Listen now | Today’s movie is Everything Everywhere All At Once directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. This movie is joyfully absurd, and one of the most creative movies we’ve seen in a long time. Unsurprisingly, Casey takes issue with a few plot mechanics, but we both agree that this movie is truly unique and really well directed.
34:00 he was only looking for his wife, because all the versions of her were getting killed by the daughter, the daughter was looking for the mother because she was looking for any version of her mother to do the mind fracturing torture thing she was subjected to, and was only looking for the most capable mind of actually going through that process and gaining the "experience every reality" power, the daughter never intentionally killed her alternate mothers, all of those just perished because they were too weak, or they didn't have enough potential.
I think universes and adventures here are a metaphor for what mother and daughter go through emotionally in the real life. The laundromat universe is the real life. There’s small scene closer to the end where they make up at the parking lot. It’s easy to miss, but I think that’s what really is going on.
Otherwise it would be really hard to explain the continuity with e.g. Jamie Lee Curtis’s character (they hit her, destroy the building, then she comes to the party, then they come to the office again)
The specific version of the mother is important. It needed to be a depressed version of the mother to trigger the shattering. And the chubu chubaki was the daughter in a full depression, so she was pulling at straws, looking for a depressed version of the mother(shattering) to go down with her.
But in the movie, instead, the father remains cheery and stable, so he teaches the mother to be cheery, which then they both pull the daughter out of the depression.
I was bored for the first fifteen minuets for this movie and when I first saw the sausage finger universe I thought it was dumb. The movie slowly won me over and by the end of the movie I was so invested and trusting of where we were going that when they showed the rocks I was giving them the benefit of the doubt and felt like my trust was rewarded with great payoffs. I thoroughly enjoyed the comedy and absurdity of this film and it has become one of my favourites.
Casey seems be hung up on the technology stuff like the wheelchair but one thing that helped me resolve some of that is the starting universe isn't necessarily our universe and you only see a laundromat and an office so you don't even get much of an idea of what does / doesn't exist in it.
Super interesting podcast as always. I never thought of Zemeckis that way and I think the set pieces analogy works well with EEAAO. I understand that you are asking that it goes deeper in a direction or another, I think that's what bothered me as well. But I like the themes that are hinted throughout and I also like the idea of absurdity, I just wished for more commitment to some of the ideas. I like absurdism in general but making stronger points (per example writer Daniil Kharms).
My first impression of the movie is that while it is put together very well, I wished that in terms of visual grammar it would be much more daring. There's a director named Ryan Trecartin who does similar absurdist videos, but he takes tik-tok visual aesthetics and pushes the editing and the angles of the shots a lot more, it gets almost uncomfortable to watch. So it makes you feel how aggravating the current visual culture is. Everything Everywhere does not go there as much so to me it felt more like advertising visual grammar, fast-paced and polished.
I don't want to bring him up all the time, but Godard made something very similar in the 60s with Une femme est une femme. Godard being himself, the movie critiques spectacle and how it bleeds into everyday life. I think there's some of that too in Everything Everywhere (like when the central character punches the IRS person at the beginning of the movie) but it's played more as a joke. In Godard I think you feel more the dissonance between fantasy and real life and his movie is also very ugly, more like Trecartin, so the overall experience is more abrasive I think.
This was a truly entertaining movie that I never expected to enjoy this much. The directing was top notch right from the start, the camera angles, use of reflections, cutaways, the use of music (at one point they played a rock version of Arabesque), the visual comedy was another refreshing thing to see in a movie again. I was not surprised to learn they also had made Swiss Army Man, they seem to be able to do a nice mix of silly visual comedy and serious subjects, by making the absurd so normal and adaptable by the characters. The viewer knows it is absurd but what amplifies it is how serious the characters are within the absurdity. I have a few remarks regarding what you guys talked about:
To touch on the earpiece thing, I agree with Anna that it was a tangible tool to visually establish the characters and clarify that they are verse jumping. However, I also agree with Casey. It was never explained, and it's not like its current form is the only way that tool could've been used. They could've made the characters' eyes have a different color, (the mom's become black more than once) or use the circle thing on the forehead, which by the way, was already established at the beginning of the movie as a distinguishing factor. They could've gone for many different options that doesn't require a weird inexplicable device out of nowehere, and STILL have a clear visual cue.
The way I understood it about the girl finding this version of her mom is that she isn't looking for this exact version per se, and more like she's going through them all looking for a mom that can become, or is, like her.
