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Life Arts    H3'ed 1/30/23

Film Review: Everything Everywhere All At Once

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POster for Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
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This article first appeared in CounterPunch magazine on 1/27/2023

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One Last Chance To Boot the Nothing Matters Blues

by John Kendall Hawkins

What remains is irony. Once irony was a rebel yell; now it is spiritually corrupting, the voice of the damned of neoliberalism. When David Foster Wallace wrote about post-modern irony, he yearned for something better. Post-modern irony became a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. It became not liberating, but enslaving. It became the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage.

- Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Post-modern

One of the more bizarre notions to emerge out of the last few decades is the mind-bender: What if we lived in a multiverse? What if instead of the one barely coherent universe we existed in is just one of an infinite number of universes -- simultaneously? What if you lived in various modes and disguises and forms in all those space-time continuums? Forbes magazine ran a multiverse piece back in 2019, almost like they wanted to rub the gobsmack in our face. Ethan Siegel, wrote:

The Multiverse is an extremely controversial idea, but at its core it's a very simple concept. Just as the Earth doesn't occupy a special position in the Universe, nor does the Sun, the Milky Way, or any other location, the Multiverse goes a step farther and claims that there's nothing special about the entire visible Universe.

If you mess with God (the uber-Brennan of the ultimate IC), then He has six ways from Sunday to pay you back.

The multiverse means we are essentially all strangers in a strange land, truly clueless, and we probably deserve every bit of it for embracing neoliberalism and the postmodern so recklessly. As with the 2007 Ig Noble Prize-winning gaybomb concept, which is what we should be sending to Ukraine instead of Abrams tanks, blowback is your b*tch. And we don't care which way the wind blows there. Personally, I'd love to see Putin come out of the pink smoke with his eyes all p*ssy Riot needy . And Z may be a corrupt actor playing a corrupt president, but he sure knows how to dance. Yep, as Dylan might have observed, he's a real song-and-dance man. And probably be a CIA puppet. Remember how Bill Clinton's pal Boris Yeltsin danced the night away all day everywhere all the time? , actually.

The multiverse is a main character in the recent film Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), which has been nominated for 11 Oscars for this year's Academy Awards. The notion is embedded right there in the title. And the movie lives up to the implications of the notion -- at times it's all over the goddamned place in a way that reminds me of the glory days of the Marx brothers. Zany. Surrealism and absurdism abound. Normal everyday affairs turn into an environment reminiscent of The Matrix, Kill Bill, A Wonderful Life, and GroundHog Day, according to some of the film's actors. I'd throw in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, too. It's a wild ride and a lot of fun to watch.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is officially a science fiction /action / adventure/ comedy. The film is written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. It stars Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians), Stephanie Hsu (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween), Ke Huy Quan (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), James Hong (Kung Fu), and Tallie Medel (Broad City). This core ensemble is wonderful, playing off each other deftly and playfully. But there is also a darker, graver layer that works effectively as a catalyst for humorous mayhem. The IMDB Storyline of the film is succinct:

With her laundromat teetering on the brink of failure and her marriage to wimpy husband Waymond on the rocks, overworked Evelyn Wang struggles to cope with everything, including tattered relationships with her judgmental father Gong Gong and her daughter Joy. She must also brace herself for an unpleasant meeting with an impersonal bureaucrat: Deirdre, the shabbily-dressed IRS auditor. However, as the stern agent loses patience, an inexplicable multiverse rift becomes an eye-opening exploration of parallel realities. Will Evelyn jump down the rabbit hole? How many stars are in the universe? Can weary Evelyn fathom the irrepressible force of possibilities, tap into newfound powers, and prevent an evil entity from destroying the thin, countless layers of the unseen world?"Nick Riganas.

This Chinese immigrant is Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) and the wimpy husband (who wears a bumbag) is Waymond Wang (Quan). Evelyn is not only in a troubled marriage but struggles to keep their daughter Joy engaged in the Chinese-American subculture, as she pursues a 'taboo' lesbian relationship with Becky (Medel). Confucian reigns, but so does freedom. That's how the fortune cookie crumbles.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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