That cameo from that movie

Spoilers are traditionally thought of as major story twists that, if revealed, would ruin the emotional or intellectual trajectory of your viewing experience. You’re supposed to only know what you’re supposed to know when the filmmaker wants you to know it.

But spoilers can also be cameos. In that case, you’re not usually trying to avoid ruining someone’s experience of the film’s plot. You’re trying to preserve their sense of delightful surprise.

Take the Tropic Thunder cameo. Since I don’t think there are likely to be many people reading this who have not seen Tropic Thunder (but get out of this paragraph now if you haven’t), I will ruin that “surprise” by alluding to Tom Cruise’s amazing turn as the bald, corpulent producer who megomaniacally shouts into a phone for a couple scenes. It’s priceless, and you would surely agree that a large part of that is because you didn’t know it was coming.

And so it is I recommend to you the new(ish) Netflix romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe, telling you there is a terrific cameo … but not who it is.

You may already know who it is, as this person has been particularly hot over the past few years after experiencing a career resurgence. Plus, you know, social media.

But if you don’t … well, I’m not going to be the one who tells you.

I will tell you about the movie. It stars Randall Park and comedienne Ali Wong as San Franciscans who have been friends since childhood, when their best friend relationship turned “will they-won’t they” after an awkward sexual experience in the back seat of his car. Flash forward 16 years, when Park and Wong no longer need to play themselves at 17 (which, granted, is funny). They’re adults navigating success (she’s a celebrity chef) and failure (he can’t get his band off the ground), living in different cities, but reunited when she has to return home to open a new restaurant. They haven’t spoken since they were teens.

Typical fodder for a romantic comedy, just like my favorite romantic comedy (and one of my favorite films, period) of last year, Crazy Rich Asians. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that both films star Asians that I liked the movies better, which would be strange because I’m not inherently pro- or anti-Asian. (I mean, I’m “pro-Asian,” but in a neutral, not a fetishistic, way.) But aside from their casting, both films reminded me that it’s really simple to make a satisfying romantic comedy, and we should attempt more than we currently do. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. All you have to do is do it well. (Ha, easier said than done.)

The cameo, which comes about midway through, is certainly the movie’s funniest part, but I don’t know how significantly it contributes to my overall assessment of the film. Surely the cameo will be the reason why many people want to see it, and if so, it’s done its job, which is to expose people to superior material that they will, indeed, find very satisfying on its own terms. Which is also the aim of this blog post, I should say.

You could say that even knowing there is a cameo is a sort of spoiler, because the best cameo is probably when you didn’t know there was a cameo coming at all. But Always Be My Maybe is probably not enough of an inherent draw to enough people for me to just say “See it, I promise you won’t be disappointed, there’s something great in it” and expect you to run out and do that. The revelation that there’s a cameo is the carrot I need to entice you.

So hopefully you’ve been enticed. And you have Netflix, so you know, run out and do that.

One last recommendation: Don’t google the title. If you do, Google will autofill this person’s name and ruin the surprise for you.

And all my tiptoeing will have been for nothing!