Everything Everywhere All At Once

Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) plays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American immigrant who has been ground down by her life choices. The movie begins with her in the midst of a potentially ruinous audit by the IRS, her marriage on the rocks, and her late-teen/20-something daughter miserable and on the knife’s edge of being estranged from her.

Just when things don’t seem like they can get any worse, the entire universe is turned upside down and inside out, nearly literally. You see, Evelyn is the key to saving the multiverse, and she must master he abilities if there is any hope of stopping Jobu Tupaki from ending all of creation.

While Everything Everywhere All At Once is primarily a plot-driven piece, the performances and chemistry of its cast only serve to enrich it, giving us a reason to care about all of the craziness that is happening. I do mean craziness; from nunchuck dildos to hotdog fingers, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a zany and wild ride.

Yeoh’s Wang follows a pretty traditional hero’s journey, even if the mechanism of the journey is rather exceptional, and Ke Huy Quan, who played Short Round in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, gives a beautiful performance as Yeoh’s sweet and loving husband, Waymond.

In the wake of the accolades that Yeoh has been receiving for her part in the film, Quan’s performance has been overshadowed and all but forgotten by the media. Quite frankly, he’s wonderful in this film, effortlessly switching from one Waymond to a radically alternate-universe variant with utter perfection and ease. Just like Temple of Doom, he is the heart of this movie, and it made me feel his absence from American cinema these many years all the more.

That’s not to say that Yeoh doesn’t deserve the attention that she’s getting. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, she shows that she is as much a leading lady as she is a skilled action star. Her performance is subtle and heartfelt, and she effortlessly takes the audience along on her characters’ s emotional journey.

That being said, in my opinion, the hands-down-standout performance in this film has got to be Jamie Lee Curtis (Knives Out, the Halloween series). She may only be a supporting character but she gives a hilariously fun turn as Deirdre Beaubeirdre, a dry and miserable IRS auditor/evil acolyte/WWE wrestler/etc. She steals every scene, chewing up scenery like a hungry vole, and one can almost forget what an annoying Leftist weenie she appears to be in real life.

At its heart, Everything Everywhere All At Once is not a multiverse-spanning sci-fi epic but a deceptively simple story about family dynamics, the road not taken, and learning to appreciate what you have rather than dwelling on what could have been.

However, as good as it is, the film isn’t quite as deep as it thinks it is. Its ultimate message is slightly muddled and feels a bit self-congratulatory, however, only slightly.

With nearly perfect pacing, fun characters, smart dialogue, and an engaging story, if you can forgive its single Woke conceit, Everything Everywhere All At Once is an excellent way to spend 2h and 19m.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Evelyn and Waymond’s daughter is a lesbian, and every time it comes up you can practically feel the writers patting themselves on their backs for their “bravery.” Unfortunately, it comes up quite a bit and the film thinks that it and Yeoh’s acceptance of it are what’s driving the narrative. However, despite themselves, the writers crafted a movie that is actually about loving and appreciating your husband and the importance of making sure that your child understands that your love for (in this case) her is unconditional, even if you don’t approve of or accept all of her life choices.

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The Fabelmans

This was a really challenging film to critique. It’s full of perfect performances and Spielberg’s deceptively easy filmmaking style that drives the rather thin narrative and keeps the viewer engaged despite itself.

Even though it is told from Sammy’s (mostly) teenage perspective, the film’s main protagonist is actually Sammy’s mother, Mitzi, played by Michelle Williams (Venom: Let There Be Carnage, The Greatest Showman). She has an artist’s soul and is a gifted pianist who gave it up to be a mother and wife. Since then, she has been growing increasingly unhappy with her life, and, through Sammy’s eyes, we watch her fuse burn until she finally explodes, taking the family with her. She’s not a good mother, and she’s a worse wife. In one scene, she admits as much, right after she acknowledges that her husband is the kindest most loving man in the world. Nonetheless, the owning of one’s flaws does not justify them, and the already thin narrative nearly breaks when her pedestal isn’t tipped over. Instead, her atrocious behavior is excused. That being said, the story is told from a young boy’s perspective, and he’s a young boy who adores his mother. So, it’s a forgivable conceit. In spite of this, I found myself being drawn out of the film’s reality and back into my own every time the film tried to defend her.

