One of the Best Movies of the Decade: 'Everything Everywhere All At Once'
#171: "Everything Everywhere All At Once," "The Worst Person In The World," Movie Theaters, "Looper"
Edition 171:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: One of the best new movies in the last several years just came out, and you need to make every effort to go see it. Plus, the year’s other best movie just hit streaming! Then I put in a plug for good ol’ fashioned movie theaters, and give a tribute to Bruce Willis. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” it’s a parody trailer roasting Spider-Man.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
If there’s one thing this year’s best movie can wholeheartedly thank Marvel for, it is educating audiences about the multiverse.
A word that would’ve been as nebulous as “blockchain” as recently as a few years ago has now become commonplace, thanks to Marvel mastermind Kevin Feige and a trio of Peter Parkers.
But while the comic book industrial complex has implemented its multiverse as a form of Copy->Paste and or Edit->Undo function for its sprawling cinematic money machine, Everything Everywhere All At Once wields the infinite realms of alternative reality to tell perhaps the most poignant story of 2022.
This cinematic dare-I-say masterpiece comes courtesy of the directing duo known as Daniels, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, best known to readers of this newsletter as the filmmakers behind Swiss Army Man, a movie I love and recommend incessantly that draws either love or hatred from those who oblige.
This movie is their own bizarre, ultra-creative and chaotic version of a “crowd pleaser,” they say, following a seemingly ordinary woman who discovers an ability to access and experience different versions of herself in other lives on a day when all facets of her own life seem to have reached a breaking point — an audit on her business, divorce papers from her husband, a visit from a disapproving father and the introduction of a new girlfriend for her daughter.
She’s called, almost comically, out of these pedestrian problems into an inter-universal war for extinction, using her universe jumping to acquire the skills of the other versions of herself — whether it be kung fu movie star or opera singer or chef — in order to defeat a villain who is hoping to destroy all universes by sending them through a black hole in the center of a truly “everything” bagel.
If that sounds complicated, and a little bit ridiculous, it is, or at least it should be, but the Daniels’ special skill is the ability to use insanely outside-the-box methods to tell very simple human stories.
This is the story of a woman searching for meaning in life, of wanting to make her life into something significant.
And the multiverse is a tidy stand-in for the internet, our own portal into infinite universes, giving us knowledge of everything going on around the globe at the same time and allowing us to simultaneously claim so many different identities — on a given internet day I might pose as a movie critic in the Twitter universe, a sports writer in the Forbes universe, a soldier on a video game universe, and an international traveler in the Kayak universe (for flights and hotels I’ll never book).
Knowledge of all these multiverses, in addition to being exhausting and chaotic, tends to make people cynical (the entire premise of “Rick and Morty”). A world without limits means a world without consequence, and if the world is so big and so chaotic, does anything we do matter?
The true villain of this movie, then, turns out to be nihilism. The easiest and most logical thing to do when faced with these feelings of insignificance is to simply give up.
The validity of that option is never dismissed, but without spoiling the movie it’s clear that the Daniels are softies deep down (the same conclusion can be found in Swiss Army Man, on the theme of loneliness).
All that headiness adds depth to what is otherwise a hilarious and action-packed romp with a more than a few absolute show-stopping moments.
The mix of action, comedy and heartfelt sentimentality could not have been pulled off by anyone other than Michelle Yeoh in the lead role. She’s in the center of almost every frame and absolutely crushes it. The supporting cast is note perfect, all having to play wildly different versions of themselves across universes: Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong, Jenny Slate (hilarious) and especially Jamie Lee Curtis, who absolutely brings the house down as comedic relief. She is electric.
The Daniels, by their own admission, are not cinephiles, and therefore have little use for the grand cinematic tradition. This movie is as much a product of YouTube, music videos, TikTok and cartoons as it is any capital “F” Film.
That makes it all the more suited to 2022 audiences, who are bombarded by differing forms of media in a swirl of information overload chaos on a daily basis.
Perhaps that style means this movie won’t be every every single person, but without spoiling any more I’ll just say it all amounts to not only the best movie of the year, but one of the very best in the past several. It’s hard to think of many movies that are so thrilling on the surface and rewarding upon investigation. Seek this movie out, put it on your watch list, and make the extra effort to see it however you can. You won’t regret it for a second.
Something New
The Worst Person In The Word ($VOD): I raved over this movie in February in my full review. I called it a masterpiece, so I don’t have too much to add now. But I realize this Norwegian rom-com was going to be difficult for most of you all to see in theaters. Well! Now it’s out for VOD rental on Apple and Amazon, so anyone can watch it. It’s gut-wrenching and beautiful and clever and insightful and really makes you think and feel and so many other things! Go watch it.
Something Old
Movie Theaters: Hey, remember those old things? This week I went to a screening of West Side Story as a part of “Rooftop Cinema Club,” a nation-wide company hosting outdoor movie screenings on rooftops in select cities. String lights, snack bar, lawn games, the whole nine yards. It was fantastic, and full! On a week night! The club’s programming includes some new movies but mostly older classics, and people show up in droves.
I think this is the future of theatrical moviegoing. Seeing a movie in a theater is special for two reasons — yes, the giant screen and expensive sound system can provide an out-of-body experience that caters to the giant blockbuster and super hero movies, but also because of that special feeling of a communal experience. The 50th anniversary rerelease of The Godfather, for example, had the highest per-location average of any movie in the country on its opening weekend, and was No. 1 or No. 2 in 50 percent of the theaters where it played, and among the top three in all 156 locations. Because people want to watch that movie in a theater with other people!
Los Angeles is able to host dozens of screenings each month that feel like unique experiences, because of easy access to actors and directors to drop by for intros or a Q&A, but any city can replicate the strategy of making a movie screening feel special, rather than “the 7:10 p.m. showing in theater seven.”
Something to Stream
Looper (Netflix, Hulu): If you subscribe to this newsletter, chances are you’ve heard by now the tragic news about Bruce Willis, who announced this week he was retiring from acting because he has aphasia, affecting his mental acuity. There was a much larger story to tell about his last five years, during which he appeared in 22 (mostly bad) movies and reportedly had major cognitive problems on set.
But we’re here to celebrate Willis, who was the star of more than a few movies that will forever be remembered: Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Armageddon (joking) and Ocean’s 12 (not joking! maybe the greatest cameo of all time). I’d argue another entry on that list from his late-period renaissance is this sci-fi drama from director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Brick). It’s a killer concept for a movie — an assassin from the present (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) gets sent forward in time to unknowingly kill his older self. It’s more JGL’s movie that Willis’s, but Willis definitely harnesses the same appeal that made him an icon: a wry smile, smart-ass banter, and that everyman action hero charisma. Awesome actor, absolute icon. He will be missed.
Trailer Watch: Honest Trailers
This was an especially bad week for new movie trailers, so let me put you all on to one of my favorite YouTube channels. Every week, the channel “Screen Junkies” puts out a fake movie trailer using a voiceover artist made to sound like those cheesy “In a world…” trailers from the 90s. Except the whole video is them roasting the movie in question, often in very clever and insightful ways. I’ve had my entire opinion about a movie changed by something they have pointed out before. Other times I’m just dying laughing.
This week’s target was Spider-Man: No Way Home. It’s one of the biggest hits of the decade and mostly universally loved, except for my review, making it the perfect target for some playful jabs. Enjoy.