“Everything beautiful is ruined eventually.”
Something I say about a lot Netflix trailers when the movie comes out. Also, a quote used in Netflix’s newest romantic comedy, The Half of It.
Ellie Chu, played by the CW’s Leah Lewis, lives in Squahamish. A small town that vaguely looks like it is located in Washington state. Squahamish is a god-fearing town with absolutely no people of color besides the two Asia people in town who happen to be, Ellie and her father. When Ellie is not writing her classmate’s papers for profit, she’s helping her father run the train track traffic.
Soon she meets Paul Munsky (played by Daniel Diemer), a lackluster football player who has a flair for cooking. His specialty dish is a “Taco Sausage,” which has NOTHING on Spencer Shay’s Spaghetti Taco from iCarly. Paul also claims that he’s bad with words, which you can see when he presents a letter that is in desperate need of editing, to Ellie Chu. This love letter is for their classmate Aster Flores (played by Alexxie Lemire) and he wants Ellie to help him capture Aster’s heart. Aster, the daughter of the priest, is the town sweetheart, the good girl. She’s also dating the town golden boy, named Trig. Yes, I know, Trig….sounds like the jock in an 80s movie.
Through this movie you see the relationship between Ellie and Paul grow, their friendship develops over the course of Ellie writing the letters. But, complicating their relationship is the fact that Ellie is also falling in love with Aster.
I wish there was more I could say about this movie, other than that I was hoping for more. The trailer and the idea of an LGBT Asian film was exciting to me. Unfortunately, it didn’t hit the warm feels as promised. The characters were likeable and the foundation for a great film was there. What felt to be missing was the heart, the characters felt disconnected, as if relationships were built out of thin air. The story felt disjointed and it made it hard to keep up with. What felt like Sierra Burgess is a Loser’s more diverse twin, The Half of It gave what felt like half of a movie.
You can stream Half of It on Netflix now.
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