In true Spielberg form, he manages to squeeze every ounce of talent from his actors. To say that nigh every performance is perfect is not hyperbole, so let’s talk about the stand-outs.

Burt Fableman is Sammy’s father and a computer engineer at a time when most people had never heard the word “computer.” He’s kind and loving, and deeply in love with his wife but his pragmatic approach to life leaves little room for art and repeatedly puts him at odds with both Sammy and her. Paul Dano, who plays Burt, is a chameleon, after his most recent role before this one, as the psychotic Riddler in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, his subtle and velvety Burt Fabelman should secure him whatever role he wants next.

How does someone like myself, with so little poetry in his heart, describe perfection? The best that I can do is to say that Williams is present in every nano-second of her performance, offering such nuanced authenticity that it’s virtually impossible to not empathize with her, and was almost enough to overcome my personal bias against any type of cheater…almost.

My favorite performance was given by the venerable Judd Hirsch (The Goldbergs, Independence Day), who plays Mitzi’s eccentric Uncle Boris. He’s over-the-top yet nuanced and gives the movie some much-needed levity while still being menacing. I know that that’s a lot of contradictions but it’s also true. The movie is worth the watch if only for his short time on film.

Even Seth Rogen turns in a notable performance as a sober (as in “not high”), less obnoxious, almost likable Seth Rogen. That’s a true triumph given the last few years of his woke musings.

WOKE ELEMENTS

All of the Goyims in the film (that aren’t extras), with the exception of those in Hollywood (who Sammy idolizes) and a single high school girl, are antisemitic.

The only openly Christian character is a crazy Bible-thumping caricature with a ludicrous religious perspective and a low double-digit I.Q. Be that as it may, this is a semi-autobiographical film, so maybe that was Spielberg’s experience and this ridiculous character is only insulting because of her stupidity and not the storyteller’s bias. However, I find it to be deliciously ironic that, in his attempt to show antisemitism, Spielberg uses gross and cartoonish Christian stereotypes to comedic effect.

One of the main narrative points that the movie tries to make is that art is cruel to the true artist and must leave them alone and miserable. This feels extremely self-aggrandizing and insincere coming from a filmmaker worth a reported $4 billion and who has a nice seeming and supportive family (his porn-star daughter notwithstanding. After all, she was abused outside of the family…can’t really blame that on the “tragedy of being an artist”). “How is this woke,” you ask. The progressive Left often holds art up as demi-god-like, and the sanctimonious pushing of obviously false and flimsy ethical and moral equivalencies in the stead of thousands of years of tradition and tried and tested truth is the epitome of wokeness.

Speaking of which, the perspective that the mother is a heroic character for sacrificing her family for her own happiness is 100% woke garbage.

Near the end of the film, Spielberg had to include a throwaway line that Sammy’s college roommate couldn’t be lived with because he voted for a Republican.

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Elvis

Elvis is a visual masterpiece with some of the most amazing cinematography and scene transitions that I’ve seen since…Moulin Rouge (another Baz Luhrman musical), which is actually its greatest strength and weakness. Every shot, every camera angle, the lighting, every scene’s composition, all of it is meticulous and beyond anything that any other director is doing nowadays. Lurhman masterfully captures the frenzied whirlwind of Elvis’s rise and fall and makes you feel like you’re on the verge of having a panic attack from the moment that Elvis is having his first panic attack all the way to his death.

Regrettably, in Luhrmann’s successful attempt at making high art, he placed a barrier between the audience and Elvis, played by Austin Butler, making it challenging to connect with the characters on any level other than that of The King’s sense of isolation and being overwhelmed. This is probably the feeling that Luhrmann was going for but it’s too much and too fast. So what we end up with feels more like a 2-hour 40-minute montage rather than a cohesive story. This is truly a shame because (back when the world was sane and The Academy Awards were merit-based) Butler could have easily won an Oscar and become a household name with this performance.