This was a nice high after Dune, a needed refreshing change in anticipation of the next one, oh boy The Batman. I have a long list for that already.
I think upon further reflection my main complaint with this movie is I just wanted them to go deeper _somewhere_. Everything in this movie just barely gets by (the emotional stuff, the sci-fi, etc.) and so it has to basically skate on its visual slickness and inventiveness. And it _does_, but it fails to have any real staying power as a result. If they'd gone back and done another pass on the script and said "let's really get into some of this", I think this could have been a _great_ film instead of merely a fun thing to watch, so it's a bit disappointing in that respect.
As I said in the podcast, though, major props to the producers and directors for making this on $25 million. It looks better than films costing ten times that much, and that is impressive.
Terminator is just vastly better in this regard, and in general most sci-fi that I think is good tends to be. It's not about explaining everything, it's about feeling like there _is_ an explanation for everything.
EEAAO is particularly frustrating because the more you think about it, the less it makes sense, which is the opposite of what I want in something that purports to have concrete explanations for things (which this movie does). For example, the father ends up having a super-advanced robotic wheelchair. Who built that, exactly?? Are we meant to believe that the father verse-jumped a long time ago into this world and has just been pretending to be a doting old man the entire time while he had a secret tech lab in his basement the whole time?
It's just nonsense. When I watch movies, I want them to have solid underpinnings for the things they decide to do. If the movie is just going to be "the stuff happens in this scene, don't think about it, just watch it and move on to the next scene", to me that is more just a music video, and not a movie, and I don't really like music videos. Movies can decide to leave things vague or unexplained, and that's totally fine - just don't _pretend_ to explain something and have that explanation obviously not work.
If the central conceit of the movie is that there are infinitely many universes, then if they do very improbable things with those universes, to me that is OK because there _is_ an explanation for it, and it is consistent with the rules they have set out. That those universes are infinitesimally likely (why would a hot dog fingers world ever create a piano where the piano was at arm-level??), it still is _an_ explanation.
The problem I have with movies like this is that they _then also do things that have nothing to do with the conceit_. Someone just wanted grandpa to show up in a robotic wheelchair, so he does. But there is no _possible_ explanation for it at all - it's not that it is extremely unlikely, it is _literally arbitrary_.
That's really where I part ways with movies - not when something is very implausible, but rather when it is actively impossible according to what they have explained.
34:00 he was only looking for his wife, because all the versions of her were getting killed by the daughter, the daughter was looking for the mother because she was looking for any version of her mother to do the mind fracturing torture thing she was subjected to, and was only looking for the most capable mind of actually going through that process and gaining the "experience every reality" power, the daughter never intentionally killed her alternate mothers, all of those just perished because they were too weak, or they didn't have enough potential.
RE: why this mother specifically?
I think universes and adventures here are a metaphor for what mother and daughter go through emotionally in the real life. The laundromat universe is the real life. There’s small scene closer to the end where they make up at the parking lot. It’s easy to miss, but I think that’s what really is going on.
Otherwise it would be really hard to explain the continuity with e.g. Jamie Lee Curtis’s character (they hit her, destroy the building, then she comes to the party, then they come to the office again)
@30 min,
The specific version of the mother is important. It needed to be a depressed version of the mother to trigger the shattering. And the chubu chubaki was the daughter in a full depression, so she was pulling at straws, looking for a depressed version of the mother(shattering) to go down with her.
But in the movie, instead, the father remains cheery and stable, so he teaches the mother to be cheery, which then they both pull the daughter out of the depression.
My main criticism is that they tried to do too much in too many places all at the same time.
I was bored for the first fifteen minuets for this movie and when I first saw the sausage finger universe I thought it was dumb. The movie slowly won me over and by the end of the movie I was so invested and trusting of where we were going that when they showed the rocks I was giving them the benefit of the doubt and felt like my trust was rewarded with great payoffs. I thoroughly enjoyed the comedy and absurdity of this film and it has become one of my favourites.
Casey seems be hung up on the technology stuff like the wheelchair but one thing that helped me resolve some of that is the starting universe isn't necessarily our universe and you only see a laundromat and an office so you don't even get much of an idea of what does / doesn't exist in it.
Super interesting podcast as always. I never thought of Zemeckis that way and I think the set pieces analogy works well with EEAAO. I understand that you are asking that it goes deeper in a direction or another, I think that's what bothered me as well. But I like the themes that are hinted throughout and I also like the idea of absurdity, I just wished for more commitment to some of the ideas. I like absurdism in general but making stronger points (per example writer Daniil Kharms).
