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Tag: Henry Golding

  • ‘A Simple Favor’ review — A deliciously twisted mystery

    ‘A Simple Favor’ review — A deliciously twisted mystery

    A Simple Favor is a darkly funny and campy mystery thriller anchored by stellar performances by Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick.

    30-second review: So much of the plot of a simple favor is melodramatic and ironically plays off like an episode of a CW primetime soap opera. But it works. That’s thanks to director Paul Feig‘s incredible sense of tone. He knows when the movie needs to be a melodrama and when it needs to be a comedy and when it needs to be a mystery. Finding that right balance makes A Simple Favor a pure delight to watch.

    However, it would be nowhere near as successful as it is if it wasn’t for an awkwardly charming lead performance by Anna Kendrick and a stellar, career-high turn from Blake Lively playing a compelling and deliciously campy character.

    Where to watch A Simple Favor: Available to buy or rent on Prime Video.

    Director Paul Feig has been on a roll with female-fronted broad comedies with critical and commercial hits Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy, and Ghostbuster coming one after the other. And while all of those movies share the same general tone—elevated, raunchy broad comedy with emotional elements—he takes a crack at a truly genre-bending story in the deliciously campy mystery A Simple Favor, which is based on the novel by Darcey Bell and adapted by Jessica Sharzer.

    In the film, Feig is challenged with balancing a Gone Girl style mystery with a satirical suburban melodrama a la The Stepford Wives with a hint of the broad comedy he has become famous for. And while he’s mostly successful in his execution, the true stars of the movie are Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively giving the best performances of their careers. 

    Kendrick plays Stephanie, a widowed full-time single mother and part-time mommy blogger who is every bit the endearingly awkward, always upbeat person we’ve come to expect Kendrick to play. And while many may have become tired of her adorkable charm defined by spitfire lines delivered in stream of consciousness style, it certainly is effective here. Though she’s certainly a super mom to her son Miles (Joshua Santine), the other parents at the school don’t easily take to her over-achiever status, which is why they’re surprised when she becomes friend with full-time working mom Emily (Lively).

    Emily is an enigma. She seems to have it all. A high-profile job in the city, a beautiful house in the suburbs, stunning closet—she rocks chic three-piece suits paired with equally stunning Louboutin’s throughout the film—and a devilishly handsome husband, Sean (Henry Golding). However, there’s a darkness to her hidden by her effortless attitude towards life. Still, Stephanie is roped into her life blinded with intrigue—and an afternoon martini quickly loosens her up to the idea of friendship. And that intrigue only increases when Emily goes missing. 

    A Simple favor
    Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively in A SIMPLE FAVOR. Credit: Lionsgate.

    One day, Emily asks Stephanie for the eponymous simple favor, which is looking after her son Nicky (Ian Ho) while she deals with a work crisis. With Sean in London visiting his mother, Stephanie, always eager to help out, accepts. But Emily never returns to pick up Nicky. From there, the story unfolds while Stephanie tries to figure out what happened to her recently acquired best friend. Along the way, she deals with a suspicious detective (Bashir Salahuddin, great here) convinced there’s more to the case than meets the eye, Emily’s boss Dennis (Rupert Friend), and a punk artist from Emily’s past (Linda Cardinelli). 

    A Simple Favor has more twists, turns, and shocks than a soap opera and Feig tackles them all with a self-aware campy flair that makes every stinging quip and ridiculous moment land. And although the movie has trouble navigating its own plot towards the end, Feig has a stellar cast to anchor it. After charming us earlier this summer in Crazy Rich Asians, Golding more than holds his own as a doting, though worn down, husband and father to Emily and Nicky. His character’s slow deterioration during the film is shown all over his face, but he still retains that movie star glow. He has a career ahead of him.

    Still, it’s Anna Kendrick’s quick-fire charm and Blake Lively’s seductively sinister barbs that make A Simple Favor so incredibly fun to watch unfold. Even as the plot becomes convoluted—sometimes to excess—it’s still the kind of consciously ridiculous suburban satire that is going to please any audience it plays to. A Simple Favor is a mess in the best way possible. The only thing that would make it better is if you watched it with a gin martini with a twist of lemon in hand.

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    Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter and Letterboxd. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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  • ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ review — A step forward for represenation and rom-coms

    ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ review — A step forward for represenation and rom-coms

    Crazy Rich Asians is a big step forward for representation, but also a refreshing take on a genre that has needed a mainstream hit.