Simply put, he is amazing. There are several moments in the film when Elvis suddenly takes charge of the stage and Butler is mesmerizingly electrifying. His ability to capture The King’s grandeur without treating him like a caricature was only marred by Luhrmann’s ADD. In many ways, Butler’s performance reminded me of Joaquin Phoenix in Joker, not because there are any similarities between the characters or the films but because, in that film, Joaquin acts with his entire body and with such authenticity. Between the beats of a hummingbird’s wings and with total sincerity, his eyes, his body, and his entire demeanor would change, and Butler is like that in this movie. One moment, he’s so nervous that you think he might faint, in the next, we see/feel him find something within that has to get out and he explodes. There were moments that I, like the teen girls at Elvis’s concerts, nearly threw my underpants at the screen, and I’m a straight guy.

In the movie’s only relationship that’s given any time to breathe and develop, if only slightly, Tom Hanks plays Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, (aka Colonel Tom Parker), Elvis’s manager. Parker is a Dutch immigrant and carnival promoter who immediately sees Elvis’s potential as well as all of the weaknesses with which he can manipulate him. He’s a shrewd and conniving man who serves himself to the detriment and, ultimately, the early death of his meal ticket.

Hanks, of course, puts in his usual stellar performance, no small feat since he’s buried under heavy prosthetics and a fat suit throughout the film. However I, like many, found his accent to be distracting, especially in the beginning. That being said, this is Tom friggin Hanks we’re talking about, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and suspend my disbelief for the duration of the picture. Afterward, however, I lept headfirst down the YouTube rabbit hole. Apparently, Parker would speak with either a southern accent or his native Dutch, depending on the situation.  As you can hear in the following clip that I found, Hanks sounds within the ballpark of the real thing. It was probably a wise decision to stick to a single accent throughout. In a movie that seemed to only incidentally allows any character development, and jumps from one scene to the next faster than a middle-aged barfly jumps from bed to bed, it would have been far more confusing for Parker to suddenly shift accents without sufficient time to explain.

There’s a handful of other characters in the film who aren’t worth mentioning, not because they were performed poorly, quite the opposite. Everyone gives a great performance but as I’ve already mentioned, we aren’t given enough time to care.

As a whole, I really liked this film. It had some warts but the craftsmanship exhibited alone, is nearly enough to forgive them.

WOKE ELEMENTS

One of the inherent benefits of a biopic about Elvis is that Presley pretty much stayed out of politics, and his cultural involvement was limited to his own. So, there really isn’t much to complain about. Race, race relations, and racism are themes in the movie but they aren’t used as cudgels. The film takes place at a time when segregation was alive and well and race relations were being redefined, and talking about racism in film isn’t intrinsically woke. The wokeness of racism in film comes about when filmmakers manufacture it where it doesn’t exist, or help move the narrative forward. Elvis was in trouble with the law due to his use of, what was referred to as, “negro rhythms,” etc. He did grow up in the projects and almost certainly had black friends, and was unarguably influenced by the black popular culture of the time.

However, there was one blink-an-eye-and-miss-it moment of wokeness in the film. In his first time on national television, The King’s gyrating gets the girls in the studio audience, as well as those watching at home, all hot and bothered, and the filmmakers squeeze in a teenage boy reacting as well.

The post Elvis first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Avatar: The Way of Water

That’s right, humanity has returned and they aren’t looking for the stupidest-named mineral in movie history anymore…because of reasons. Now, they want an entirely different substance for a wholly different reason (but one that’s actually given), and it’s one that conveniently also only exists on Pandora and, even more conveniently, is a substance that only the worst of humanity would wish to harvest. Plus, they want to get them some payback.

Specifically, Colonel Miles Quaritch, once again played by Stephen Lang (Avatar, Tombstone), wants vengeance. “But how can this be,” you ask. “Neytiri killed him in the last film.” That’s right, she did but now he’s back and he’s badder and bluer than ever. Thanks to a retconned MacGuffin, all of Quartich’s memories and personality were downloaded to a glowing flash drive before his death and then were downloaded into an Avatar specifically grown for him, should just such a situation arise. Apparently, his colossal failure in the first film made him the perfect man to get the job done in this film.

