dramedy

Materialists (2025)

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I’ve been seeing a lot of critical re-evaluation of Celine Song’s Past Lives in recent days, particularly as those who “saw through” its “mediocrity” from the beginning are feeling vindicated by the lukewarm reception of follow up feature Materialists. I couldn’t agree less about the quality of Past Lives, a movie I rated five stars and which was my third favorite film of 2023. On the other hand, that this movie is getting mixed to middling reviews isn’t a huge surprise to me, either. All the declarations that “the old-school romcom is back, baby!” that surrounded this film’s release may have been more of a threat than a promise. There’s also a tendency toward more drama than comedy, and there are moments where the slow burn that made Past Lives so powerful plays out here as more drawn out and tedious, but never so much that you’re ever truly bored. 

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker living in NYC for an organization called Adore. As the film opens, she is celebrating her ninth match that has resulted in a marriage, and she’ll be attending the wedding solo. At the wedding, she runs into her ex-boyfriend, aspiring actor John (Chris Evans), with whom she interacts warmly and fondly; she also meets brother of the groom Harry (Pedro Pascal), a handsome, wealthy socialite. Although she encourages Harry to join Adore as a client, citing that he’s a perfect package for their clientele and the proverbial “unicorn,” he seems most interested in pursuing her. In a flashback, we see that she and John broke up after an argument that was the result of his meager financial situation and both her frustration with his barely making ends meet and her own self-hatred over her materialistic nature. Meanwhile, in spite of her overall success in her field, Lucy is having trouble finding a good match for her client Sophie (Zoë Winters), a lawyer in her 30s, and when she thinks she’s finally made a good match, something tragic happens that shakes her faith in herself and her foundations. 

Materialists is about two things: the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and what gets lost when love is treated like capital – a measurable, tradable commodity. Early on, Lucy compares her work to that of a mortician or an insurance claims agent, in that she treats matchmaking as a mechanical enterprise. Boxes checked in Subject A’s columns match boxes checked in Subject B’s column, and we’ve got love. She gives the hard sell on Adore to several of the women at her client’s wedding, talking about love as an ineffable and beautiful thing, that matchmaking isn’t about finding someone to be with for the next ten years but a “nursing home partner” and a “grave buddy.” It’s hard to tell where the real Lucy is in all of this, how much of what we see is her putting on a show, but when we see her in a moment of vulnerability with her boss, Violet (Marin Ireland), she admits that she’s not interested in dating because she wants her next partner to be her husband, and that her ultimate goal at present is to marry a man who is wealthy enough to provide for her. At other times when it’s clear that the facade is slipping, she tells John that he shouldn’t want to be with her because she believes that, at her core, she’s a cold, unfeeling person who is only concerned with marrying rich. She wishes that she could be the kind of woman whose love for John would have kept them together despite his inability to take her to fancy restaurants instead of the corner Halal stand, but she isn’t, at least not until the story that she’s told herself about who she is professionally crumbles. When Sophie is assaulted by the man that Lucy matched her with, Lucy is confronted with the unfortunate truth that this is something that happens in their business because many terrible people are able to charm their way past attempts to gatekeep them. Lucy realizes that her narrative of being the girlboss of twenty-first century luxury courtship is both (a) not true, and (b) perhaps not that important, and that love is more than a series of compatibility tests. 

What’s fascinating about the way that people talk about love is how transactional it all is. When the bride from the beginning of the film has cold feet, Lucy is ushered in to see her; the woman asks why she’s even getting married in the first place, since her family doesn’t need a cow or to seal a political pact through ritual like previous generations. Lucy leads her to the truth, that the bride’s sister’s jealousy over how the groom was more handsome and taller than her own husband made the pride feel valuable, and that gets her up on her feet and down the aisle. We get a montage of several of Lucy’s clients, both men and women, and these segments lean a little bit more into the comedy than the mostly dramatic film. Although Sophie is the first one that Lucy interacts with on screen (over a phone call) and it makes her come across as shallow and unpleasable, but she pales in comparison to some of the people we meet later. There’s one client who clearly doesn’t know or doesn’t care how his requests come across, as he opens by talking about wanting to meet a woman who shares similar interests, who’s seen all the old classics and probably likes the same kind of music, but he also insists that his potential matches be in their twenties (he is forty-eight); when pressed, he says that even twenty-seven is “basically thirties.” Lucy has to put on a pleasant face with all of them, and it’s clear that she finds many of these people to be creepy and weird, but she also lives inside of their world insofar as she also treats love like, as she herself puts it, math, and the film is about her realization that there are some things that can’t be reduced to numbers and checklists. 

