All right, get ready, here comes a very, very unpopular opinion, I'm sure. It's about the movie "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once"... oh, excuse me, I got that wrong, it's actually "Everything Everywhere All at Once" without any commas, because, I guess, bad grammar is "artsy." Directed by two dudes that happen to both have the same first name "Daniel" so they call themselves "Daniels." Starring the way-overused de facto stand-in actress Hollywood uses for anything calling for a middle-aged Asian woman, Michelle Yeoh, who played a big role in killing Star Trek with her over-the-top Evil Empress character in that franchise. And an irritating, Jackie Chan wannabe who tries to come across as a cute and loveable "simple Asian dude" way too hard and causes actual belly-ache cringes.
Yup. This super popular movie from a couple years ago, critically-beloved, fan-favorited, "modern masterpiece of mind-bending art, humor and humanity" magnum opus, multiple award winning, including Golden Globe and Oscars which only the most horrible person could not love.
Well, I guess I'm horrible. 'Cause that's what I call it.
Look, I gave it a couple chances.
I tried to view this when it first came to HBO Max a while ago, maybe like a couple years now? I'm not sure. All I know is I got only as far as the point where Evelyn and Waymond (I'll get back to his name in a second) are in the broom closet of the IRS office as alternate versions of themselves and they get killed by a zombie Jamie Lee Curtis in a fat suit sounding like a female Bernie Sanders. It was way too "out there" way too soon in the story for me to get a handle on things and I quickly got bored so I said "maybe tomorrow, I'm not into this tonight." Well, "tomorrow" took a couple years but I finally decided to get back to it today.
It didn't get better with age. Or maybe I didn't.
Now I love a good far-out concept movie. David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Charlie Kaufman, heck, even Kurosawa, Fellini and Bergman have all made really fucked up classics that push the limits in film and elevate it to another level of art. And they're just a few. I actually like off-beat shit. I watch a lot of movies so I can get bored with the mundane, ho-hum stuff. Give me the quirky, the unsettling, the bizarre... I can handle it, I'm a big boy.
But I can also sniff out a bullshit artist, or, in this case, artists (plural, despite their desire to be known professionally as a singularity). This movie is pretentious slop.
Multiverses, I got no problem with that. People traveling between multiverses, I got no problem with that. But then when everything is getting all wonky and all the rules are changing as we're going along, I'm starting to get a problem with that. That points to lazy writing. Why have these quirky little rules on how verse jumping works and then allowing characters to break those rules nilly willy? And then to ratchet up the level of humor and quirkiness, start to add all kinds of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy style nonsense albeit with a lot more 12-year-old gutter trash jokes like butt plug trophies, guns turning into dildos, pant-less security guards with their balls hanging down, and of course, hot dog fingers. Lorne Michaels wouldn't even allow this on one of the near 1am skits.
And the racial stereotypes played up in quite negative ways. Funny? Not especially, I don't think.
The above mentioned naming of the husband character Waymond. Is that a common Chinese-American first name? It's not a common generic first name. I think they're trying to play up the common trope of Asian accents substituting the "r" sound with "w" so I guess his name is just Waymond instead of Raymond.
The oft-used trope of the Asian shopkeeper who insults non-Asian customers by calling them names in Chinese.
The "flashback" montage bit where the doctor delivering Evelyn to her father presents her and says "It's a girl... unfortunately." playing up the assumption Asian cultures value females as less desirable.
The general use of martial arts throughout the film is cheaply stereotypical, comical and ridiculous, especially the "pinky finger can be kung fu" shit and seeing the pinky with beefy "biceps" (okay, actually, that was fucking funny).
But it also seemed like this movie couldn't figure out what it really wanted to be. Did it want to be a witty, artsy, thought-provoking science fiction-esque look into life, humanity, the universe, and everything? Or did it want to be an Asian-American Benny Hill? I think it tried to be both and succeeded at neither.
I read on some forums that according to some people they found the heartfelt scenes to be some of the most tear jerking scenes in all of cinema. I'm like, what? First of all, which scenes? There were three glaringly obvious scenes where we were meant to pull the Kleenex out. The grandfather being forgiven for the sins of his shunning of his daughter Evelyn, but not forgotten since her scars would remain with her throughout her life. Boohoo. Evelyn realizing that her life in our universe, though poor and without much glamor, she has her happy-go-lucky husband Waymond to spend it with her. Boohoo. Evelyn and joy putting aside, much like grandfather and Evelyn did, generational differences about how children growing up should live their life, and realizing that their love is deeper and transcends all the other universes. Boohoo. Boohoo. Boohoo. Guess how many pieces of Kleenex I used?
Well I did get one thing out of this 2 hours of my life nearly wasted. If I ever see another movie directed by "Daniels," I'll be sure to click on my remote control right past that motherfucker with my beefy kung fu pinky finger.