If you hope to enjoy this movie, you’re going to have to forgive several plot holes and MacGuffins in the first hour, like the new substance that humans want only exists in Pandora’s oceans, far away from Jake and the forest Na’vi. The only reason that the humans and forest Na’vi come into contact with one another is that the humans have built their base inland and next to the forest that is inhabited by Jake’s clan. It would have made far more sense for them to build their base on or near the water, nearer to their quarry and far enough away from their known enemies that they would almost certainly leave one another alone.

Not enough of a convenient plot-device? Well, how about this, if humanity has the ability to download and upload people as well as make clones of themselves, why wouldn’t they have just grown a regular clone of Colonel Quaritch instead of an avatar? The real reason is for a third-act showdown but the given reason is that Quaritch and his band of reincarnated Marines are needed in order to access and ultimately destroy an area of terrain inhabited by Jake’s clan that can only be accessed via indigenous people, which they wouldn’t need to do if they built their base where it made sense. Also, there are other Marines there, why not just use Avatars? Also, also, Quatrich failed so hard last time that he died. So, why bring him back at all?

While my notes are filled with many more of these convenient plot issues that are peppered throughout the film, two of the most glaring ones are these: First, this movie has the same problem that the last one did, like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley wisely said in Aliens (another of James Cameron’s films), “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” As we’ve already seen, humans have no problem wiping out the Na’vi to get what they want, so why do they insist on fighting in ways that give the Na’vi a chance against them when they could so easily overwhelm them with superior and unassailable firepower from space? The reason is…reasons. Second, one of the major points of tension in the first film was that it took all of the Na’vi coming together and plugging themselves into the Tree of Souls to permanently swap Jake into his Avatar. In this film, humans can just download a dead person’s personality and memories into an avatar like so much bootlegged porn (not that I’d know anything about that). At one point, it looks like these reincarnated Marines might go native, they say that they are going to do as much in order to better hunt their prey but it ends up leading to nothing more than them learning how to fly the bird-lizard things from the first movie.

Now that that is out of the way and you are prepared for just how much you are going to have to suspend your disbelief to enjoy this film, let’s plug our telepathic sex braids in and talk turkey. I went into this movie expecting to absolutely hate it. The first one, while a technological achievement, was boring and the politics were distractingly eye-rolling. Dancing With Wolves did it all better and it only cost $22 million to make. So, when I caught myself enjoying this film, no one was more surprised than I.

Once the interminable 10-minute prologue/exposition dump is done, we skip ahead one year to find that the humans and the Na’vi, led by Jake, have been continually engaging in battles and skirmishes since the humans landed. Quaritch 2.0 has finally landed, so Jake and his family find themselves at the center of the human military’s bullseye. In response to this, Jake, a lauded, fierce, and loyal warrior abdicates his clan leadership so that he might take his family on the run. It is his belief that the humans will leave the forest Na’vi alone once he is gone. This is really dumb, since the Na’vi gives no indication that they plan on stopping their fight once Jake and his family are gone, and our experience with the humans from the last movie shows that they are more than happy to annihilate every last Na’vi in order to achieve their goals.

It’s such a dumb idea that it would immediately make Jake appear weak and cowardly if it weren’t for the movie’s greatest asset, the way that it treats the family unit. Jake is clearly the head of the family, he is loved and, more importantly, respected by his wife and children. The children unironically call him “sir,” and his wife defers to him for the final word on family decisions. I can’t stress enough, how well this serves to draw you in and make you care about the Sullys. No matter how mundane the plot might be, wanting the best for the family raises all of the stakes, and the strength of their family unit is what carries the film’s meaningful emotional throughlines.

So, now the Sullys are on the run, and when they reach the shores of one of the island-dwelling variety of Na’vi, we are treated to, what feels like, a never-ending montage of the Sullys adapting to their new lifestyle (seriously, I think it’s still going on). Then, an hour in, the movie finally begins (that’s not hyperbole).

It’s pretty standard fare, the bad guy wants revenge. The bad guy looks for the good guy. The good guys struggle to belong in their new environment. Lay on a thick layer of boring teenage angst, and then the good guys’ kids do something that makes them friends with the popular kids. The good guys and the bad guys fight one another.

