Everything Everywhere All at once : Movie Review

Dir: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert. Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis. 15, 139 minutes.

The multiverse is having a moment. I’m undecided on whether the decision to chase up Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness with Everything Everywhere All at Once – a film grounded in the same concept of parallel realities, yet made with a fraction of the budget – is foolhardy or ingenious. Either way, David has shown Goliath how it’s done. While Marvel executives huddle around conference tables, braiding together franchises in a grand show of corporate synergy, here’s a film that really understands what the infinite might look like.

Everything Everywhere All at Once exists in the outer wilds of the imagination, in the realm of lucid dreaming and liminal spaces. It bounces off familiar representations of altered states, whether it be The Matrix or the phantasmical films of Michel Gondry, while feeling entirely unclassifiable. It’s both proudly puerile, with a running joke about butt plugs, and breathlessly sincere about the daily toil of intergenerational trauma. That curious mixture of tonal extremes will already be familiar to fans of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, otherwise known as The Daniels. Following the success of their music video for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” – in which a guy smashes crotch-first through several storeys of an apartment building – they made their debut feature Swiss Army Man (2016) about the tender relationship between the survivor of a shipwreck and a farting corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe. With Everything Everywhere All at Once, these filmmakers have fully hit their stride.

At the heart of its story is an ordinary woman, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh). In fact, she’s the most ordinary of women, quietly running a laundromat in the Simi Valley, California, with her sweet, sprightly husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Tensions are high. Evelyn’s father (James Hong) is visiting from China and has always looked down on her decision to marry Waymond and move to America. Her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), has brought her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel) along, already bitter in the knowledge that her mother is about to shove her back in the closet. Oh, and Evelyn’s being audited. “From a stack of receipts, I can trace the ups and downs of your life,” her assigned IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis, delightfully and manically mundane) warns. “And it does not look good.”

Then, out of the blue, a version of Waymond from somewhere called the “Alphaverse” commandeers her husband’s body in order to tell her that she’s the key to saving all reality. Out of all the Evelyns that exist, branching off from every choice she’s ever made, this Evelyn has fared the worst. That means she’s the only one who still has unfulfilled potential. What a beautiful way to look at the world – that a life in stasis is really one of bottomless possibility. We meet quite a few of the other Evelyns: a martial arts star who could easily be Yeoh herself (spot footage of the actor on the Crazy Rich Asians red carpet), a dominatrix, a piñata, a Chinese opera singer, a hibachi chef and a woman with hot dogs for hands. Aided by the freneticism of Larkin Seiple’s cinematography and Paul Rogers’s editing, we shuffle through Evelyns like cards in a deck. There’s an exquisitely constructed homage to Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, alongside full-blown fight scenes choreographed by Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ Brian and Andy Le.

To elaborate any more on the plot would spoil the fun, but the power packed into Everything Everywhere’s punch is that all this elaborate chaos has a distinct purpose to it. The Daniels have fully captured the fractured feeling of modern existence, of never quite being at the wheel of your own life. Evelyn’s task, she’s told, is to “take us back to how it’s supposed to be”. But that proves to be an empty phrase. If every path in life can live side by side, who’s to say any of them is the right one? It’s the sort of philosophy that needs to be tethered to something forceful and absolute – that’s Yeoh, who moves through Everything Everywhere All at Once like she could hold the entire film in the palm of her hand.

You could argue the actor, in a way, has lived a few different lives herself: as the Hong Kong action star in Heroic Trio (1993); the Bond girl of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997); the romcom matriarch in Crazy Rich Asians (2018). But the Evelyns she plays aren’t parodies or costumes; they are a set of emotions placed on a gradient. To say this is a showcase for her talent almost feels like an understatement – the same can be said for Quan, who played Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Data in The Goonies (1985) and then learned the hard lesson of how little Hollywood cares for the accomplishments of Asian actors. If the industry has really changed for the better, this return to acting should mark the first role of many.

From The Independent.co.uk by Clarisse Loughrey

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A discussion on a movie which i saw last week - Prometheus. I was unhappy that the movie didnt explain much at the end and left us on a limb really..... Im not asking for a complete understanding but atleast a glimpse of what the hell is going on could have made sense but the fact that they immediately assume that the humanoid at the end is going to Earth and kill the planet simply just doesnt make sense.

One of the best openings

veyyil movie review

i recently got the dvd version of this movie and decided to watch it,i knew that this movie was a hit but i wasn't impressed by the trailer and didn't go by its box office records cause even dhanush starrer "thiruvilaiyadal arambam" was a hit and that was the worst crap i have ever seen. but i regret my decisiosn now cause veyyil is an amazing movie and it completely blew me away atlast a nice village movie with "bharathiraja style" looks like back to the 80s.This is extremely well made and hats off to the director Vasantha balan ,he has made the best tamil ovie in recent times noe lets go to the review
Where can i start everything about this movie is excellent it starts with Murugesan- Pasupathy (virumandi fame)killing a group of people and threatening them to give him the location of the villain and after that he cuts his throat.at this moment i thought this was going to be another bloodfest like virumandi but i was pleasantly surprised. ,from there pasupathy tells his flashback from his childhood days.
The picturisation of the life of a village kid was wonderful with the song "veyilodu vilayadi" a tune to our ears.We follow the life of murugesan along with his brother and how he flees from his village after the public beating he suffers at the hands of his father.He is a film addict so he basically spends his day by watching movies in theatres with the money he stole from home.He basically loses that money also and starts working in the theatre itself.The scene then moves after 20 years where he is an operator in the theatre and falls in love with the girl living opposite to the theatre ,her parents don't agree to this and her father tries to hang murugesh but she tries to stop him by commiting suicide,murugesh survives.now his life has turned to the worse with his lover dead and the theatre owner planning to close it down as it is no longer financially viable.this forces murugesh to return back to his village but he is hesitant as he stole before he ran away.Left with no other choice he returns to his village,there he finds that his brother(bharat) is doing well with an advertising company and is the bread winner in his family.His father doesnt accept him but his brother accepts him whole heartedly.the rest of the film is about murugesh's mental turmoil of his brother's love for him and his guilt of not being a responsible son or elder brother.there is a parallel love story between bharat and bhavana which provides some comedic scenes not to mention the story of pandi(played by shreya reddy of ss music fame) .then it results in the climax where the fight between his brother and his rival agencies goons resulting in bharat getting injured and murugesh taking revenge at the cost of his own life.finally it ends with the scene where the father is making posters of his sons death anniversary stating that he is atlast proud of his son who he has rejected when he was alive.
i would like to mention certain scenes which moved me like the one when murugesh talks to pandi about that his house will be quite when he is around but lightens up once when his brother returns from work.Also the scene where murugesh tells his fatherthat he wouldnt have run away if he hadnt made to suffer the public humiliation dealt to him by his father. this is probably a lesson to all the parents and how they should try to understand a child's psyche when dealing with them.this is a classic movie for the ages i would strongly recommend it to all and even non tamil viewers to watch this movie cause this is a must see. hope you liked my review.