I stared at Adele Lim‘s Joy Ride (aka Joy Fuck Club) like an Egyptian sphinx. I was honestly hoping to laugh but I didn’t. At all. I just fucking sat there…sorry. I seem to recall having the same reaction to the Hangover movies. I hate movies about people drinking shots. I really do.

Others in the audience laughed, however, so there’s that. High-pitched hyena laughter, I mean. And certain critics have called it funny. So blame me….it’s my fault that I didn’t so much as smirk or guffaw or even crack a smile.

Actually, that’s not true — I smirked at the sex scenes. Particularly an oral sex scene with two guys eating out Ashley Park‘s character at the same time, and I don’t mean one of them licking her anus while the other does the clitoris…I mean both of them chowing down side by side. That I laughed at.

And I did respect much of what I was watching. Joy Ride is not some sloppy-ass, improvisational bullshit anarchy comedy like…I don’t know, What’s New Pussycat or something. It’s a real movie with a sense of structure and three acts and an aspirational heart. It emotionally touches bottom during the last 20 or 25 minutes.

And I respected the decisive, highly sprung energy…the shallow but spritzy feel of it…the lively performances…Lim’s fast-paced, high-velocity direction…the screwballish, His Girl Friday-like script by Cherry Cheva (aka Chevapravatdumrong) and Teresa Hsiao. It’s really not bad.

It’s silly and shallow and formulaic but comedies like this are expected to dive into this kind of jaundiced fuckwad swimming pool.

I didn’t much care for Sabrina Wu‘s “Deadeye”, the obligatory trans-non-binary character with (not a pun) slightly dead eyes, but I pretty much loved the other three — Park’s “Audrey Sullivan”, a lawyer and an allegedly Chinese child of adoptive white parents who lives in White Hills, Washington (there has never been any town or village or real-estate district in the world called White Hills…a completely bullshit and thoroughly racist name of a cliched Anglo hamlet), Sherry Cola‘s “Lolo Chen”, and Stephanie Hsu‘s Kat.

And I really loved Daniel Dae Kim, who plays the husband of Audrey’s birth mother.

Much of Joy Ride feels inhabited by at least a semblance of recognizable human behavior. Not actual human behavior, mind, as it adheres to the rules of farce, but at least it tries to go there now and then. I respected that effort.

Don’t let the fact that I smirked at only one scene and sat stone-faced throughout the rest of it….don’t let that stop you from giving it a whirl.

The first two thirds to three-quarters of Joy Ride made me feel like my life is winding to a close and that perhaps I need to think about killing myself, but I gradually got past that. What matters, I think, is that it pays off during the final 20 or 25.

…before James Mangold and Timothee Chalamet finally start shooting the endlessly delayed A Complete Unknown or Going Electric or whatever they’re calling it now? Fish or cut bait, cowards.

…who was busted a few days ago for carving his own name and that of his girlfriend (“Ivan + Haley ‘23”) into a Roman Colisseum wall should face two (2) distinct punishments — one for defacing a priceless ancient monument and a second for professing ignorance about the age of the 2000-year-old amphitheater. The guy should definitely be jailed and slapped around.

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and written by Zach Baylin, Frank E. Flowers and Terence Winter, Bob Marley: One Love is a rise and fall of a superstar biopic. Green (King Richard) is an excellent director and Marley (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) is a fascinating subject, so why is Paramount sidestepping award season and opening it on 1.12.24?

Irritating Canadian director Xavier Dolan, 34, has announced that he’s quitting filmmaking.

El País has quoted him saying “I no longer have the desire or strength to commit myself to a project for two years that barely anyone sees…I put too much passion into it to have so many disappointments…it makes me wonder if my filmmaking is bad, and I know it’s not.”

HE reaction #1: Don’t be a quitter…keep at it, never say die, refine your game. HE reaction #2: What’s Dolan going to do, become a bartender or a travel guide? He could direct more Adele music videos until inspiration taps him in the shoulder. No respect for guys who throw in the towel. HE reaction #3: I’ve never really liked a Dolan film. The best that has happened (when I saw Mommy in 2014) is that I felt a certain respect or tolerance.

The French-speaking Dolan was born on 3.20.89. Last May another major-league, French-language film star quit the business — Adele Haenel, who is also 34 and was born one month earlier than Dolan.