I’m sure that Avatar: The Way of Water is a technical marvel that required computational power greater than that of the sum of all the single 40-year-old men sitting in their mothers’ basements playing WoW right now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the fact that most of the time, it looks like a really cool video game. This is especially jarring when the scenes cut from the Na’vi in their natural environment to humans in ships and bases. It felt like I was playing Wing Commander III, and I half expected Biff to pop up and call me a butthead (follow the above link and that reference will make sense). Some of this may be due to the fact that Avatar 2 jumps back and forth between 24fps and 48fps. So, for wide shots, it looks like The Hobbit, while close-ups show amazing detail like the individual tastebuds on a tongue.

Another issue with both the digital as well as flesh-and-blood performers is that of wooden performances. It’s my assertion that the facial design for the Na’vi is inherently flawed. There’s something about it that leaves their eyes mostly flat and unexpressive, which doesn’t allow you to fully empathize with them. It might be the lack of eyebrows.

As for the human performers, there’s one standout for which the casting director should be dragged out in the street and shot but only after James Cameron swallows 9 millimeters of hollow-pointed lead for creating him in the first place. If you’ve seen the film by now, you know that I’m talking about Spider, played by Jack Champion (Avenger Endgame).

Spider is the orphaned son of the original Colonel Quaritch. Apparently, he was left behind during the mass exodus at the conclusion of the first Avatar movie, and he grew up among the Na’vi and the handful of human scientists who chose to remain behind. Don’t worry if you don’t remember him from the first one, he didn’t appear in it and he’s been retconned into this one to give the new Colonel a single moment of doubt. That is the entire purpose of his presence in this movie. He’s described as “feral’ but the actor is completely out of his depth and the character is completely useless and obnoxious. Every time he’s on screen, his inauthenticity immediately pulls you out of the moment. More than that, he’s unnecessary. The moment’s doubt that he provides could have easily been replaced by a distracting explosion, or a sneeze.

WOKE ELEMENTS

While making this story more about family and one individual’s desire for vengeance than about the human race’s unchecked avarice and the military’s (writ large) boundless bloodlust, the movie manages to avoid the most egregious sins of wokeness which its predecessor committed. That doesn’t mean that it’s free of wokeness.

It’s still heavy-handed with the noble savage bs from the first, as well as having an outdated environmental messaging that rails against something that we’ve all pretty much agreed upon being bad for a century.

Every bad guy that isn’t blue, is white. Virtually, all of them are men, except for General Ardmore, played by Edie Falco (The Sopranos). She’s clearly a diversity hire, because you’ve got to have a woman in charge somewhere, and the preestablished story from the first film wouldn’t allow for Neytiri to be in charge. Falco is a great actress, and her character is a blink-and-miss-her, so you’ll only notice this if you are looking for it (and now that I’ve poisoned the well, you will be…you will be).

You might be able to make the case that Kiri, Jake and Neytiri’s adopted daughter, voiced by Sigourney Weaver, is a Mary Sue, but I don’t think so. While she does have a “tragic” origin and she does have abilities beyond that of the others, she isn’t an unstoppable force who is perfect at everything immediately. There’s something going on with her character, and my money is on her Mary Sue’ing it up in Avatar 3 (The Search for More Money) but in the here and now, she’s only a curiosity.

Finally, there’s a very pregnant female warrior who won’t stay behind during the final battle. Although, they do set her up from the beginning as someone who only barely listens to her husband (the leader of her people). So, it’s within the established framework of her character to be an obnoxious Karen. However, obnoxious Karens who won’t listen to a man who is in charge because she is a strong independent woman are pretty woke.

I struggled hard on whether or not to mark this “non-woke” or not. Our current standard is to do so if a show has four or five non-woke stars. If I could, I would have rated it at 3.8 on the non-wokeness scale. However, I’m not sure if that’s because of my feelings for this sequel or its much more woke predecessor, and since we are in our infancy and we don’t have the ability to give individual review criteria fractions of stars, it gets 4 stars but will not go into the non-woke category. The respect shown to the traditional family almost put it over the top, almost.

