Sundance 2021: How It Ends (2021)

When a thirty-something (played by Zoe Lister-Jones) wakes up on the day the world decides to end. Her inner child comes out to play, guiding her on a journey to reconnect with her parents, friends, lost loves and herself before earth’s impeding doom.

 

Remember when you and your friends made cheap bad horror movies on your parents camcorder in your neighborhood, because there was nothing better to do? Welcome to the slightly bigger budget B to C-list version of that, in the supposed comedy - How It Ends. The intentionally low budget Indie Dramedy film version of Gal Gadot’s Imagine video. Like that video, How It Ends was made during the 2020 COVID lockdown and feels it in the worst way possible. This movie’s bloated self indulgent unfunny script and reason-to-hang-out B to C-list celebrity appearances of the likes of: Fred Armisen, Bobby Lee, Olivia Wilde, Charlie Day, Pauly Shore, Helen Hunt and so forth, immediately makes the film come of like a charity movie for COVID relief or a half-assed reason to enter the 2021 Sundance film festival competition. Sadly, it’s the latter, and the only insight this movie has is to first year film students, of what not to do when making a movie with your famous friends.

 

Zoe Lister-Jones directed the fantastically hilarious, heart-felt and actually insightful film - Band-Aid (2017) and as well directed the wasted, unwatchable Craft sequel/reboot - The Craft: Legacy (2020). This all means Zoe Lister-Jones should stay away from sequel/reboots and director collaborations with Daryl Wein, ‘cause if How It Ends is the result, time can be better spent during quarantine than walking around your LA neighborhood, humble bragging to the audience that you know Olivia Wilde and Helen Hunt. Pssst....nobody cares....also nobody cares that you’re trying to make your less famous friends more famous by involvement. It’s offensive, especially during a pandemic, and just so to be entered into Sundance, in which a better, more important film could of taken your place instead.

 

Of all the pandemic films to come out so far, this is the most painstakingly despicable, as during the making of this film, actors and crew could of caught COVID during a certain party scene at the end of the movie. And there’s absolutely no effort taken in making the film entertaining in the least bit. If this is suppose be a Portlandia format of joke telling, it lacks the break by break musical interludes that jump from scene to scene in order to help jokes land. Instead, we’re left with the sound of the neighborhood streets and joke pauses, mixed supposedly sentimental scenes of self discovery that we’re suppose care about, but can’t, as we’re distracted by well off “comedians” in LA, living it up and filming their movie, while the reality of the pandemic goes on in the background for the rest of the world.

 

How It Ends is such an excuse to hang out with Pauly Shore, (and so Olivia Wilde and Zoe Lister-Jones can duel each other with their frighteningly sharp and soulless, vapid freaky light blue eyes, while finding out who can say meaningless, stale, regurgitated rich white girl trauma dialogue the fastest) that it’s main plot of the world ending holds no actual weight, and it’s most interesting premise of ones inner child being present during the apocalypse, could of been explored throughout the film with every character, but instead stays with Zoe Lister-Jones, adding no real depth due to sterile direction, predictable grade school writing and bad exhausted one take acting by the film’s inner child actor.

 

Daryl Wein could of maybe gotten a better camera to film with. Zoe Lister-Jones could of maybe not of written this film, realizing there’s nothing here to chew on or to care about. The idea that we should care about this movie that was made during COVID is CRIMINAL, hilariously criminal but still criminal. Zoe, no one cares that you visited your friends houses during COVID. No one cares you and Olivia Wilde are such good friends. We don’t care you managed to make the gang from It’s Always Sunny seem unfunny for the first time. And we definitely don’t care about any light family trauma you’ve been through as a child and then got to make a cheap film about under the painfully bright L.A. sun; staring at your painfully bright white skin and scarily piercing zombie blue eyes with smeared red lips, when everyone else had to survive the COVID pandemic in actual life threatening circumstances of struggle. Shame on you, Zoe. 1/10.

 

 

• Maurice Jones