![]() ![]() Through it all, it offers just enough moments of weirdly perfect meta-comedy to stay invested. Yeoh, too often the martial arts movie sidekick Hong, the all-purpose Asian heavy of the 80s and 90s (perhaps you remember him from Big Trouble In China?) and Quan, in another life the little kid who played Short Round in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom and Data in The Goonies, now a 50-year-old man coming off a 20-year acting hiatus.Īs a stunt, Everything Everywhere is interesting enough, at first, though its frantic manic shifting between different universes does get a little enervating. Just as with mainstream cinema’s too easy takes on interdimensional travel, the Daniels strive to delve deeper into actors who have too often appeared in gimmicky ways. The parallels to a thousand other things, from Cloud Atlas to The Matrix to Douglas Adams (AC Weisbecker’s 1986 book, Cosmic Banditos, arguably the funniest book ever written about quantum physics, also deserves mention here), are obvious, and the casting alone should give you some sense of the pop culture stunt the Daniels are trying to pull off. Her adversary generally takes the form of Dierdre, an IRS functionary played by Jamie Lee Curtis. The next 40 minutes or so are a manic pastiche of Evelyn meeting other Evelyns from different dimensions in a race against different daughters from different dimensions with the help of different husbands and grandfathers. Then one day, a version of her husband who isn’t really her husband shows up to explain that there’s a disturbance in the fabric of space-time or some such, and that Evelyn might actually be the key to everything. The plot concerns Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), the owner of a failing laundromat, who has a lesbian daughter who resents her (Stephanie Hsu), a husband who’s sick of being ignored (Ke Huy Quan), and an ailing father with a series of crushing expectations (James Hong). ![]() In many ways, Everything Everywhere All At Once is the Daniels creating the chaos they’d hoped to see in the world, a movie in which commercial impositions cannot exist without artistic consequences. “It would be such a big deal! Like if logic broke down and time didn’t move forward and a million people could go back in time a million number of times, there’d be absolute chaos.” “My pet peeve is time travel when you introduce it and just do a tiny bit like it’s no big deal,” Scheinert told Indiewire this week. To them, the way most movies toy with the nature of reality seemed infuriatingly utilitarian. It’s a commercial imposition masquerading as an artistic choice, and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the directors known collectively as “Daniels”) don’t believe in those. Where other directors may have toyed with concepts like time travel, separate realities running in parallel, and different versions of characters living in separate universes, usually these concepts show up as sparsely-explained excuses for why, say, three different Spider-men have to appear in the same scene. But in a good way?” (The directors apparently appreciated this description).Įverything Everywhere All At Once concerns “the multiverse” - the infinite number of parallel dimensions created by every life decision and the random collisions of sub-atomic somethingorothers. When the publicist asked me what I thought after the screening, I said “I feel like I just got skull-f*cked. There are times it feels like trying to take a sip of content and getting blasted with the totality of the last 40-years of pop culture through a firehose. To describe the experience of watching Everything Everywhere All At Once as “sensory overload,” (as Florida Project director Sean Baker put it recently) is a bit of an understatement. ![]()
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