Taylor Sheridan may be the best screenwriter in Hollywood right now but Seth Rogen is the worst film producer in Hollywood today. Rogen cannot create a film outside of sex, drugs, and nauseating progressive lectures.
If Seth Rogen is producing a film, you can guarantee that you’re in for the most insufferable film of the year. The last time Rogen produced a film it was 2019’s ‘Good Boys’, a film where a group of Elementary age kids were doing drugs, swearing like adults, and swinging on sex swings for the laughs of Hollywood producers who shouldn’t be around children.
This time instead of a bunch of minors, we get a group of 30-year-old female Asian burnouts. Thanks to Hollywood’s diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates that have swept the industry into giving jobs to unqualified filmmakers.
A film written by the no-name writers of “Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens”, ‘Joyride’ is a convoluted story about childhood best friends Audrey and Lolo. One girl who was raised by adopted white parents and another girl who was adopted by Asian parents from California.
The film sees no irony whatsoever in the fact that the Asian daughter who was raised by white parents, has done much better in life while the one adopted by Asian parents now makes abstract art out of penises for a living.
Audrey takes her burnout best friend to China for a business trip that could lead her firm to get a big deal. They meet up with a friend of theirs Kat (Stephanie Hsu) who’s an actress in the Chinese region, and another friend of theirs called Dead Eye who may or may not be non-binary.
The film pretends to have a thinly veiled plot of an Asian woman going to China to meet her birth mother, but the movie’s focus is unfiltered degeneracy and progressive soapboxing.
‘Joyride’ is the perfect example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood. This is a movie that fails on every conceivable metric that we use to judge Cinema. Let’s start with the aspect of comedy. Comedy is a genre that Hollywood has struggled to produce quality in the last couple of decades because in 2023 is the fact that we live in a society where progressives try to redefine what is funny.
A world that tells people like Dave Chappelle that his jokes are no longer funny because they don’t target the right groups will turn around and create one of the most unfunny movies of the 21st century and tell you that it’s hilarious because of the race and gender of the people involved.
In this movie, the setup of a joke is that a random white kid says something obscenely racist to a young Asian girl, and then in return, the Asian girl attacks the racist kid, and the crowd laugh. That’s how the writers believe the joke is supposed to play out.
However, there’s nothing funny about an act of racism and it’s not comedy when a character violently beats that person up. Another setup for a joke is when the Chinese actress who is dating a Christian boyfriend lies about her sexual past to him while her friends bring up every depraved thing she has ever done with other men, and this is presented as comedy.
Hollywood has no idea what a protagonist is. They craft characters based on a person in their inner circle and then prop them up to the audience expecting that everyone is going to love this person as much as they do.
This level of self-inserting in storytelling has killed the audience’s ability to invest in a story because they can’t invest with the people in the story. The industry believes representation matters more than characters and stories.
Because this movie promotes sex positivity, LGBTQ, feminism, white privilege, and representation; in the minds of Hollywood this is a good film. If a film has an Asian female majority cast that includes members of the LGBTQ that flaunt their sexual immorality as empowerment, on that metric and that metric alone, the film is viewed as successful.
If you’ve seen one Seth Rogen and comedy you’ve seen them all because they’re all the same. As someone who has grown fond of South Korean Cinema over the last several years, this movie is an absolute embarrassment to the Asian community. Most people from South Korea or China who watch a film like this would hate Americans because they believe that this is how their people are viewed in the United States.
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s ‘Joyride’ may very well be the worst movie I’ve seen in the last 10 years. A film that manages to take the lowest expectations possible and somehow surpass them just when you think that Seth Rogen could not bury the bar any further.
