Bob's Cinema Diary: July 7, 2023 -- 'Joy Ride' and 'Biosphere'

 Joy Ride

     Who should we place at the head of the class when it comes to raunchy  movies? 

     Maybe you’re thinking white American men. But if you see Joy Ride, an ultra-bawdy comedy starring four Asia women, you might want to reconsider. 

     Director Adele Lim plays raunch for laughs when four women (Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu, and Stephanie Hsu) travel to China. 

    The ostensible reason for the trip: Park’s Audrey, an up-and-coming lawyer, needs to close a deal in Beijing in order to land a partnership that will take her from New York to LA. 

     Once Lim dips her toes into ribald waters, she's pretty much obligated to try to outdo previous big-screen efforts. She often does. 

      Lim makes her mark with a major sight gag that's best discovered in a theater but which certainly fulfills the obligation to raise the movie's  off-color quotient, delivering the joke with in-your-face panache. 

     The movie also delves (skims is more like it ) into issues of identity. The women are attuned to stereotypes that have been used to diminish Asian Americans and know how to play them back while enriching them with sarcasm. 

     Sex almost always occupies center stage, some of it involving Audrey and a couple of members of a Chinese professional basketball team. Hsu's Kat works overtime to conceal an active sexual past from her strait-laced religious fiancé (Desmond Chaim). 

    I can’t say I found Joy Ride consistently hilarious, but Lim hits the high points square on, and her movie can't be faulted for lack of crowd-pleasing boldness. Joy Ride makes no bones about establishing its place in the world of aggressively impolite comedy.

Biosphere

    Billy (Mark Duplass) once was president of the United States. His best friend Ray (Sterling K. Brown) was his trusted science adviser. Some form of apocalypse has pushed the two men into a self-sustaining sphere that Ray designed. Billy and Ray seem to be the last two people on Earth. Biosphere doesn't want for ambition as it tries to tackle themes related toi gender, male bonding, and the unexplained doomsday that forced these two characters into claustrophobic isolation. Pay attention to the fish farm Ray has created; it holds the key to the survival of the two men and perhaps the entire human species. A twist involving rapid evolution taxes belief but serves as a way for director Mel Eslyn to explore issues revolving around manhood and its meanings. Bottom line for me: I found this two-hander a bit dull and a bit strained in the way it deals with issues involving gender. In the end, the screenplay by Duplass and Eslyn tries to endorse the idea that science and rational thinking sometimes must give way to the unexplainable. Magic would be another word for it, but the movie feels short of that elusive ingredient. It’s an odd mix: High stakes in a low-wattage drama.

Two short takes before a long weekend

 Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul

Writer/director Adamma Ebo tackles the hypocrisies of a Black megachurch in Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, a muddled satire that seems unsure how hard it wants to hit. I have no idea what Ebo believes when it comes to religion but her movie can confound as it tries to blend comic and serious elements. Decked out in some of the year's most flamboyant costumes, a commanding Regina Hall plays the First Lady of the Atlanta megachurch where her husband (Sterling K. Brown) presides. Early on, we learn that Brown's pastor Lee-Curtis Childs has disgraced himself. He's busy warding off suits by former male congregants who have claimed sexual abuse. Hall's Trinitie Childs stands by her man, even though she knows he has foundered on the rocks of what the church regards as a forbidden temptation. Hall holds the movie together as Brown conveys the fallen pastor's attempts to regain his pulpit privileges, which include an immaculately groomed mansion, a sleek Bugatti, and celebrity status. A rival couple (Nicole Beharie and Conphidance) prepares to lure the Childs's disillusioned flock to a new venue. Hall and Beharie give the movie its backbone, even though its broadly comic gestures and moments of high drama can't compensate for an already depleted mock-doc approach. The movie, which includes Trinitie's donning of white face for a weirdly misguided roadside promotional effort, can't resolve what feels like uncertainty about how sharp a satiric knife to wield.

The Good Boss 

Javier Bardem's Julio Blanco runs a company that manufactures scales. Julio claims to care about his employees, insisting that they've become members of an extended family. That’s true if you happen to be part of a family that gives you a trinket and a hug as it pushes out the door. Alternately smarmy and exasperated, Julio deals with a cascading series of problems on the eve of a visit from a team of judges who will decide whether the company receives a coveted award for its achievements. Julio wants to win, but layoffs -- notably of a protesting former employee (Oscar de la Fuente), marital problems of an important manager (Manolo Solo), and Julio's dalliance with a slyly seductive intern (Almudena Amor) --  push him toward extremes. Otherwise, director Fernando Leon de Aranoa, who also wrote the screenplay, sketches in upbeat strokes that allow Bardem to build a wry performance around Julio's well-practiced duplicity. Thanks to Bardem and a fine complementary cast, The Good Boss amuses, even though it takes a darkly jolting turn as the 10-day period before the factory's inspection draws to a close. I wouldn't take The Good Boss as a definitive critique of capitalist hypocrisy. Still, as an enjoyable comedy and a showcase for Bardem, it can be as diverting as it needs to be.

