Everything Everywhere All at Once

A meditation on nihilism???

A game changer??

A martial arts acid trip????

I'm always a little bemused how people can seize on a film and rev it up to be something sooo good, sooo special, soooo iconoclastic.

If everything is a 10, then we all live in TikTok it seems.

Well not all of us.

Back here on Planet Earth, some very talented people signed on to something a little edgy.

I'm guessing they didn't know where this would go.

But after two plus hours of this visual vomit, this pretentious picture, it seems to me only that:

SOMETIMES A BAGEL IS JUST A BAGEL.

It certainly isn't everything, everywhere or worth the fuss.

I FINALLY sat down to finish watching this movie. I had started it when it first came out to stream and turned it off about 20 minutes in, I found it so boring.

But, last night I decided to sit down and finish watching it to see if it lived up to all of the hype and Oscar accolades...to me, it didn't.

Don't get me wrong, I do feel Mechelle Yeoh did a great job with this very complicated role, so perhaps she deserved it...but the rest of them, ehhhhhh maybe, maybe not so much.

This movie TOTALLY lost my husband, he just couldn't keep up with the different story-lines in different dimensions, and the fast-pace of jumping around from dimension to dimension often game me the "what in the world is going on" feeling. I get it....everything all at once, but sometimes way too much.

This movie, for me, didn't make sense at all until the last 20 minutes or so when, at that point finally, the writers basically spoon-fed the viewer the meaning of the movie, because (in my own personal opinion) even they knew people wouldn't get it on their own.

As for Jamie Lee Curtis, I also think she deserved her Oscar for this one. Hers was also a pretty complicated character in oh so many ways and a huge departure from many roles she has played.

So was this an Oscar worthy movie....eeeehhhh, not so much. Were there good performances? Yes. Was this an original movie? Yes, I can appreciate that too.

Was it over-hyped? Most definitely.

Firstly I should say I thought the actors did put in some very good performances and I can see why they were nominated although as to whether they deserved to beat some of their competitors is another matter.

I have to say I found this film to be tedious and almost unenjoyable to watch. It feels like a film made for the TikTok generation - no overall coherence with nuggets of scenes rammed together. Is this a film I would ever bother watching again - absolutely not.

Yes it is different - in much the same way The Artist was (and who talks about that film anymore?) but that doesn't make it good. It aims for a profound message whilst its style is overwhelmingly superficial. It's a film with little artistic merit or dare I say beauty (I am talking about the scenes and cinematography here not the actors) and it definitely did not move me except to pray it was going to finish.

In short it barely ticks the boxes of what I'd consider to be essential criteria for a great movie. Maybe this is the first of a new wave of this type of film and I am not getting it but when it had finished I felt pretty much nothing.

There's a point here where we are swept up in sensory overload, where so much stuff is thrown at us that we tune it out. I reached a point about two-thirds through this where I couldn't get my mind back in it. Have we reached a point where we have no expectations of a conclusion. When one has someone playing multiple characters in multiple settings, there needs to be something tying it together. The protagonist needs to be someone we identify with who has wishes and hopes that lead us on. She seemed as confused as the storyteller and the husband. I guess I'll read some more about this film and hope with guidance to try to figure it out a bit. Obviously, all these universes and all this actions (way too much battling in my estimation) are leading somewhere. I thought the film had ended about six times. I don't mind being brought back in, but I wish I understood where we just landed. Yes, there is a lot going on and it is violently splashed on the screen. But I ended up exhausted and unsatisfied.

I have trouble turning off my brain. Anxieties, worries, mundane to-dos, even positive things, sometimes feel like they're swirling around in a chaotic funnel cloud and I would like nothing more than to sit in physical and mental silence.

"Everything Everywhere All At Once" felt like the inside of my head. In a world of non-stop, 24/7 news, most of it bad, how is a person like me, who has trouble filtering out things that affect me directly from all of the other things that are just out there happening in general and over which I have no control, supposed to cope?

One answer is to decide that nothing matters anyway and give up caring. But that means deciding that my wife doesn't matter. And that my kids don't matter. And that art, and nature, and things that bring joy to my life, don't matter.

Another way is to decide that some things, ok maybe most things, don't matter, but that there are things that do, and those are the things that make it all worth it. I get to decide what those things are.

The first approach is nihilistic. The second approach is empowering. This film explores both approaches, and I was a sobbing mess at the end.

I will say there were times that I was a bit exhausted by this movie. It throws a lot on the screen and at the viewer, and occasionally it can't keep up with its ambitions. But this was mostly a home run.

Michell Yeoh does terrific work in this, but the MVP is Ke Huy Quan (Short Round from the "Indiana Jones" movies).

Grade: A.