‘Joy Ride’ Director Responds to Critic Claiming the Film “Targets White People”

Joy Ride director Adele Lim is addressing a social media reaction to her Lionsgate film ahead of its theatrical release later this month.

Lim took to Twitter on Tuesday to weigh in about an unfavorable assessment from Jackson Murphy, whose Twitter bio describes himself as a film critic for 99.5 The River, an iHeartRadio station based in Albany, New York. Murphy’s tweet criticized the feature as “embarrassing” and “incredibly unpleasant,” along with adding about the movie: “Objectifies men, targets white people.”

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In her response, Lim, who is making her directorial debut following writing credits on such films as Crazy Rich Asians and Raya and the Last Dragon, posted, “Imma need ‘Objectifies men, targets white people’ on a tshirt.”

Joy Ride, which hits theaters July 7, centers on a woman traveling across China to find her birth mother and was written by Lim, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao. The R-rated comedy premiered earlier this year at South by Southwest and stars Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu in the lead roles.

In her film review for The Hollywood Reporter, critic Lovia Gyarkye wrote, “Like the best quartets in film and TV, the four friends form an unlikely crew, but it’s their differences that make their relationships with one another oddly comforting. Joy Ride balances its irreverent humor — a mix of sex jokes and insider-y, affectionate jabs at stereotypes within the Asian diaspora — with poignance.”

During a recent interview with THR, Lim addressed the pressure of having a voice as a member of a historically underrepresented community in Hollywood.

“It’s the first time that we are putting four Asian faces in the middle of an R-rated comedy,” Lim said at the time. “If you fuck up — if a project with a queer lead, a Black lead or an Asian lead fails — the industry’s knee-jerk reaction is to blame it on the otherness. You don’t want that fear to paralyze you and keep you from creating from a place of joy.”

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