This one doesn’t have the same heart as Past Lives did, and I don’t think that it’s trying to. That film was much more introspective and thoughtful, and this one isn’t trying to recreate that tone so much as explore a different one. It’s also a more standard and formulaic one, but at least it’s been a while since there was such an earnest send-up of the canonical romantic comedy. It’s subversive in that there’s never a moment when the love triangle seems like it could ever possibly resolve with anything other than John and Lucy giving things another chance. Harry’s successful wining and dining of Lucy requires that we buy that our leading lady’s character arc will be accepting that she’s exactly as shallow and materialistic as she perceives (the persona she has created of) herself to be and she’ll be picking the rich guy? Be real. Within this paradigm of two love interests, one rich and one poor, for there to be a narrative at all requires that she not end up with the guy in whom she initially expresses a shallow interest. Where this breaks from the mould of the standard plot structure is that most of these films would have both love interests vying for Lucy at the same time, but the film is fairly well bifurcated right in the middle where she moves from one to the other, with the rejected partner disappearing from the plot after Lucy’s life is upended. 

A lot of whether this film will work for you depends on how you feel about Dakota Johnson and her acting style. Prior to her matchmaking career Lucy was, like John, attempting to make it as an actress, but she got a regular (well, sort of) job instead while he continued to pursue his artistic passions. This means that there is a conversation in which Lucy says things like “I decided acting wasn’t for me,” and “I was never a very good actor,” and I just know that the moment this movie hits video on demand, people are going to run wild with screenshots of these moments and attempt to use them to dunk on Dakota. In this house, we call those haters, and there’s not a hate campaign in this world strong enough to make me turn on my Madame Web. Before she was a director, Song was a playwright (and a matchmaker), and it’s in the scenes in which Lucy interacts with clients that the film feels the most like a stage play, with strong repartee, and it’s in these scenes that Johnson is the most believable. She’s as charming here to me as she was in Am I OK?, but while this film is much more well-made and richly photographed, it doesn’t connect with me on an emotional level. 

When I sat in the darkness staring up at Past Lives two years ago, it resonated with me deeply. Like Hae Sung, I had recently socially encountered an old … well, an old something let’s say, and the spark that still lingered there was such a powerful reminder of what that kind of interaction could feel like that I broke things off with someone I had been seeing casually for a couple of months because that electricity and chemistry wasn’t there. Circumstances with my old flame meant that, like Hae Sung and Nora, it could never be, no matter how much in-yun there may have been between us. There was a potency to the reality of it all that left an indelible imprint on me, and which simply is not a presence in Materialists. It may not be fair to judge this movie based on that criterion, especially since Materialists isn’t trying to be as deep as its author’s previous work, but it is nonetheless an area that it’s lacking. And before you jump to the conclusion that I may have overrated Past Lives as a result of my empathic rapport with its characters, you should know that I actually cried more during Materialists than I did Past Lives. The movie wasn’t connecting with me on the same emotional level as Hae Sung did, but the treatment of love as capital and the way that the film utilized that to find places in me that are still smarting from more recent misadventures and tribulations in the bottomless open sea that is contemporary love and dating … it did get to me. It didn’t get to me by resonance; it just happened to make me recall some misfires of late and then give me too much time to dwell on those before the film moved on to the next scene. When I watch Past Lives again, I will cry again. This one? Not so much. 

This is a cute movie. Serviceable, occasionally goofy, and mostly charming, I’m glad that it exists, even if I’m not sure it will have staying power. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Paper Tigers (2021)

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The Paper Tigers is a 2021 martial arts dramedy about three men who were once the pupils of a kung fu (or gung fu, as a character notes in this film is the correct pronunciation) master, now middle-aged adults who reunite after years of no contact when their beloved former teacher dies under mysterious circumstances. I’ve also seen the film billed elsewhere as a comedy, and while it’s certainly a charming film, the USA Today pull quote on the poster that says the film is “filled with laughs” is a little overblown. It’s more of a feel-food, leaves-you-with-a-smile movie than a laugh riot, but the world needs both. And if you’re looking for something that won’t offend the sensibilities of the family that you’ll be spending time with over the holidays, this is a pretty good choice. 