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The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin is one of the most gorgeously shot films of the last 20 years. Director Martin McDonagh takes full advantage of the dreamlike beauty of the Emerald Isle and makes it one of the main characters. The ancient fairytale quality of the Aran Islands archipelago (the filming location) serves as a stark contrast to the often emotional altercations between the film’s two leads as well as the exchanges of military ordinance sporadically seen and heard coming from the not-so-distant mainland.

Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, as the estranged friends in question, The Banshees of Inisherin also boasts subtle and nuanced performances equal to the beauty of its surroundings. Farrell plays Pádric Súlleabháin, an unmarried middle-aged dairy farmer who lives alone with his bright and bookish yet miserable sister Siobhán, masterfully played by Kerry Condon (Better Call Saul). However, the standout performance in a film full of standout performances is given by Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk), who plays the local gom (i.e. idiot) Dominic Kearney.

Dominic is developmentally delayed at a time when there was little patience for such things. He’s a lonely young man who has grown up with a horribly abusive father and few friends. Keoghan’s performance is stunningly brilliant. With very little, he manages to convey all of the pain and longing that his character has felt for a lifetime but is unable to fully understand, let alone articulate.

Unfortunately, The Banshees of Inisherin’s only weakness is also a big one. It doesn’t have much of a story. It is a character-driven piece, which is all fine and good, however, it spends all of its 1h and 54m runtime building toward a crescendo that it never quite reaches.

Often, the problem with artistic films is that they rely on a message that the filmmakers believe to be deep and meaningful to carry the audience to the film’s “a-ha moment.” It’s the moment in which the larger meaning of the film is fully revealed and the audience is given a sense of catharsis and satisfaction, even if the resolution isn’t a happy one. It’s too bad then that The Banshees of Inisherin’s final message is so bland and nihilistic.

The Banshees of Inisherin is one of the most beautiful and well-acted letdowns that I’ve seen in a long time. It’s an absolute shame that the finale renders it completely pointless to watch.

WOKE ELEMENTS

**SPOILERS**

The central theme of the movie is that even really nice guys can be pushed too far, and it’s good to be bitter and angry.

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Top Gun: Maverick

Set 30+ years after the events of the original Top Gun, Maverick follows Captain Peter “Maverick” Mitchell, played once again by the redoubtable Tom Cruise. The same independent and rebellious spirit that has made Maverick a legendary fighter pilot has also hamstrung his advancement and kept him on the knife’s edge of forced retirement for years and, much like Puss in Boots, Maverick now finds himself on his last life. Mav’s only chance to keep doing what he’s best at is to train the next generation of Top Gun pilots so that they can complete a nearly impossible mission (see what I did there) of the utmost importance to America and its allies.

It’s rare when you can tell that everyone in a particular movie is thrilled to be there, but that’s exactly what you get with Top Gun: Maverick, and it’s infectious. What’s even rarer is a modern movie that’s not either a pretentious excuse for the filmmakers to put on a sandwich board and screech at passersby, or a soulless piece of AI-generated fluff. While, Top Gun: Maverick isn’t going to win any awards for possessing exceptional depth, it is both unpretentious and thrilling. Its only ambition is to tell a fun and exciting story with some universal themes, a dose of heart, and a sprinkling of cheese, and it delivers and delivers and delivers.

It’s not a perfect movie, the love story between Mav and Jennifer Connelly’s character is completely superfluous. It was clearly originally intended to be between Mav and Kelly McGillis’s Charlie from the original film but McGillis was…let’s say no longer right for the role. However, the two veteran actors are great together, and it doesn’t detract from the film overall.

There are two outstanding performers in Top Gun: Maverick and they are Charisma and Action. Every actor has to take a moment to floss the scenery from their teeth and every action scene will have you on the edge of your seat hooting and hollering like you’re a small child rooting for Rocky as he single-handedly wins the Cold War (not that I have any 1st-hand experience with such things).

If you’ve nearly forgotten what it was like to feel good after watching a summer blockbuster, or you’re a millennial or gen-z’er and have never experienced this, then you must watch Top Gun: Maverick.

WOKE ELEMENTS

None. Before you blast me for not mentioning the female elephant in the room, there are women Top Gun pilots.

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