Tag Archives: Helen Hunt

Sundance 2021: How It Ends

Do you want to know how it ends? A meteor. That’s how we go. For the people of Earth, that day is today. It’s the last day of Earth, and Liza (Zoe Lister-Jones) has been invited to a party. The meteor is the least interesting thing about How It Ends, and its only certainty.

Liza’s initial inclination is to spend her last day alone, getting high and eating cookies. It’s a pretty solid plan, but unfortunately her Younger Self (also named Liza of course) (Cailee Spaeny) vetoes. Plan B involves checking off items on a list of regrets en route to the pre-apocalypse party. On Liza’s list of regrets: exes, former friends, estranged parents. Truth is the theme for the day, and if that doesn’t keep her honest, her Younger Self sure will. Liza and Young Liza hoof it across Los Angeles, encountering a pretty eclectic cast of characters, but most of all bonding with and taking care of each other.

How It Ends is oddly playful for the pre-apocalypse, but as both co-writer-director and its star, Zoe Lister-Jones certainly has the right sort of presence to pull it off. She’s got excellent chemistry with Spaeny, which you’d really sort of have to, or the whole thing would be an utter failure. It’s a fascinating philosophical experiment, to have two versions of the same person interacting with each other so naturally. I loved the relationship between the two, and felt a little jealous of it. I enjoyed laughing with them, eavesdropping on their most intimate conversations, and indulging in a double dose of Lister-Jones’ unique brand of charm.

Frequent collaborators Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein manage to take a quirky premise and ground it with self-aware performances. As the meteor draws ever nearer, we dread it not because of the impending doom of humanity, because it means the movie itself will end, and we’ve been having too much fun to want to say goodbye.

Candy Jar

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Lona and Bennett have been rivals their entire high school careers. In their senior year, with Lona (Sami Gayle) applying to Harvard and Bennett (Jacob Latimore) gunning for Yale, the pressure on them to do well is enormous, and they are dismayed to learn that as debate co-champions and debate co-presidents, debate isn’t going to give either of them the edge over the other. And while their ambitions drive them on, their respective mothers may hold them back. His (Uzo Adubo) is an affluent, accomplished state senator, and hers (Christina Hendricks) is a single mother with three jobs and a chip on her shoulder. And of course they too were once high school rivals.

I wondered if Candy Jar was going to do for debate what Pitch Perfect did for glee club: it’s not. First of all, debate club sucks. Clearly things have changed since I was in high Candy-Jar school. Apparently debate is now mostly loud, fast shouting. Like auctioneer fast. The arguments are spit out in such a high-speed string that they are not even distinguishable. So it’s really not all that fun to watch. As in, not remotely fun, so I wonder if the director just invented the fast pace in order to basically fast forward the most boring parts of his movie. Which is not exactly a vote of confidence, is it?

Meanwhile, their guidance counselor (Helen Hunt) is more concerned about them getting dates and going to school dances and other borderline creepy things than about their academic futures. Basically, these two are co-champions on paper but co-losers in life.

The cast is pretty solid and I’m particularly happy to see Uzo Adubo go from Crazy Eyes to State Senator. Girl is versatile! And while the kids have important lessons to learn about disappointment and loss and perspective (and perhaps their parents even more so), it feels like director Ben Shelton lacks a specific vision. If you’re going to contribute to the vast oeuvre of high school movies, maybe try not to suck so much. Well, suck is a harsh word. Bland is probably more accurate, but nearly as damning, I think.

Also, for the record, Sean suffered a personal disappointment when he discovered the movie to be titled Candy Jar and not Cookie Jar. So we’re holding that against it too.

Ride

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Watch Helen Hunt show her versatility by playing both The Mom and The Bitch in a single role! I’ve never been a big fan of Helen Hunt and this is not the movie to win me over. Her character is so shrill and cliched I feel a strong itch to break into a rant about the very narrow width of roles for women of a certain age in Hollywood, except here’s the awkward catch: Helen Hunt wrote it herself. She directs too. But this is not something I’d be very proud to put my name on.

Jackie (Hunt) is a New York book editor with an unhealthily codependent relationship ride_helen with her son Angelo (Brenton Thwaites), an aspiring writer just out of high school. He’s not too keen on post-secondary education, and when he fucks off to California for the summer (where his dad lives, and the waves beckon), she irrationally follows. Is young Angelo happy to have his Mommy along on his big independent adventure? No he is not. So to prove how cool she is, Jackie takes up surfing. When stubbornness alone isn’t quite enough, she reluctantly takes lessons from Ian (Luke Wilson).

Ian is a chill dude, but can he help her remove the stick from her ass? And do we really need another movie about a woman who needs to be taught to unwind from a barely employed but somehow revered younger man? Fuck no. Like Hunt or dislike her as an actor, she clearly isn’t very mature as a writer. Her script is obvious and creaky. And she’s pretty uninspired as a director, taking too long to develop any sympathy for the lead character (ie, herself). And don’t get me started on the missing irony of a book editor and a writer griping and agonizing over endings, when the film in fact has none.

Ride is a crummy movie, but it might have limited use as an instructional video for middle-aged surf noobs.