MOVIE REVIEW: Joy Ride (2023)
I don’t normally do many comedies, but I certainly do films starring Asian actors (not just Hong Kong martial arts, J-Horror, or K-Drama). Even though Joy Ride was produced with the help of stoner-comedy master Seth Rogen and it has his fingerprints all over it, the movie is not about White boys having fantastic Superbad-style adventures in the world, it’s about Asian women and their adventures…which don’t seem that different (which is good in its own way). There’s the tempering elements of cultural confusion and alienation, with overseas adoption as a focal story point to make it very different.
Our protagonists and best-friends Audrey (Ashley Park, Girls 5 Eva, All American Bikini Car Wash) and Lolo (Sherry Cola, “Good Trouble” [TV-Hulu], “Claws” [TV-Hulu]) are different in their town: they’re the only two Asian children in school in the predominantly Caucasian town of White Hills. They gravitated to each other, as Lolo is the outspoken daughter of Chinese immigrants and Audrey is the adopted Chinese daughter of two White parents. While Audrey has everything she needs to become a successful lawyer, she still has no idea about the identity of her Chinese birth mother. A chance to find her becomes possible when her law firm gives her an opportunity to make partner in the firm and establish the Los Angeles office: travel to China to close a deal with a Mandarin-speaking client. Audrey doesn’t know how to speak Mandarin well, so she brings Lolo — an artist that focuses on “body positive” subject matter (read: she makes images of genitalia and sexually explicit situations) — as a translator.
When they get to China, the two pick up Lolo’s socially-awkward non-binary cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu, writer for “Doogie Kamealoha, M.D.” [TV-Disney+]), who is a big K-pop fan. They also travel to a TV set where they meet up with Audrey’s best friend from college Kat (Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings, “American Born Chinese” [TV-Disney+]). Kat’s doing very well for herself, becoming an actress on Chinese TV and being engaged to her hunky celibate (??) co-star. All four get on the train to a far-away Chinese province to find Audrey’s mom, but everything starts to go wrong once they encounter Jess (Meredith Hager, Ingrid Goes West, Urge [2016], Palm Springs [2020]), a drug smuggler that gets them all kicked off the train as an alternative to going to jail for drug possession AND steals their luggage (with their money and passports). But it all balances out as the foursome fall back on the kindness of the Chinese people, confront their myriad issues, and produce some hijinks to remember.
The most notable thing about this film is not that it’s a chiefly-female Asian production — written by three Asian women, directed by an Asian woman, starring four Asian women of different shapes and sexual orientations— but how this movie’s full representation of modern Asian existence in a positive light was not allowed to shine. The advertising budget was practically non-existent from the Point Grey/Lionsgate Pictures partnership, and the movie’s advertising was buried beneath the hype for Oppenheimer (a movie about the scientist behind the first atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and Barbie (a movie about a plastic fetish object of idealized White female beauty); this isn’t an exhaustive list of factors, and there’s something in the factors listed but I’m not sure what. In any case, the movie was funny and makes a good case for why “WAP” by Cardi B feat. Megan Thee Stallion must be preserved by the Library of Congress.
CHOICE CUTS <SPOILERS AHEAD>:
- If the title Joy Ride was to be a play on 1993’s The Joy Luck Club, I got the reference. However, the title could have been workshopped a LOT more: it was originally titled “The Joy Fuck Club” (that is not a joke) and its final title can easily be mistaken for the 2001 thriller when searching on streaming services.
- Subtle line drops let you know Audrey does not feel accepted: the “Mulan-themed birthday party” thrown by her workplace colleagues in an attempt to be seen as allies to minorities and women speaks volumes.
- “White Hills” as a name for a place with predominantly White people is very on the nose.
- There’s a shoutout to 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians when our protagonists travel through the airport.
- There’s a lot of observational humor that transcends race and culture, brought out into stark relief when applied to Asian people: the nationalist and ethnocentric racism between different countries, being overfed and isolated but criticized on your weight and appearance, and so on.
- “My pussy is literally the devil” is now added to the list of things I never thought anyone would say.
- FIVE WORDS TO RUIN YOUR NIGHT: thousand-year-old-egg shot.
- Ashley Park’s physical training from her previous productions has toned her body, and the results really stands out when she puts on Lolo’s grandma’s dress to meet her mother — you can’t miss it.
- The switch in locations was out of left field (made possible by assumptions about ethnicity) and resolving Audrey’s story was the cherry-flavored rollercoaster on top of an amazing movie, and it’s worth the price of admission alone.
- The “Brownie Tuesday” K-pop stuff is wild. My experience is with K-pop groups like BLACKPINK, BTS, Wonder Girls and Sistar so I guess it’s accurate enough as a parody.
- Ronny Chieng (M3GAN, “The Daily Show” [TV-Comedy Central]), Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost” [TV-ABC]), Lori Tan Chinn (“Nora from Queens” [TV-Comedy Central]), Paul Cheng (Night at the Museum, Peter Pan & Wendy), and basketball star Baron Davis all make amazing cameos. I half expected Al Leong, Amy Tan, John Cho, Ken Jeong, or Jennifer Tilly to show up, just to see if they could fit them in!
