*About the Protean Depravity Film Festival At Home: When the pandemic started two years ago and social life shut down in Berlin, I decided to start my own film festival at home due to the lack of cinemas and cinematic activities in general. What I did was to basically create a selection of horror movies and watch these at home after which I choose a winner for that season. The winning movie gets a way too long and exhaustive review, and my gushes (the winners of 2021 were Relic and Sator).
Alas! At the end of the last Protean Depravity Film Festival at Home I realized that all the movies that made the lineup were kind of good and very much worth watching, but none of them truly was “the best” for me... So, I decided will do things differently just for this once and declare another movie my PD-Film Festival winner - a movie that I have seen twice in two different cities in May; a movie I saw both times not at home, but at the movie theater; a movie which is not even a horror movie, but an absurdist comedy. You can see that I am stretching my standards quite a lot here, but it shows how much I loved this movie and don't feel bad at all making it my winner. The lucky movie I'm talking about is Everything Everywhere All at Once.
This absolutely, insanely crazy picture, produced by my favorite filmmakers A24, is directed by a collective named The Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), stars the wonderful Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis and mixes elements of SF, martial arts and comedy.
It is almost Chinese New Year but the preparations for the party in their struggling laundromat is the least of the worries Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) and her family have; they need to weather an IRS audit, their conservative and cranky grandfather Gong Gong has just arrived from China, daughter Joy wants her girlfriend Becky to join the new year fest and husband Waymond is about to ask for a divorce because he thinks Evelyn will be happier that way.
During the audit (by agent Deirdre Beaubeirdra played by a hilarious Jamie Lee Curtis) things go out of hand and Evelyn is contacted by a parallel version of her husband who informs her that only she can stop a powerful being named Jobu Tupaki from destroying the multiverse.
The rules of the game substantiate after a lengthy frenzy of martial arts, universe jumping and chases in the halls of the IRS: by fulfilling certain tasks you can borrow the skills and competences of your parallel selves – including kung fu, power cooking or singing to raise your lung volume. The catch is that these “tasks” you need to fulfill are absolutely bonkers; from eating chap-sticks, to confess your love to your nemesis (and mean it!) or blow air into their nostrils, eat or stick various objects into various holes of your body – it is insane folks! If there is anything more absurd and ridiculously fun in this movie than these little tasks, it is the range of parallel universes you can choose from. I seriously witnessed people howling with laughter at the cinema!
Please, be kind.
For Evelyn there is more at stake than the mere end of the world, though - Jobu Tupaki has gotten hold of her daughter Joy and created a doomsday device, the bagel of doom, which will soon suck her in. So begin a race against time and space and many many fights and struggles expanding over many parallel universes that need to be overcome by every single one of them; mother, father, grandfather and daughter. To bring some sort of order to sort this chaos out, the story is very usefully divided into the three titular sections “Everything”, “Everywhere” and “All at Once”.
The flick truly delivers what its title promises; everything everywhere all at once - generational struggles, meaning of life, martial arts, off the charts imaginative worlds, awesome performances, and a heart-warming ending; brought to you in blink and miss pace. I thought that especially that head-swirling pace was a good metaphor for what we are going through nowadays - I don't know if I am the only one but for everybody around me things have been changing and weird or bad things have been happening at an incredible speed for the last three years or so. Apart from the obvious pandemic, invasions and war anxieties, there are so many deaths, divorces, flat or city changes, movings in or out, people falling ill, people losing their jobs, finding new ones, it has been equally crazy in real life as in this movie and I love the message given to us here, come down, calm down, fight in other ways than you have been fighting before.
Everything Everywhere All at Once deserves all the stars one could give and I recommend with all my might you watch it! For those who don't yet dare going into movie theaters, the DVD and Bluray release date is set for June - no excuses! Congratulations for winning the PD Film Fest!
Comments
Post a Comment