Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Writer and director Adele Lim is gracefully shaking off the haters and still managing to make us laugh in the process.
Her new comedy Joy Ride, which is making its way to theaters on Friday (July 7), has received rave reviews from primetime entertainment news outlets and was deemed a “raunch-com rollercoaster.”
However, one Twitter movie critic deemed the movie “embarrassing” and “incredibly unpleasant,” saying that it “targets white people” and “objectifies men,” per Entertainment Weekly. Nonetheless, Lim would not let one ridiculous review rain on her parade.
Lim retweeted the Twitter troll, writing, “Imma need ‘Objectifies men, targets white people’ on a tshirt.”
The film showcases four Asian-American leads, three of which are female and one nonbinary: Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, and Sabrina Wu, as they travel across China in search of Park’s character, Audrey’s, biological mother, with adventures and chaos galore. Park told Vanity Fair that she connected with Audrey, particularly in that she “was first starting to reflect on being in an industry and in a world that was very much built by and for white people or people who didn’t look like me.”
She continued, “I really connect to all of the negotiation that Audrey goes through to find a way to be genuinely ambitious and excited to be in this world that she really had no part in at first. And also just the fact that she really—it wasn’t that she was trying to ever deny being Asian, but she just really had never faced that part of her identity and was fine with it. I think that it really mirrored that time in my life too.”
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Is ‘Joy Ride’ Streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video?
Lim, who wrote Crazy Rich Asians and Raya and the Last Dragon, has sought after more Asian representation in her films and in Hollywood at large, and has faced gender and racial discrimination in Hollywood herself, most notably turning down the opportunity to co-write the Crazy Rich Asians sequel due to being offered a mere fraction of the pay being offered to her co-writer, Peter Chiarelli, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Lim spoke about her decision to go public with this decision, explaining, “Nobody wants to be the face of pay equity, but I’m glad it came out. I got lots of good feedback and realized it wasn’t just in my head.”
Lim noted that with the push for representation in Joy Ride, the “stakes are high.”
“It’s the first time that we are putting four Asian faces in the middle of an R-rated comedy,” Lim said. “If you fuck up — if a project with a queer lead, a Black lead or an Asian lead fails — the industry’s knee-jerk reaction is to blame it on the otherness. You don’t want that fear to paralyze you and keep you from creating from a place of joy.”
You can catch Joy Ride in theaters on Friday, July 7.