Long Day’s Journey Into Us

Sarah Miller and guest writer Joshua Clover watch “It Ends With Us”

Oh SHIT is this marine-grade polymer goddamit

Watching this movie we had the sense not only that it was never going to end but that it was never going to begin with us, or anybody else.

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, who star in and direct (feel the ambiguity!) this 2024/very old movie based on the hit novel by Colleen Hoover, meet on a rooftop. Followers of the massive controversy in which Blake Lively accused Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment and he countersued for defamation may recall that the authorship of this rooftop scene is in question. Lively said she wrote a version of it and Baldoni did not respond to her efforts with sufficient enthusiasm and Lively did not appreciate this and Baldoni left her a long cringey voice mail apologizing not only for his own behavior, but on behalf of all Hollywood, for not respecting her talent. But Blake’s husband Ryan Reynolds actually wrote this scene? And Baldoni didn’t know this until Lively revealed it in an interview? The screenwriter Christy Hall says she thinks she wrote it and tried to just shorten Hoover’s original and maybe that Baldoni improvised “Pretty please with a cherry on top” and Lively improvised some scientific facts and myths about maraschino cherries. The idea that a conversation worthy of two unsophisticated eight year olds could have been “freestyled” by grown adults might give you a sense of how depressing it is to watch, how seeing officially attractive people apply themselves with so much visible effort and self-seriousness to something so empty saps one of the will to live.