Tag: Sherry Cola

Freakier Friday (2025) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick synopsis: Two decades after an identity crisis, Anna’s blended family faces new challenges. Tess and Anna discover their past may be repeating with the next generation.

I know I’ve seen the 2003 version of Freaky Friday, but my main memory of it is that it had a Halo Friendlies song in it, guitar-focused female-vocal pop punk is my jam. I remember the basic plot, and the two leads, but that’s pretty much it. Added to that, I have a feeling that “straight male in his late 30s” is not the target audience for this. So I was prepared for my feelings towards this movie to be “it’s okay” at best, a solid 5/10. Thoroughly okay, but not for me.

Yup, that’s wrong, this film is good. Really good. It’s smart, funny, and genuinely heartwarming. It does a good job of catching newcomers up to speed with what happened in the first movie, without repeating itself so much that it bores fans who can remember what happened. I recognised enough “hey, it’s a reference” moments that I get the feeling fans of the 2003 version will get more out of it than those who haven’t watched it. I don’t know why I was surprised; it’s directed by Nisha Ganatra, who also directed Late Night, which was one of my favourite films of 2019. She knows how to do comedy, plus has a talent for getting the best out of actors, both established (Emma Thompson in Late Night, Curtis in this) and new.

It’s not said enough, but Jamie Lee Curtis is incredible. She NAILS her performance here. Body swap movies can be difficult for performers, as you need to behave in such a way that the audience never forgets the premise; they need to remember, “Okay, that’s so-and-so in that body”. There’s not a single moment where Curtis slips up. Lohan? She’s good, but there are a few moments where its easier to forget than it should be that she’s been bodyswapped. Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons fare slightly better, but that’s mainly because they’re given more to do physically.

The supporting cast also does their job. Even those only in a few scenes (Vanessa Bayer, X Mayo) give such strong performances that you wouldn’t object to them coming back in a sequel. I want to give particular recognition to Sherry Cola and Santina Muha for only being in one scene each, but being incredibly memorable, especially Muha as I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen her in anything, and her performance was so good in this that my brain automatically cast her in the book I’m currently reading.

There aren’t many “laugh uproariously” moments, but you’d need a heart of stone to not be charmed and amused by many of the moments here. I have a few quibbles with the script, the main one being the opening. The opening is fine, it does its job well, and I have no issues with it on its own. But there’s a montage of Anna and Eric’s relationship developing and growing that would have been PERFECT for the opening credits. With that in mind, it’s difficult to not see some moments as a bit superfluous. I’m not asking for all of it to be cut, but you could easily get it down to 5-10 minutes and THEN have the relationship play out. There are other moments where you could poke holes in the logic or storytelling. But, to be honest, you don’t really want to. It’s such a lovable film that doing that would feel weirdly cruel.

Not amazingly fantastically brilliant, but very good. Although “Lindsey Lohan tries to stop a father marrying someone she doesn’t approve of”? You sneaked a Parent Trap sequel past us, didn’t you?

Joy Ride (2023) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn Review, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Four friends travel to China (well, one was already there) to help Audrey land a business deal. Sexually explicit hilarity ensues

Adele Lin probably has the best record for screenwriting; Crazy Rich Asians, Raya and The Last Dragon, and now Joy Ride. All incredibly written films and all three of them are unapologetically Asian. That may not seem like a big deal, but the aforementioned Crazy Rich Asians was the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority Asian cast in a modern setting since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club. That’s 25 years with a large audience being ignored by mainstream Hollywood. I don’t really have a point to this, I just wanted to mention The Joy Luck Club so I can segue naturally into the fact that this film was originally (apparently) going to be called The Joy Fuck Club, and I find that funny. Instead, it’s called Joy Ride, which is okay as a title, but is going to be confusing in my archives because I’ve already reviewed a film called that.

I really enjoyed this. It’s got pretty much everything I want in a film; great jokes, emotional depth, good characters, and a condom of cocaine exploding in someone’s ass. This is probably the best outright comedy I’ve seen in a long time, causing some of the loudest laughs I’ve heard in a cinema for a long time. It’s not just the laughs though; it brings the emotion when it’s needed. It has a lot to say about cultural identity and that when you have a foot in two separate cultures how it can make you feel like you don’t truly belong in either of them. It’s effectively pulled off, not just because of the writing, but also due to the talent of the lead performer Ashley Park. She has tremendous chemistry with co-star Sherry Cola, to the point where it’s very easy to believe that they’ve been friends for years. The other two leads: Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu are also a delight to watch, but the whole thing lives or dies on the relationship between Park and Cola. Stephanie Hsu is good, but she’s not given quite as much to do as she was in Everything Everywhere All At Once, but “not quite as good as she was in one of the best films ever made” isn’t exactly a condemnation. Sabrina Wu has the widest range going from socially awkward silence to excited info-dumping on KPOP. , They also provide probably the most emotional point of the movie, when they think all their friends have abandoned them. All four of them turn what could be stereotypical characters into multi-dimensional real people. They all have moments where they’re selfish and moments where they’re right; the whole thing feels very real.

Now onto something else; it’s filthy. The trailers indicated it, but it doesn’t quite prepare you. It says a lot where a scene where they sing WAP is probably one of the least lewd moments, until the end of it anyway where it suddenly becomes incredibly sexual and funny. Personally, I think the WAP scene went on slightly too long. The scene made its point and then continued. It did lead to a satisfying pay-off, but that pay-off would still have been achieved even if the scene was cut in half. The sexual confidence the film provides will also put some people. Actually, the fact it’s a female-lead sex comedy will be enough to put some people off. One negative review saying it “objectifies men, targets white people”. I mean, it’s weird to watch a film which features a lingering shot of a vagina tattoo and think that shirtless men are the ones thought of as being sexual. And I don’t really see how it targets white people. If anything, China gets much more attacked; outright saying they’re racist towards Koreans. I think what the reviewer meant by that is; it shows sexual attraction from a female POV, and the white characters aren’t important to the plot. If you’re not going in looking to be offended, then it’s a fantastic watch with themes that will resonate with everybody. I mean, I did feel incredibly white whilst watching it. But that wasn’t because of the film, it’s because I had Hot Honey Ice Cream which I assumed would mean “warm honey throughout the ice cream”, but actually meant “spiced honey”, so whilst watching a film about Asian culture, there was me, a very white person, sitting there thinking “oof, this ice cream is a bit spicy”.