Posted on 5.22.16: In a sharply phrased piece about Sunday’s Cannes Film Festival awards and particularly Xavier Dolan‘s It’s Only The End of the World, which won the festival’s Grand Prix (or second place) award, L.A. Times critic Justin Chang has let go Sam Peckinpah-style.

“Quebec’s Xavier Dolan, the 27-year-old world-cinema enfant terrible, pretty much horrified the press audience by inexplicably winning the runner-up Grand Prix for It’s Only the End of the World.

“In my 11 years of attending Cannes I cannot recall a worse jury decision than this one. A badly shot, shrilly performed and all-around excruciatingly misjudged dysfunctional-family torture session that felt far longer than its 97-minute running time, World was by far the least endurable film in competition (and that includes Sean Penn’s dreadful but dreadfully entertaining The Last Face).

“Far inferior to Mommmy, the director’s 2014 jury-prize winner, World failed to win over even Dolan’s many fans, and I have counted myself among them on more than one occasion.”

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The already much-celebrated Lily Gladstone performance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is rooted in the rudiments of woke representation. She plays the sadly fabled Molly Burkhart, but her arc is solely about being a victim of greed — she mostly just sits (or lies) there and seethes, glowers and casts daggers of suspicion.

Truth #1 is that Gladstone doesn’t really have much of a part. Not much in the way of emotional scope or specificity. Truth #2 is that her supporters will be loathe to admit this.

Native American tokenism (or, in an award-season context, ethnic novelty as she’d be the first Native American actor to seriously compete since Will Sampson) will see her through in the Best Supporting Actress category, agreed, but those who contend for a Best Actress Oscar are expected to qualify with some kind of rip-snortin’, full-bodied, go-for-the-gusto performance, and the Killers of the Flower Moon script simply doesn’t allow Gladstone to do that.

You just know it’s a smartypants box–office trade term that will stick like glue. (Credit to HE’s Daniel Zelter for spotting Barber’s article early.)

Could this possibly have something to do with…I don’t know, concerns about stuff being taught in schools that Average Joe & Jane parents don’t agree with? And other stuff like…I don’t know, maybe drag queen performances?

For a hinterland-focused Jim Caviezel movie like Sound of Freedom — a grassroots thing, not much mainstream media publicity — to come out on top on Tuesday, July 4th…this means something. Mira Sorvino and Bill Camp costar.

In Jesse Green’s 2009 New York profile of the late playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, Laurents briefly discusses Rope, the 1948 Alfred Hitchcock thriller. Laurents adapted Patrick Hamilton‘s 1929 play for the screen.

Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan, the Leopold and Loeb-like main characters who’ve strangled a young acquaintance, are gay, of course, and are respectively played by gay actors, John Dall and Farley Granger.

But Laurents tells Green that James Stewart‘s Rupert Cadell, an advocate of Nietzschean notions of selective superiority who inspired the strangling, was gay also, although Laurents’ hints to this effect were so subtle that Stewart probably didn’t realize what they amounted to.

I should be included. Before reading Green’s article last night I’d never even flirted with the idea of Cadell being “musical.”

HE to Sensible Centrist Multitudes: There are many excellent choices if you want to buy great ice cream or gelato. You now understand which brand not to buy. Fuck these guys and the horse they rode in on. Ben & Jerry’s need to be Bud Light-ed to death.

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Few critics have angered me more over the years than David Ehrlich, but when he’s right, he’s right:

“The frantic and extremely funny mid-film chase through the streets of central Rome, during which Hunt is handcuffed to the sexy pickpocket (franchise newcomer Hayley Atwell) who might be able to lead him to the MacGuffin. A jaw-dropping ‘how the fuck did they do that?’ mega-flex in an age when movies are seldom magical enough to beg that question, the city-wide jailbreak combines artfully destructive slapstick with the loudest car crashes you’ve ever heard to create the kind of cinematic euphoria that still can’t be faked or forged at home. VR headsets might allow rich people to enjoy IMAX-sized screens on their living room couches, but Dead Reckoning is a bone-shaking reminder that sound is the real secret weapon of the theatrical experience.

“Not since La Dolce Vita has a film more effectively transformed ancient Rome into a modern playground, a fitting touch for a blockbuster so desperate to squeeze a few new dollops of joy from the ruins that surround it.”

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