wordsmith30

DON'T FORGET YOUR DAILY CLICKS FOR PALESTINE

IT TAKES LESS THAN A MINUTE. THERE IS NO EXCUSE. DO IT.

Everyone else staring at them in complete confusion

Annabeth and Percy just chilling and singing the song

The Half of It (2020) dir. Alice Wu

I was expecting this to be a safe, inoffensive romcom after watching the underwhelming trailer, so color me surprised at how genuine this movie was.

So often, the ‘small towns’ you see in a romcom are these idyllic, cosmopolitan utopias, as if you just took a street corner from a large city and transplanted it into the sticks. It was refreshing to see a protagonist’s small town actually feel like one, i.e. dull, insular, and close-minded, with peers bullying Ellie for being Asian and the entire town packing into one church every week.

This sense of place makes the characters feel particularly bespoke, with their personalities clearly a developed response to their circumstances. Ellie’s ostracism from the monoculture has led to her being solitary and introspective; Aster, as the pastor’s daughter and girlfriend of the town’s golden boy, gives off wildly intense medieval-princess-who’s-been-betrothed-against-her-will-for-the-prosperity-of-her-dynasty vibes. 

And the boys, well… holy shit, Trig and Paul are two of the biggest himbos this side of the 2000s. Trig is fully a cartoon character; he’s basically a slightly toned-down version of the infantile quarterback in Bottoms. Paul, on the other hand, is a complex himbo. He often goes full puppydog – this mf has one of the most head-empty smiles I’ve ever seen, and half of the movie is him running full tilt after cars, bikes, and trains – but there’s a quiet loyalty to him, and despite his professed clumsiness with words, he ends up being the one to deliver the movie’s most thought-provoking message.

Paul’s idea that “love is the effort you put in” comes amidst his and Ellie’s discussion about the merits of pursuing someone so unlike yourself that you have to study up in order to talk to them, but it carries a lot of weight, and got me thinking about what in his upbringing must have led him to believe this. I guess it’s not a revolutionary take; it’s similar enough to the oft-reprised ‘marriage is hard work’, when you get down to it. But I liked seeing that idea applied to the initial stages of love, too.

The story of Ellie's dad and how he got trapped in Squahamish also broke my heart

I had some gripes as the movie went on; the talent show scene was truly deplorable, and the cast (especially the extras) are some of the most egregious Thirty Year Olds Pretending to be High Schoolers I’ve seen in a minute. But The Half of It pushes past all that to feel authentic, and really sticks the landing. Likely this is just because my high school romantic experience was composed primarily of missed opportunities, awkward missteps, and naive pining, but it always feels more believable to me when a romcom with characters this young ends this way. Just because a romance doesn’t end in a years-long partnership doesn’t mean it can’t leave a lasting impression, y’know?

every movie I watched in 2024:

Fatness, like singlehood, is seen at large as a state of failure. Everybody is supposed to want to be [thin / partnered], and if you are not, that is a personal failure on your part, and you are pathetic and mock-worthy. The popular idea is that of course everybody wants to be [thin / partnered], and everybody is striving towards the goal, and anybody who is not [thin / partnered] is either temporarily inconvenienced on their way to correctness, or has something fundamentally wrong with them. And because [fatness / singlehood] is something that is treated as fixable, if you have not fixed it, then there is something wrong with you—and thus discriminating against you is acceptable, because your [fatness / singlehood] is based on your own bad choices.

The world is, in some cases quite literally, not built for fat or single people. If you are fat or single, the world is much more difficult or expensive to live in, because it is structurally designed for the assumption that you are thin or that you have a partner. The normative Person, after all, is thin and romantically partnered. If you are not thin or not romantically partnered, there is something fundamentally less human about you.

[Fatness / singlehood] is something embarrassing, something worth mocking others over, something that reflects your fundamental unworthiness. Every fictional hero is thin, every fictional happy ending ends with romance. Everyone in your life is either quietly or not-so-quietly worried about you.