern at Creative Artists Agency; Vince (Marino), a screenwriter turned paparazzo with a heart of gold; and John Slattery, as John Slattery, down on his luck. An accidental briefcase swap has a pair of thugs on their tail, in a forgettable and underdeveloped B-plot.
With a parade of celebrity cameos and collaborators in bit parts, “Gail Daughtry” at times feels like an excuse for Wain and co. to make something at home with all of their friends. Fair enough, it’s great to see all these people employed, but what about what we’re watching? Behold, the Los Angeles of the middle-aged working comedian: the CAA lobby, the Chateau Marmont, Griffith Park, etc. And the plot is as half-baked as the pitch they present to Hamm.
What’s actually interesting about this comedy is the distinct streak of despair and even resentment that reveals itself at the climax, a feeling of helplessness and uselessness. Everyone’s been striving to make it in this crazy town: the intern, the actor, the paparazzo. But not even Jon Hamm can help them get a movie made; even he feels inherently powerless. There’s an unexplored anxiety vibrating there that feels the most thematically fruitful, about what it means, some 25 years after bursting onto the scene with a generation-defining comedy, about maintaining the work, the drive, a sense of purpose, after years of strikes, and in the face of a constricting industry. Do they still have it? Is the dream still alive?
Maybe that’s why Wain and Marino need to invent a dreamer stand-in with Gail, a guileless eternal optimist who knows nothing of the craven Los Angeles and accepts everything at face value (though she is filled with a scary bit of rage too). She might behave like she has a head injury, but she’s going to achieve her goal, dammit. “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” might not be as funny as “Wet Hot American Summer” (for this critic), but reframed, it serves as a fascinating status update on life in La La Land for this troupe.
‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for sexual content, violence/bloody images and language)
Running time: 1:33
How to watch: In theaters July 10
Entertainment
Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay on sex life as a single mom scores her a seven-figure book deal
Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay detailing her sex life as a single mom just landed her a seven-figure book deal.
According to Page Six, the model’s essay in the Cut had publishers champing at the bit in a 12-way bidding war that culminated in the hefty pay day. Editor Helen Rouner at Penguin Press — who also edited Lauren Christensen’s memoir “Firstborn” and Michael W. Clune’s novel “Pan” — reportedly landed the deal.
Penguin Press did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment Friday.
Publishers Marketplace announced the forthcoming memoir, describing it as “an examination of modern female identity through the story of the author’s own efforts as a newly single mother in New York City to discover what really constitutes a good life for a woman.”
The essay, which dropped a month ago and quickly broke the internet, drops the veil on EmRata’s sexual adventures (or maybe misadventures) since she and her former husband, Sebastian Bear-McClard, split in 2022.
“It was a violent transition into a new reality of screaming baby on my aching tit and ring on my swollen finger,” Ratajkowski writes of new motherhood. “And then, in a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed. Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex. Less than a year later, we separated.”
In the missive, the model interrogates her sexuality — is she a Madonna or a whore? — while untangling bigger questions around gender, power and self-actualization. If Carrie Bradshaw wrote about “Sex and the City,” then Ratajkowski is writing about sex, the city and single motherhood. And naturally, her fleeting paramours have vague monikers: “Vegan Graffiti Artist,” “Spanish Gen-Zer” and “Son of a Billionaire.”
“And then there was the Elder Millennial: obsessed with dental hygiene, psychedelics, and dirty talk,” she writes. “He had approached the subject coyly at first, like it was something he was kind of embarrassed about — the way a kid will test you to see if you’ll talk to them about their dorky obsession of the moment. Do you like Godzilla? What about Star Wars?”
Would-be sleuths with Ratajkowski’s essay and a gossip rag handy will have their work cut out for them.
This will be Ratajkowski’s second book. The first, “My Body,” dropped in 2021 and was a bestselling collection of essays exploring gender, power dynamics, sexuality and the commodification of female beauty in the modeling and entertainment industries.
Ratajkowski’s foray into the spotlight came more than a decade ago when Robin Thicke’s controversial “Blurred Lines” music video made the model an overnight star. She was cast in David Fincher’s adaptation of “Gone Girl,” which hit theaters the following year, and catapulted to top fashion runways — Marc Jacobs, Versace, Victoria’s Secret and Dolce & Gabbana, to name a few. She she’s been romantically linked to Harry Styles, Eric Andre, Shaboozey, Brad Pitt and Pete Davidson, among others.
In 2023, she moonlighted as the host of the “High Low With EmRata” podcast, where she interviewed sex workers, investigated ethical nonmonogamy and pondered the etymology of the word “toxic.” The same year, she told The Times that she was coming into herself post-divorce, “Being able to assert what I want — that feels like it just started: My life as a creator and not as a muse.”
Wainheads will be delighted to see his alums in cameos: Kerri Kenney-Silver, Michael Ian Black, Thomas Lennon, and supporting roles for Zickel and Truglio. A large portion of the cast are his homies. But with Deutch, Gutierrez-Riley, Wang, Slattery, Impacciatore, and yes, Hamm, it’s as if they’re being inducted into a new mad family. Wain and Marino are basically catching Pokémon and hoping they can hold onto the roster (by that logic, yes, Paul Rudd is a legendary Pokémon). The film is anchored by Zoey — everything everywhere all this summer with Voicemails From Isabelle to Minions & Monsters — Deutch in the Dorothy Gale role, exuding a high level of perkiness consistent with the character’s can-do, wide-eyed, midwestern charm and heart.
A major standout, Ben Wang finally gets to show off his comedic abilities, portraying a self-assured, quick-witted agent who makes me laugh every time he reveals his sheltered upbringing in snappy whines at every inconvenience. Sabrina Impacciatore, who has proven to be a comedic juggernaut in The Paper, is having so much fun hamming it up as the mob boss-esque wicked witch counterpart, torturing her henchmen and deliciously chewing up the scenery whenever onscreen. I don’t think they use her to the height of her comedic prowess, but she’s a delight nonetheless. John Slattery is the film’s comedic MVP. The way the writers use his over-the-top character for comedy is downright hilarious every time. They use him as either a punchline or a force of nature, and he’s great. This movie is like Mad Men propaganda, and by God, it works. As someone who’s never seen it, Gail allowed me a better appreciation for Slattery and Hamm.
Man, we don’t deserve Jon Hamm. This is the second time I’ve seen him play a silly, fictionalized version of himself this year (the other being the SXSW crowd-pleasing rom-com Wishful Thinking, which Gail distributor Sony Pictures Classics acquired), and he also voice-acted in his comedic Mayor Jerry role in Hoppers. Maybe working with Wain in 2007’s The Ten was the canon event, but I consider his weird little sex scene with Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids his awakening. Since then, I’ve only seen him as unserious, and it’s delightful. Oz-like in appearance, he’s funny and befitting the film’s overall light, joyful nature.
LAST STATEMENT
Ultimately, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a campy, delightful romp that succeeds as both a distinctive Hollywood‑centric riff and a Wizard of Oz reimagining, retaining a loving, twisted, demented charm. It’s a weird description, but it’s so high‑spirited and light‑hearted despite being strangely ultraviolent. It might as well be a live‑action episode of Smiling Friends (RIP), yet it’s everything the theatrical market needs today. Ten years ago, this would’ve been a studio production rather than an indie Sundance acquisition, but thank God it exists for the big screen. More absurdist Gail Daughtrys for cinemas (not streaming), please, because this is the most fun to be had in a theater all summer, if not the year thus far.
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