It Ends With Us

This seems like an appropriate title for the first post of the resurrection. I don't know if I will make this blog public, or just invite peeps to read, or what. I don't have to decide everything right now, dammit! The thing is... I really have stuff to say, mostly about books and movies, sometimes food, but not politics omg barf that's everywhere, and often peeps aren't that interested in discussing these topics, so my thoughts end up dissolving into nothingness. Oh no, the horror of the unexpressed thought! FB is impossible to navigate with garbage ads everywhere, and Bluesky has the character limit. As you may remember (she says to the nonexistent audience), when I have an opinion, I tend to go on and on. And on. I can't deal with threading my thoughts into blurbs regardless. I dumped WP around a year ago for various reasons, mostly my own OCD, but I still have this bloggity blog. Simple. No fancy layout, no weird formatting. No prompts. Just babble and publish. Yay for Google!

Ahem, the movie. None of my book club peeps or any other friends jumped at my idea of going, so I went alone last Saturday. There's nothing wrong with going to movies alone! I also had a delicious lunch by myself afterwards at Greenleaf off Hyland. Shrimp quinoa wrap thingie outside at a shady table next to a fountain. Rather blissful, plus I love wraps ~ must remember to get them more often. I was kinda glad I didn't end up nagging anyone else to see It Ends With Us however because it was a disappointment. The book, written by Colleen Hoover, was layered and intense, with many leitmotifs, such as teenaged Lily Bloom (played by Blake Lively) keeping a diary in the form of letters to "Dear Ellen" (Ellen DeGeneres), which threaded though future events and provided inside jokes for Lily and her teen boyfriend Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar). In the movie, the diary/Ellen device was on the screen for a nanosecond. Oh hang on...

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Whatever. No one is reading this, but I am traumatized by people yelling about spoilers, which I find absurd because stuff is spoiled all over the internet 24/7, so if it bothers you so much stay away from the screen. Why is it my responsibility to keep your books and movies in a pristine state in your mind? I really don't get that. Spoilers don't even bother me... sometimes I enjoy knowing beforehand so I can observe the set-up with the keen eye of a writer (LOL). Anyway, in the book we discovered that Lily's mother was abused (and Atlas was abused by his mother and stepfather), which was a big fucking deal and impacted Lily's emotional landscape, but in the movie this was a blip. A nothing burger! Yet the entire premise including the title is about ending the cycle of abuse, hello! Wtf were they thinking? I read today in People that the director Justin Baldoni (who also played the male lead Ryle Kincaid) was overruled during the final cut by both Blake and Colleen. I have no idea if Justin's vision was vastly different from theirs or what, but I gotta say... it would be interesting to see his version since this one pretty much sucked. 

The movie is doing well, so maybe I'm the only one who thinks it sucked, but honestly how can you have a film about the cycle of domestic violence when you barely touch on the fact that two sets of parents had a violent backstory? Besides the film glossing over the history of Lily’s father being an abuser, we were treated to maybe one sentence about Atlas' mom, but that was crucially important too and colored the way he saw Lily and Ryle when they met up years later. Blake & Co. seemed more focused on accentuating Lily's messy hair, sexy crop tops, and "vulnerable" lip-biting moments than fleshing out important themes. In the book, the romance between Lily and Ryle took months to begin, and the reader saw how hesitant she was and how persistent he became, while in the movie all that was compressed into a couple scenes. We also didn't get any sense of Lily's thought process about leaving him during or after her pregnancy either as we did in the book. Just OK done. Everything's fine now and wrapped up neatly like a sitcom burrito.

Meh.

OK, I made this public, so we'll see how that goes. Preparing for an avalanche of comments, or none. Most likely none.