The film opens in 1986 with the training of young Danny, Hing, and Jim (Kieran Tamondong, Bryan Kinder, and Malakai James, respectively) by their teacher, Cheung (Roger Yuan). Their learning is unconventional, with shades of Karate Kid, but even more unusual; it wouldn’t have been too out of place to have Mr. Miyagi teach Daniel body control and perseverance by having him balance on a paint can, but he wouldn’t have done it while smoking cigarettes that he ashed directly into the trash can and looking at racing results in the newspaper. In an expertly edited piece of VHS-styled home videography, the boys age into high school by 1991 (now played, respectively, by Yoshi Sudarso, Peter Adrian Sudarso, and Gui DaSilva-Greene), where they have become undisputed masters of their craft, effortlessly fending off challenges from Carter (Mark Poletti), a student of a rival gung fu school. Finally, the three young men graduate from Cheung’s training, fully becoming “Tigers,” as Danny prepares to go and fight in Japan after their graduation in 1993.

In the present day, Danny (Alain Uy) is struggling to juggle part-time custody of his son Ed (Joziah Lagonoy) with his ex-wife Caryn (Jae Suh Park) with his job, which leads to an ultimatum when he’s late for pickup, again, and he has to go back to the office instead of taking Ed to similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from Disneyland (the child’s favorite ride is “Mountain Splash”), resulting in him asking Ed to lie to his mother about their activities. Danny is visited by Hing (Ron Yuan), who tells him that Cheung has died, seemingly of a heart attack, but something about it all seems fishy. At their deceased mentor’s funeral, they reunite with Carter (Matthew Page), who has gone into full cultural appropriation mode, and his own teacher Wong (Raymond Ma), who owns the restaurant at which Cheung had been employed as a chef for decades and runs his own gung fu school. Carter also confesses a belief that Cheung was murdered, and points to three young “punks” who interrupt the ceremony and disrespect Cheung’s memory as possible persons of interest. Hing and Danny reunite with Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins) to get to the bottom of their mentor’s murder, and in the process learn that he may have trained a fourth Tiger (Ken Quitugua) after his surrogate sons abandoned him. 

The action here is nothing short of spectacular. It’s always a treat to see martial arts depicted with an emphasis on the arts over the martial, and this is a truly elegant film to behold. This isn’t really all that surprising, really, given the talent behind and in front of the camera; for over half of the cast, clicking through to their IMDb profiles reveals a host of stunt credits alongside their acting performances and that many of them come from stunt families—Roger Yuan (54 acting credits, 38 stunt credits) is the older brother of Ron Yuan (actor 169, stunts 36), and Yoshi Sudarso (actor 51, stunts 43) is the elder of two brothers as well, with Peter Adrian Sudarso alongside him in this film. The three actors playing the disrespectful punks (Brian Le, Phillip Dang, and Andy Le) have 34 acting credits between them, and 32 stunt credits. This is a truly stacked cast, and they are fantastic to watch. While several of the more obvious jokey bits didn’t work for me—in the opening training sequence of the guys as children, Cheung has them hold a squatting pose until one of them farts, and I almost opted out immediately—the action provides plenty of opportunity for physical comedy as well, which is well used. 

The comic elements are more grounded in character than we’re accustomed to in modern comedies as well. Unlike other movies that pastiche and homage martial arts films (The FP comes to mind), Paper Tigers doesn’t rely on old stereotypes and tiresome cliches to create a rhetorical space for joke-telling, and the comedy that does recall those dead horses is punching (and kicking, and breaking bricks) up, not down. In the nineties, Carter was a joke to the Tigers because he kept challenging the far-superior Danny to fights, even after eight spectacular losses (in the ninth encounter, Danny doesn’t even bother to take his jacket off); in the present, Carter has, as noted above, gone into full appropriation mode, and the joke’s on him as a result, even going so far as to have him say things like “We Chinese have a saying” in front of several Asian Americans. Later, one of the punks uses a slur as part of a larger appropriation of AAVE, and his ass gets rightfully, and hilariously, beaten for it. (In a non-comedic example, there’s a use of the f-slur by Ed, but it’s in the context of explaining to his parents how he got into a fight with another boy at school as the result of defending a friend against a slurring bully, and it’s one of the things that reminds Danny why he learned gung fu in the first place, setting up the film’s climax.) 

