July Movies Part 2: Joy Ride & Mission: Impossible 7

Do you just want to have a fun time at the movie theater? Like a crazy good, delightful time? Then these next two movies will provide exactly what you seek.

Joy Ride: Written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao and directed by Adele Lim, this is a perfect movie about a group of Chinese* (I won't spoil, but that asterisk is there for a reason) women who head to China for a work trip/girl's trip and all manner of shenanigans ensue. 

Ashley Park plays Audrey, who was adopted by white American parents as a baby and lived in Washington in a town called White Hills that wasn't exactly a beacon of diversity. As a child she befriended another Chinese girl, Lolo (Sherry Cola), and the two of them continue to be best friends into adulthood, though their paths have significantly diverged. Audrey is a successful lawyer, while Lolo lives in Audrey's guesthouse and is a struggling artist who likes to make sex-positive artwork. Audrey is  straight-laced and proper, Lolo is decidedly not. But Lolo was raised by Chinese parents and is fluent in Mandarin, so when Audrey has to go to China for work to woo a big client, she brings Lolo along to serve as her translator. Lolo's Kpop-obsessed cousin "Deadeye" (Sabrina Wu), joins them as well, and when they get to China, they team up with Audrey's college roommate, Kat (Stephanie Hsu) who is a successful actress on a Chinese soap opera.

After the business stuff takes a turn for the worse, they pivot to trying to find Audrey's birth mother, which leads to a road trip that has many lewd and hilarious pitstops. It's an incredible R-rated rampage, but at the same time, it is also an incredible story about identity and friendship. Audrey's struggles with racism and always being told she's too Asian for white people and not Asian enough for Asian folk was very relatable as a third culture kid. This is a movie with so much heart, even as you bust a gut laughing at all the inanity that takes place on screen. This is a phenomenal cast, all doing phenomenal work, and I am ready for them to give me Joy Ride 2: Electric Boogaloo. 

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One: Phew, did you make your way through that title? Well, just wait till you watch the glorious two and a half hour extravaganza that is this movie, the seventh entry into the Mission: Impossible franchise. The plot revolves around a dangerous artificial intelligence called The Entity that has stealthily found its way into the nooks and crannies of top secret intelligence software across the planet and now seems poised to wreak havoc on the world. I wish I could tell you more, but come on, we all know the plot is completely besides the point in these movies. I'm just here to watch Tom Cruise run.

Oh man. There's so much running. And epic car chases through Rome (which definitely gave me Fast X flashbacks - Hollywood has really destroyed Rome this year!), an insane fight in a narrow and claustrophobic alley in Venice (I found myself aghast at how they even managed to film that), a finale on a train where you will literally be on the edge of your seat for twenty minutes, and then be like, oh my god, it's still going! And of course, the famous motorcycle jump right off a mountain. Tom Cruise filmed that stunt on Day 1, so that if he got terribly injured, or, you know, died, at least they wouldn't waste all their money shooting the rest of the movie. Which is some foolhardy commitment to the craft. 

And while the action is incredible and wondrous, I was also very pleased at how funny this film was. Writers Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie (also the director!) have injected way more comic relief into this movie, particularly when Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames show up as the bantering sidekicks, and there are also plenty of meta asides about how the Impossible Mission Force (yes, IMF, no, not the World Bank one) is such a ridiculous organisation. This movie contains a hearty serving of absolutely everything you wanted from a Mission: Impossible movie, and at the end, I clapped my hands in glee. Part Two, I'm ready.