A revenge saga that fails to kill

In a more reasonable world, there would be a national contest to determine whether anyone can find a way to care about the plot of The Rhythm Section, a senseless thriller about a woman who sets out to avenge the death of her family.

Blake Lively portrays Stephanie Patrick, a promising young woman who abandons her work at Oxford when she loses her parents and siblings in a plane crash. More than grief-stricken, Stephanie loses her moral bearings, sinking into a life of prostitution and heroin use.

As for Stephanie's family, they're not only killed in a plane crash, they're rendered lifeless in flashbacks that director Reed Morano uses to remind us of the familial bliss that Stephanie has lost.

Not to worry. A reporter (Keith Proctor) arrives at Stephanie's seedy digs to tell her that this was no normal plane crash, but one engineered by an Islamic terrorist.

What's a girl to do? In a sub-par movie such as Rhythm Section, she decides to take revenge, seeking out a former M16 agent (Jude Law) to help her learn the assassin's trade.

Killing is easy, Law's character says. The hard part? Living with it.

Adapted from a novel by Mark Burnell, who also wrote the screenplay, the movie plays as if it consists of little more than story beats cobbled together without much concern for either credibility or involvement.

Murky motivations substitute for intrigue when Stephanie goes to work for Marc Serra (Sterling K. Brown), an ex-CIA agent who wants her to hunt down the people involved in the bombing.

Stranded by a lifeless screenplay, Law had the good sense to hide behind a beard and look as grim as possible. Lively approaches a physical role by inserting streams of grunting realism into her many bruising fights.

Lest any base is left untouched, the movie travels to London, Tangier and Marseilles in search of excitement, including (what else?) a frenzied car chase.

Perhaps to add faux complexity, the screenplay finds Stephanie hemming and hawing about how much she wants to hone her skills. Is there any form of killing she won't try?

Efforts at nuance aside, Rhythm Section fails as either a satisfying helping of revenge or a drama about a female character kicking down the doors of a formerly male preserve. Does a franchise loom? That may have been the hope, but -- for my money -- Rhythm Section offers no reason we should want to see any of these characters again.

Emotions break in inventive ‘Waves’

Director Trey Edward Shults plunges us into a family drama in which style surpasses story..

From its opening shots, it's clear that Waves -- a movie about the difficulties faced by a middle-class black family -- refuses to be ordinary. Director Trey Edward Shults creates an illusion in which it feels as if the movie's images are enveloping us. A simple shot of a girl riding a bicycle pushes us into a world that surrounds us and begins to work its ways on us, jarring us out of indifference.

Shults (Krisha) takes a dare with his movie. First, he bets that a white director can capture black life in South Florida without dipping into the treacherous waters of cultural appropriation. Second, he divides his movie into halves -- focusing first on the family's son, a championship wrestler played by Kelvin Harrison Jr. In the second half, Shults draws attention to Emily (Taylor Russell), the family's daughter.

The pace and concerns of the movie's two halves are radically opposed. Initially, Shults barrels his way through the story of Harrison's Tyler, a high-school wrestler whose future looks so promising, we can't help but think that the rug will be pulled out from under him. We wait for tragedy and it eventually arrives with shocking force.

The second half of the movie deals with how Tyler's sister adjusts after the devastations of the first half. The movie proceeds to draw a slightly different picture of the family's father (Sterling K. Brown), the owner of a construction company who pushes his son hard in the first half and who softens with his daughter in the movie's final chapter. We also gain new insight into the family's mother (Renee Elise Goldsberry).

Shults keeps the movie's emotional life close to the surface as he pushes into the teen world Tyler occupies. The first indication that Tyler may be headed for trouble occurs when he injures his shoulder. He doesn't tell his hard-driving father. He begins swiping pain pills that his father uses for a bum knee.

Tyler's father insists that his son perform: "We can't afford the luxury of being average," he says. "We have to work 10 times as hard as others."

It's one of the ways in which race becomes part of the movie's fabric, a realization that ordinary striving isn’t good enough for black achievers. Over-drive becomes a necessity.

Somewhat predictably, the kid who couldn't possibly fail becomes mired in drugs and alcohol. He also breaks up with his girlfriend (Alexa Demie) when he learns that she's pregnant. She refuses to get an abortion. Tyler begins to see his golden future circling a drain.

In the film's second half, Emily meets a boy (Lucas Hedges) who brings her out of her shell. I'm not sure the relationship really computes, but it forces Emily to extend herself, to begin to see beyond the borders of the world in which she was raised.

Hedges' Luke has father problems of his own and the script (unwisely, I think) branches out to include them.