My other concern that arose in the first few minutes was that we were also immediately treated to a scene of Danny as a subpar parent, and I was worried we would eventually veer into territory of the overly sentimental. There are few storytelling devices of which I tired as quickly as a child than the “Workaholic Dad” who appeared in so many of the family films of the 90s, virtually always using a mobile phone of a now incredible size, who ultimately comes through for his child/ren in the end (The 6th Day, Jack Frost, Liar Liar, Little Giants, and especially and egregiously Hook) while treacly music plays. This family dynamic ends up being a smaller and quieter part of this film while having a genuine impact on the story eventually. This is, after all, a film about legacy and fatherhood. In fact, the Tigers don’t call their teacher “sensei” or “master,” but “sifu,” which means “master,” yes, but also father. Their martial art isn’t merely a general kind of gung fu, but a lineage and genealogy of instruction and mastery. We learn that there was a reason that Danny and Sify Cheung first became estranged, and that this led Danny down a path to conflict avoidance that has left him rusty in his skills after all this time; it’s only when he finally admits to his son that asking him to lie was dishonorable and that fighting to protect others when there is no other choice is a valid stance to take that Danny once again feels the inner strength that made him so formidable in his youth, which allows him not to avenge his Sifu’s death, but to deliver justice. At an earlier point in the film, Danny and Hing ask Sifu Wong to maintain Sifu Cheung’s ashes at his dojo despite being of a different clan, as they believe he would prefer to be enshrined where gung fu is practiced, to which Wong replies that his ashes belong with his disciples; at the film’s conclusion, we see Danny in his garage training Ed in his master’s ways, including balancing on paint cans, and that he now has his Sifu’s ashes there. Danny is embracing and continuing that legacy, and it’s actually very sweet without hitting you over the head with its symbolism or becoming cloying and insufferable. 

This is a debut feature from writer/director Quoc Bao Tran, and he’s made a spectacular first impression. Surprisingly for something with such sumptuous visuals and excellent transitional and fight editing, this is also cinematographer Shaun Mayor’s first feature with that particular credit, although he’s had extensive camera operation experience, as well as an editor, Kris Kristensen, whose prior work has been in shorts and documentaries (other than a 2004 film entitled Inheritance, which was also directed and written by Kristensen, leading me to believe this was probably a student film situation). Somehow, this turned out to be a dream team, and I’m excited to see what each of them does next. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Sunkist Family (2019)

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On a recent 9-hour flight, I was browsing the in-flight movies that Delta Airlines had to offer. And yes, I did watch Delta’s controversial version of Booksmart in which the gay love scenes were cut (I wasn’t expecting them to be), but thankfully, Delta is working on incorporating the scenes into the films again after all the recent backlash. While browsing through the available movies, I came across the Korean family dramedy Sunkist Family, and it is one of the most heartwarming films to come out this year. To my surprise, this is the first film from female South Korean director Kim Ji-Hye, who served as both the film’s director and screenwriter. Her work is extremely impressive as she is able to keep this very sex positive movie quirky and sweet without ever coming close to being raunchy.

After about 20-something years of marriage, Joon Ho and Yoo Mi can’t keep their hands off each other.  They somehow manage to take care of their three children and run a small butcher shop while still making time to have sex anywhere and everywhere. The small suburban home that the couple share with their three children is a hilarious madhouse. Each kid has their own unique personality that really adds a lot of flavor to the family’s wacky dynamic. Chul Won is a sexually challenged teenage boy, Kyung Joo is an angsty teenage girl awaiting her first period, and Jin Hae is an extremely observant young girl. A good chunk of the film focuses on Jin Hae’s perspective of the family’s drama, and it is ever so charming and insightful.

Joon Ho and Yoo Mi’s perfect marriage takes a turn for the worst when Joon Ho’s first childhood love moves in next door. She pulls him back into his artistic roots while being a bit flirtatious, and Yoo Mi is not having it. Basically, one misunderstanding after another begins to tear the family apart, and little Jin Hae does her very best to bring them back together. Part of her plan includes spraying her entire family with what she thinks is “love spray,” but it’s actually some sort of penis spray intended to make men last longer in bed. This is perhaps my favorite moment in the film. The entire family is having a heated argument and Jin Hae comes to the rescue with the spray to help everyone love each other again. The whole spray scene is filmed in slow motion and looks so magical even though the reality of it is sort of disturbing.

Sunkist Family really focuses on how important communication is at all levels of a family. Husband to wife, parent to child, child to parent, etc. The miscommunication between the Sunkist Family almost destroys them, and this is something that most families can relate to. Whether it’s Jin Hae’s confusion on the world of sex or Joon Ho’s reluctance to tell his wife that he is visiting his lady neighbor instead of going to work, talking and being honest with one another is what is needed to keep this family together. This entire film is such a treat, and I’m looking forward to adding it to my ever-growing collection as I plan on watching again and again.

-Britnee Lombas