My first impression of the movie is that while it is put together very well, I wished that in terms of visual grammar it would be much more daring. There's a director named Ryan Trecartin who does similar absurdist videos, but he takes tik-tok visual aesthetics and pushes the editing and the angles of the shots a lot more, it gets almost uncomfortable to watch. So it makes you feel how aggravating the current visual culture is. Everything Everywhere does not go there as much so to me it felt more like advertising visual grammar, fast-paced and polished.
I don't want to bring him up all the time, but Godard made something very similar in the 60s with Une femme est une femme. Godard being himself, the movie critiques spectacle and how it bleeds into everyday life. I think there's some of that too in Everything Everywhere (like when the central character punches the IRS person at the beginning of the movie) but it's played more as a joke. In Godard I think you feel more the dissonance between fantasy and real life and his movie is also very ugly, more like Trecartin, so the overall experience is more abrasive I think.
Looking forward to listening the podcast!
This was a truly entertaining movie that I never expected to enjoy this much. The directing was top notch right from the start, the camera angles, use of reflections, cutaways, the use of music (at one point they played a rock version of Arabesque), the visual comedy was another refreshing thing to see in a movie again. I was not surprised to learn they also had made Swiss Army Man, they seem to be able to do a nice mix of silly visual comedy and serious subjects, by making the absurd so normal and adaptable by the characters. The viewer knows it is absurd but what amplifies it is how serious the characters are within the absurdity. I have a few remarks regarding what you guys talked about:
To touch on the earpiece thing, I agree with Anna that it was a tangible tool to visually establish the characters and clarify that they are verse jumping. However, I also agree with Casey. It was never explained, and it's not like its current form is the only way that tool could've been used. They could've made the characters' eyes have a different color, (the mom's become black more than once) or use the circle thing on the forehead, which by the way, was already established at the beginning of the movie as a distinguishing factor. They could've gone for many different options that doesn't require a weird inexplicable device out of nowehere, and STILL have a clear visual cue.
The way I understood it about the girl finding this version of her mom is that she isn't looking for this exact version per se, and more like she's going through them all looking for a mom that can become, or is, like her.
This was a nice high after Dune, a needed refreshing change in anticipation of the next one, oh boy The Batman. I have a long list for that already.
Thanks for sharing!
I think upon further reflection my main complaint with this movie is I just wanted them to go deeper _somewhere_. Everything in this movie just barely gets by (the emotional stuff, the sci-fi, etc.) and so it has to basically skate on its visual slickness and inventiveness. And it _does_, but it fails to have any real staying power as a result. If they'd gone back and done another pass on the script and said "let's really get into some of this", I think this could have been a _great_ film instead of merely a fun thing to watch, so it's a bit disappointing in that respect.
As I said in the podcast, though, major props to the producers and directors for making this on $25 million. It looks better than films costing ten times that much, and that is impressive.
Terminator is just vastly better in this regard, and in general most sci-fi that I think is good tends to be. It's not about explaining everything, it's about feeling like there _is_ an explanation for everything.
EEAAO is particularly frustrating because the more you think about it, the less it makes sense, which is the opposite of what I want in something that purports to have concrete explanations for things (which this movie does). For example, the father ends up having a super-advanced robotic wheelchair. Who built that, exactly?? Are we meant to believe that the father verse-jumped a long time ago into this world and has just been pretending to be a doting old man the entire time while he had a secret tech lab in his basement the whole time?
It's just nonsense. When I watch movies, I want them to have solid underpinnings for the things they decide to do. If the movie is just going to be "the stuff happens in this scene, don't think about it, just watch it and move on to the next scene", to me that is more just a music video, and not a movie, and I don't really like music videos. Movies can decide to leave things vague or unexplained, and that's totally fine - just don't _pretend_ to explain something and have that explanation obviously not work.
I mean, sort of, but not really?
If the central conceit of the movie is that there are infinitely many universes, then if they do very improbable things with those universes, to me that is OK because there _is_ an explanation for it, and it is consistent with the rules they have set out. That those universes are infinitesimally likely (why would a hot dog fingers world ever create a piano where the piano was at arm-level??), it still is _an_ explanation.
The problem I have with movies like this is that they _then also do things that have nothing to do with the conceit_. Someone just wanted grandpa to show up in a robotic wheelchair, so he does. But there is no _possible_ explanation for it at all - it's not that it is extremely unlikely, it is _literally arbitrary_.
That's really where I part ways with movies - not when something is very implausible, but rather when it is actively impossible according to what they have explained.