Shults knows how to italicize the emotions in a scene and as a visual stylist, he immerses us in whatever location his camera finds.

I know people who question whether a white director should have made this movie, even one that brims with cinematic invention. A shot in which the camera revolves around a couple in a moving car is dizzying, as is much of the rest of the movie.

The two leads -- Harrison Jr. and Russell -- totally commit to Shults' approach, but I can't say that I totally bought Shults’s movie. When you step back from it and consider the story, Waves looks an awful lot like a conventional melodrama. I leave it to others to judge whether Shults' grasp of a black milieu is credible. He was smart to set his story in an integrated high school environment and that helps him.

Still, I wondered whether Shults wasn't guilty of piling woe on his characters.

Heaven forbid Tyler should have admired his father and had sense enough not to get his girlfriend pregnant. Suppose he had gone to college followed by medical school — all the time negotiating the tensions of being black and successful in a country that hasn’t fully faced its racist past, much less its present.

And what if Emily’s foray out of her grief and confusion arrived when she met a young black man who reached out to her? Or maybe a black female classmate?

But, hey, I’m just thinking out loud about a movie that I found visually exciting, disorienting and a bit troubling — all at the same time. Let me put it another way: I was caught up in the movie but when I reflected back on it, I thought more about Shults' vision than I did about the characters. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Thurgood Marshall, young attorney

Not a bio-pic, Marshall concentrates on a single, racially charged case.

Chadwick Boseman has made a specialty out of playing historical figures. He began with Jackie Robinson in 42 (2013), followed with James Brown in Get On Up (2014), and now tries his hand at Thurgood Marshall in Marshall.

A cautionary note: Marshall isn't really a bio-pic about the man who became the country's first African-American Supreme Court Justice. Rather than taking a sweeping look at Marshall's amazing life and career, the movie focuses on a single case that took place in the early 1940s when Marshall worked as the NAACP's only lawyer.

Law books in tow, Marshall traveled the country defending African Americans whom the NAACP believed to be innocent, men who were on trial only because of their race.

Directed by Reginald Hudlin and written by civil rights attorney Michael Koskoff with his son Jacob, Marshall deals with a racially tainted judicial system -- not in the Jim Crow South but in Bridgeport, Conn.

The case in point involves sex. An African-American limo driver (Sterling K. Brown) is accused of having raped and attempted to murder his employer's socialite wife (Kate Hudson).

As an out-of-town lawyer dispatched by the NAACP, Marshall needs a local attorney to act as the "official" counsel for the defendant. Enter Josh Gad as Sam Friedman, an insurance lawyer who's suddenly thrust into the limelight in a case for which he's ill-prepared.

The trial judge (James Cromwell) rules that only Friedman can speak during the trail. The 33-year-old Marshall acts as Friedman's coach and strategist, often scrawling notes as he sits next to the silent defendant. Friedman never before has argued a criminal case.

Hudlin relies heavily on the evolving relationship between Marshall and Friedman to supplement the judicial proceedings. Self-assured, brilliant and even a bit arrogant, Marshall always seems to know exactly what he's doing as he represents those accused of crimes, knowing that every move he makes also subjects the NAACP to possible scorn.

Friedman slowly comes to share Marshall's convictions, initially fearing that association with a racially explosive case -- which he's more or less dragged into -- will ruin his business and tarnish his reputation.

The movie eventually takes the familiar form of a courtroom drama, which Hudlin handles in a straightforward fashion that would be right at home on a TV series; he interrupts the proceedings with recreations of the accounts of those who offer key testimony, notably Hudson's Mrs. Strubing and Brown's Joseph Spell, two people with widely divergent versions of what really happened.

Hudlin seasons the movie with snippets from Marshall's non-courtroom life. He travels so much that he spends only limited amounts of time his wife (Keesha Sharp). The couple desperately wants to have a child. In what amounts to dramatic name dropping, Marshall meets with poet Langston Hughes (Jussie Smollett) and novelist Zora Neale Hurston (Rozonda "Chili" Thomas) in a Harlem night club.

Boseman, who'll next star in the Marvel Comics adventure Black Panther, brings steady conviction and sly humor to the role of Marshall. Although his character functions as the lead attorney for the defendant, Gad mostly defers to Boseman. Gad plays a middle-class Jew who slowly sees the civil rights light.

The writers may have felt that the case -- which involves race relations and sex -- would be entirely compelling, but Marshall sometimes seems bound by period-piece trappings and routine genre tropes that make the movie feel less exceptional than its title character might lead you to expect.

Still, Marshall's story -- even part of it -- remains a worthy subject: The influence of race on American criminal justice remains a hot-button issue and Marshall understands that the way some cases unfold has more to do with white perceptions, particularly about black men having sex with white women, than with facts, a condition that's still very much a part of our national tragedy.