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Posted in: Lionsgate, Movies, Review | Tagged: Adele Lim, Ashley Park, Asian-American comedy, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Joy Ride, Sabrina wu, satire, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, Teresa Hsiao, The Joy Fuck Club
Joy Ride is the Raunchy Asian-American Female Comedy You Need
Joy Ride is a gleefully, uncompromisingly sweary, raunchy, sexy Asian-American road trip that's the funniest Hollywood comedy of the year.
The mildest part of Joy Ride is its title. Director Adele Lim and her co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong (a Thai name if you're wondering) and Teresa Hsiao's original title was the movie was The Joy Fuck Club, which is a pun on "The Joy Luck Club" but also a more accurate summation of the journey the four wayward Asian-American heroines go through on their way to self-discovery and the realization of the Power of Friendship, the latter being the lesson of every Hollywood comedy these days.
Audrey Sullivan (Ashley Park) and Lolo Chen (Sherry Cola) have been lifelong best friends since childhood, partly because they were the only Asian kids in their town. Audrey was adopted by loving white parents and is culturally and temperamentally American, speaking no Chinese and knowing virtually nothing about where she came from. Lolo is uncompromisingly and unapologetically herself, equally proud of her Chinese heritage and American bolshiness. She grows up into an artist creating sex-positive art all about penises and vaginas but on the verge of slackerdom as success still eludes her. On the other hand, Audrey has become the stereotypical Model Minority A-type personality as a high-flying lawyer heading for a promotion if she could close a major deal in China. She's way too eager to please her liberal guilt-ridden boss, who's woke to the point of paranoia, played by Veep's Timothy Simons in a pitch-perfect portrait of a guy trying so hard not to be racist that he comes off as racist. Lolo comes along as her translator and talks her into tracking down her birth mother, roping in her college best friend Kat (Stephanie Hsu), now a TV star in China, and Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), Lolo's deadpan cousin who's obsessed with K-pop. Things go disastrously, hilariously wrong, and their attempts to put things right only make things even more disastrous. All four leads are hysterically funny, even with Park as the straight man; Sherry Cola and Stephanie Hsu carry the machine-gun pacing of comic timing, and Hsu might have the funniest facial expressions in show business now, with Wu's deadpan providing an equally funny contrast.
Joy Ride is a Masterclass in Hilarious Insider Satire
The trailers somewhat misrepresent Joy Ride. It's more than just a raucous sex comedy with Asian-American women. It's an ode to female friendship along with insider satirical commentary about outsiderness, the pressures of being a "model minority," internalized racism, and Asian-on-Asian racism. It pokes, punches, and kicks viciously at the Western stereotype of Asian women as passive and submissive by showing them as anything but. It has funny and loving touches unique to Asian and Asian-American culture, such as the characters eating Cheetos and potato chips with chopsticks, which is funny and totally practical – it keeps the hands clean for handling other things. Joy Ride's comedy and satire are all from an insider's perspective, and any Asian would feel the shock and delight of recognition at its insights. Like all Asian-American stories, this movie is about Asian-Americans' anxiety about being looked down upon by those in Asia as not being "Asian enough," but that anxiety is universal for anyone who ever felt social pressure from their family, Asian or not. And it addresses all those issues with gleeful comedy that punches up, down, and every direction it comes across.
Minor Quibbles
If there's a false note in Joy Ride, it's the notion of Stephanie Hsu's Kat and her co-star boyfriend Clarence (Desmond Chiam) as big TV stars in China. In our reality, she would not be a star in China – their entire demeanors are too American to appeal to Mainland Chinese people. Celebrity behaviour in China is extremely codified and reserved, and Kat and Clarence's personalities, all the way down to their body language, are not the type that the Chinese public likes. The notion of them being celibate Christians is more an American notion than one the Chinese ever begin to care about. That's a strange note to ring since most of China is not Christian and sometimes even frowns upon religion in general. If anyone out of this group was going to be a Christian, it should be Audrey, an Asian baby adopted by white American parents, so it's odd that it isn't touched upon. Kat and Clarence are more like Asian-American's vague fantasies of what Chinese TV stars are like without having seen enough Chinese TV or their celebrity culture – and frankly, they have no excuse not to have done that research because there is at least fifteen years' worth of Chinese TV dramas and celebrity events free to stream on YouTube with English subtitles.
The other quibble we have is that what happens to Kat in the latter half of the movie would not only have ruined her career and reputation in China but would have landed her in prison! (Also, a friend who knows tattoos has remarked that what's depicted in the movie is not how tattoos work at all, but hey, it's a fantasy for comic effect). There could have been more farcical chaos milked from Kat being unable to get back to China lest she get arrested there and having to scramble to get back to the U.S. It's too bad that comedy goldmine was ignored entirely.
Still the Funniest American Comedy of the Year
These quibbles aside, Joy Ride is the funniest Hollywood comedy of the year so far; it achieves the kinds of what-did-I-just-see farcical insanity that No Hard Feelings doesn't fully hit. The comedy insanity hits its peak at the midpoint with the mishap over the drugs that leads to the most raucous, raunchy, extended sex sequence that mainstream studios usually try very hard to nix, which is why this movie is unrated. The funniest part of Joy Ride, for us, is that this movie would be totally banned in China for the drugs, the sex jokes, the major LGBTQ characters, the sex – hell, it wasn't even shot in China because no way would the authorities have permitted that based on the screenplay alone. They faked as much of Vancouver to look like China and Asia as possible, which is funny. The funniest part of Joy Ride to us is that it would horrify the Chinese censors if the studio tried to submit it for release there. We can already list all the Asian countries this movie that will either be banned or cut to ribbons in. Joy Ride might be the greatest expression of American free speech you will find this year.
The best movies are made by people who really care about it, who are making it like they think they may not get the chance to do this again. There's a sense that Adele Lim, her co-writers, and the cast are all going for broke here, good taste and politeness be damned, and for that and its sheer comic energy alone, makes Joy Ride the movie you want to see for a good laugh and a tug at the heartstrings.
Joy Ride
7/10
A gleefully, viciously raunchy, sweary, sexy Asian-American comedy about female friendship that tackles Asian-American identity issues that's the funniest Hollywood comedy of the year with a surprisingly heart-tugging twist at the end but whose insider satire hits bullseye at every point.
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