Tag: the half of it

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Not yet, no! Now that it’s finally here, I feel oddly reluctant to sit down and start. Sometimes hype makes me really want to watch something, sometimes I’m scared to start and be disappointed or worse, love it and have no more of it. Also, you know. It’s a movie. I still haven’t watched A Secret Love either. (Or The Favourite or Carol or The Handmaiden. :x) But I hope you enjoyed it!

And another two anons (one is mildly spoilery and negative):

<tried to insert a read more here, it wouldn’t do it…oh…it inserted the link in the ask itself, freaking geniuses>

I just watched the half of it and it wasn’t bad? I mean towards representation is not the best movie ever but it was nice and like the way it was shot was great?

The half of it vaguely spoilerish if you haven’t seen it yet… I am so glad I found out ahead of time that this wasn’t a lesbian rom com Bc whew I woulda been pissed watching it had I not known that. As it was, I was honestly kinda bored a lot of the movie. I love Alice Wu and she made very lovable characters in Ellie & Aster, but this movie had so much focus on Paul. I’m sick of white boys dominating narratives honestly. He wasn’t a fresh character at all but he was still so much the focus.

These two came in so close together this morning, they made me laugh. You’re like two sides of the same coin, all, yeah, I guess it was okay??

To the first anon, heh, you seem unsure? You can like it or even love it without any issue! It DOES hit a lot of rep points, unless it’s willfully apathetic or offensive, I feel like you’re free to enjoy what it is more than add disclaimers for what it isn’t. If you enjoyed it, that’s awesome.

To the second anon, well, I get it. Maybe that’s why I’m not in a rush to watch. I’m not currently in the mood for a story that is basically, in Wu’s own words, an attempt to reach out to people who made Trump happen. And okay, that’s not fair, it’s so many more things, a coming of age story for an Asian American lesbian teen, the story of a second gen immigrant and her dad in a small American town, among other things, friendship between seemingly fundamentally different people, how to grow and learn past learned biases, even the effects of religion on Aster.  And heck, even if it were just the first thing, that’d be an admirable goal, let alone the many other things it manages to be to so many people. I’m not saying it has to be something different.

But if this movie has two main roles, to teach empathy to an external group and to be relatable to an inner group, it is…neither of those things to me. I’m a Southeast Asian American who grew up abroad, my experiences are very different from Ellie’s and while I have a bunch of guy friends, I don’t care about Paul. Which will probably change when I actually watch, the way I love Dutch and Johnny in Killjoys. Or currently, Isaac on Vagrant Queen. I end up liking a lot of male characters, tbh. I dunno. I guess it’s what the focus is Presented as. Ellie may be the lead of THOI, but a movie’s inherent lack of time forces Paul and their dynamic to be so central, and a part of me does resent that a bit. It’s sold as a different kind of love story, their dynamic itself is the main character.

It could be a combination of many things, a difference between what I want and what it is, the fact that it’s a movie and just didn’t have the time I like to develop. I really liked In My Skin, a TV show, and that wasn’t particularly relatable, I guess I’m more open to stories when the female lead is front and center in every way. The story is about her. It’s like in Stumptown, I FAR preferred the episodes that treated Dex as the main than those where Grey or Hoffman had some adventure and Dex was just, like, there. 

But annnyway. It’s fine, right, we don’t have to like everything. I get the FOMO, something like this is so big and the f/f community’s still so small, it’s hard to ignore it and everyone around us engaging with it in some way. But aren’t we reaching a point where we don’t have to like something because it’s f/f but can go on to something else? Well. I say that as someone who prefers TV to movies, because damn, pickings are slim if you want happy central f/f in movies. Honestly, that’s really what it comes down to, the issue isn’t this movie but that there aren’t enough f/f movies out there. Every one of these discussions boils down to that basic point, that this one movie shouldn’t be responsible for everything this industry’s failed to do. You don’t have to like this movie, but you should have the opportunity to watch more than one happy ending every few years.