XPost: rec.arts.sf.written

I had not heard of "Everything Everywhere All At Once" until I
googled "movie times" and it was one of tonight's choices. The
synopsis & Michelle Yeoh sold me.

Michelle Yeoh is Evelyn Quan, an immigrant from her native China
to California's Simi Valley where she runs a, failing, coin laundry
with her husband. Now she is at her absolute wits' end as she is
trying to get ready for a crucial IRS audit, prepare a party for
her mostly estranged father, who has finally deigned to visit, and
deal with her emotionally fragile daughter who is in a relationship
with another girl, a *white* girl, which she is kind of OK with and
kind of not OK with. To make matters worse, her mild mannered
husband is serving her with divorce papers, as much to get her
attention as anything else, and she has never fully realized what
he keeps trying to say to her.

Things come to a head on the elevator up to the disastrous interview
when her husband suddenly starts talking like he is a stranger, and
informs her that, at this moment, he is channelling a doppleganger
from the Alpha universe, and that the entire multiverse is in danger,
and that out of all the infinite number of Evelyn Quans, she is the
only one who has a chance to fix things because, since she is bad
at *everything*, her potential is incalculable.

Unfortunately not only the good guys can channel the abilities of
their infinite dopplegangers; the bad guys can do it as well, and,
oh yeah, her daughter's doppleganger is so powerful and evil that
she exists to some extent in all her daughters all the time and is
the ultimate threat.

Will Evelyn be able to work with the Alphas to repair the mulitverse
and save her daughter from the nihilistic temptations of the
Everything Bagel? Will the IRS shut down her laundry? Will her
family find harmony?

This is a film with moxie and the Hong Kong action-cinema willingness
to throw everything at the wall, in a Larry Niven "All The Myriad
Ways" setting, and see what sticks. Not everything does by any
means, and it goes out of the way at one point to earn its 'R'
rating, but for me it more worked than didn't, the patently absurd
and all. A lot of that is due to Yeoh, still one of the most
compelling and beautiful women in the world, even in a setting which
works hard to show her as aging and unglamorous (except in those
multiverse worlds where she is a movie star or Kung Fu hero). She
is willing here to play the family drama, and the ridiculous scenes
where she is a chef in a "Ratatouille" or in a tumultuous lesbian
relationship with pianist Jamie Lee Curtis in a world where humans
have hot-dog hands. Until the end, it is an often unflattering
role, and she embraces it.

I suspect this film only got a theatrical release because the last
Spider-Man movie and the Dr. Strange trailers have raised the
awareness of the "multiverse" concept in audience's minds, and I
don't expect it to make any money or last long, so if you want to
see it, you should probably hurry.
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

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