    Crazy Rich Asians is the first Hollywood studio movie to feature an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club nearly 25 years ago. However, that’s not the only thing that it is doing after nearly that long. Despite being groundbreaking for its cast and subject matter, it also throws back to an age of Hollywood when romantic comedies were flashy, a little corny, but grounded by its characters.

    What’s so refreshing about the characters in Crazy Rich Asians is they are archetypes we’ve seen before, but because they’re pulled from different experiences they feel fresh. The perfect example is the protagonist, Rachel (Constance Wu). She was raised by a single mother who immigrated from China to the US to give her daughter a better life. That experience is something that has shaped Rachel and who she is today. As a first-generation Asian-American, even the mention of that backstory was a watershed moment for me.

    Rachel, an economics professor at New York University, is dating fellow professor Nick Young (a ridiculously charming Henry Golding). Nick asks Rachel to accompany him back home to Singapore to attend—and be the Best Man— at his best friend Colin (Chris Pang) and his fiance Araminta’s (Sonoya Mizuno) wedding. What he failed to tell Rachel is that he is the heir to his family’s massive Singaporean real estate developer fortune and they are—well, crazy rich. 

    In a subversion of many other romantic comedies—where Asian characters are often put into stereotypes or shown simply in the background of a date set at a Chinese restaurant—American Rachel is the outsider. Not quite Asian enough to be a part of the Young family’s world. It’s especially apparent as Nick introduces her to his mother Eleanor (a deliciously devious Michelle Yeoh), his grandmother Shang Su Yi (Lisa Lu), a parade of Aunties, and countless young eligible bachelorettes that despise Rachel.

    While there are people on her side like Araminta and Nick’s sister Astrid (Gemma Chan), who is having troubles of her own, it seems that almost everyone is weary of Rachel. At one point while at Araminta’s bachelorette party Rachel finds a dead and gutted fish on her bed with the message “catch this you gold digging bitch” on the wall. Yeah, these crazy rich Asians don’t play. And while a moment like that is shocking and the way she’s treated by Eleanor—most of which consists of icy stares and cool takedowns—and others could be over-the-top, it’s all told in a fun way. Crazy Rich Asians is essentially—and I say this in the best way possible—a soap opera.

    Crazy Rich Asians
    Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding, and Constance Wu in Crazy Rich Asians.

    However, there is a lot of heart, as well. A large part of that heart comes from Rachel’s Singaporean college friend Goh Peik Lin (Awkwafina is hilarious and used perfectly) and her family (Ken Jeong and Koh Chieng Mun to name a few actors) who are all hilarious and Rachel’s mother Kerry (Tan Kheng Hua). 

    And while Rachel tries her best to win over Nick’s family—they’re constantly trying to convince him that Rachel doesn’t belong among them—she eventually learns that to beat them she has to join them. She returns Eleanor’s icy stares and cold takedowns and stunts on the other jealous girls at the wedding. The movie is tightly plotted and almost all of it is about relationships and communication—both spoken and unspoken. 

    The importance of diversity and telling a wide array of stories in Hollywood becomes so apparent in a movie like Crazy Rich Asians. While the story and movie have mass appeal, it’s the small moments and gestures that make it clear that this is made for an Asian audience—crazy rich and regular alike.  One of the moments—one of many that I smiled at simply because I recognized it from my own life—is a tense Mahjong game that also doubles oddly as a negotiation. And while the game furthers the story, what was more emotional was watching something that was such a large part of my childhood being reflected on screen.

    Fireworks, private island resorts, lavish balls, one of the most entertaining things about Crazy Rich Asians is how crazy rich the characters are. However, the most fascinating thing about the movie is how much it’s about the things that connect us as Asians—and not just culture. I think the expectations of Asian parents and their desire for their kids to be as happy and successful in life sometimes cause rifts in our relationships with our parents. That’s one part of what Crazy Rich Asians is about. The other part is about how our parents always have our best interests at heart—whether it’s Rachel’s mom’s decision to bring her to American or Nick’s mom’s desire for him to take over the family business. No offense to rom-coms in the past, but this is much more interesting than a straight-forward love story. Crazy Rich Asians is a step forward for representation, but also a step forward for an entire genre.

    Crazy Rich Asians is available to rent or buy on Amazon!

    Karl’s rating: