Reviews: It Ends With Us — Challengers — My Old Ass

Perfect opinions on mortal works

On December 20 and 21 I watched these 3 movies, plus Zone of Interest, which I thought was excellent, although when I read that Europeans thought it was boring I admitted to myself that I too found it boring.

It Ends With Us

Perfectly economical symbolism, satisfying three-act structure, great pacing. As a story, this is wonderful. Colleen Hoover got a ton of shit when she first started to get noticed by the mainstream—probably, like me, most non-romance readers who’d heard of her before this movie became aware of her through this 2022 NYT profile at a moment when 5 out of every 10 bestselling books in all genres were hers—but I’m curious to read the book now, especially after reading The Bestseller Code, which generously, non-judgmentally, and I think convincingly, breaks down the patterns of bestsellers using insights from natural language processing and data science. Hoover’s books are supposedly ‘bad prose’ but I should have known that anything that was such a phenomenon would have something compelling in it. As a movie, it was basically exactly what I want this medium to be: a super-emotional string of music videos. The soundtrack was excellently selected and very effective.

Challengers

Was pretty much what I expected it to be. Somehow I could infer merely from the discourse, without even seeing a trailer, that there was no actual story here. Here’s the moment when it could have become a good story: when Tashi returns to the hotel room after hooking up with Patrick in his car, she should have found Art dead from suicide, caused by her saying she would leave him if he didn’t win. This would recast Tashi as the main character, which the camera wants her to be anyway, and the story as a morality tale, warning of excess of ambition—an Icarus story. It would give the plot an arc, and make room for some kind of redemption at the end, which would be satisfying. Instead we got an ending of ‘the two guys jumping at each other’, which is stupid and doesn’t resolve anything.

As I was watching it, one thought kept recurring to me: a theme is really a subject about which reasonable people can debate, and this movie’s theme is ‘relentless ambition’—but there’s no debate, it’s just “doesn’t Zendaya seem glamorous when she girlbosses really hard?” The movie appears to have been made by people who don’t know that the costs of ambition are understood: having a relentless drive to win will result in bad emotional outcomes for you. To pretend this isn’t so, or to ignore it, or worse, to not know that this is an emotional truth makes you seem like a child with no understanding of life, which is who this movie felt like it was made by. It feels like a movie about how eating a lot of candy is awesome, because sugar is amazing.

If you want to show a triumphant outcome of an obsessively ambitious person, you can do that as a Faustian bargain story, where they win, but lose everything else that’s important to them. A story is about what you lose and gain by taking an action, and Challengers shows us neither losses nor gains, because it doesn’t have an ending. This is in line with my feeling that the filmmakers in fact do not know what you lose or what you gain by taking the actions depicted.

My Old Ass

Setting a movie in Canada is a hard semiotic problem, and it’s interesting to see every few years how someone attempts to solve it. I’ve written about this problem in fiction at almost unbelievable length before — but basically, the problem is this: locations in Canada don’t have settled meanings.

Consider the TV show “Ozark.” You already know what the vibe is going to be like, because you kind of know what the Ozarks are like—not because you’ve been there, but because of their reputation as hillbillyish, backwater-y. Consider “Beverly Hills, 90210.” The neighborhood’s reputation precedes it. Consider Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”; “Portlandia.”

The setting doesn’t have to be in the title for it to carry meaning—I’m just using these examples because the settings have such strong meanings that they can be used as titles.

Now consider a story set in Toronto; New Brunswick; PEI.¹ A romance set on the latter is so counterintuitive that it served as a headline about Carley Fortune’s recent memoir.

Setting is a big part of a story’s meaning. A preteen’s first summer romance in the south of France means something very different than a preteen’s first summer romance in Harlem. To a surprising degree, setting, often thought of as the most boring part of storycraft, can actually, weirdly, be seen as possibly the only way out of the ‘every story has been told before’ problem. Yes, we’ve heard this story before; but what’s it like where you live? A normal person can simply answer this question straight, and let their listener decide what it means; but a storyteller, in order to communicate well, must know exactly how what they’re saying will be received, in order to produce intended effects.

So, for storytellers who are interested in setting a story in Canada that they want to have international reach, this creates a problem — how to tell a story in a setting that means very different things to very different people?

My Old Ass is an interesting case study. It’s set in “the Muskokas.” Watching the movie, my brain, flipped to its ‘Canadian’ setting, was bewildered as I saw unfold a simple tale of pie-eyed pastoral youth, whose plot device is literally “mom n’ pop are sellin’ the ol’ family farm,” in what I understood to be the most expensive and elite vacation spot in my country, where Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have summer homes in places called ‘Millionaires’ Row’ and ‘Billionaires’ Row, in an area sometimes called “The Malibu of the North” and the “Hamptons of the North.”

Like the geochemistry experts in the comic above, but for Canadian locations, it took me a while to come around to the understanding that, for Americans, firstly, at least 99% of them had probably never heard of the Muskokas, so all they saw was an ol swimmin hole-type setting; and for the tiny proportion of Americans who had heard of it, even if they’d been there themselves, they’d probably still just think of it as a random peaceful rural location. Because for them, the idea that the Muskokas would be comparable to Malibu or the Hamptons would just be funny. It’s a lake! In Canada! In the literal middle of nowhere! Not even near a city!

I would guess most Canadians probably didn’t think too hard about this while watching My Old Ass, and if it did jar that Muskoka was being used as ‘generic farm country’, they might write that off as “well, what do you expect from a Hollywood production with Aubrey Plaza.”

On the other hand, for Americans who’ve heard of Muskoka (or “the Muskokas”), the movie is probably mostly in line with their expectations: kind of a clean-cut version of a similar American rural locale. For Americans who haven’t heard of Muskoka, though, I can imagine the setting registering as kind of uncanny valley-ishly fake. Like, if this is supposed to be some kind of Alabama-ish place, why is the vibe so preppy? The brother plays golf? Everyone is super progressive, to the point where it’s embarrassing to be straight?

Anyway, I don’t consider any of this a misstep by the filmmakers — it’s an inherently hard problem, and it was interesting to see them grapple with it. I think they did a good job.

1. “PEI,” which, ironically, it didn’t even occur to me I needed to spell out until my partner Naina, who’s from England, asked for clarification, stands for: Prince Edward Island.