Both movies deal, using a huge amount of metaphorical and fantastic imagery, with the communication breakdown between immigrant Chinese mothers living in North America, and their more westernized daughters.
The age of the daughters differ. Red's Meilin is supposed to be 13, while the actress playing Everything's Joy, Stephanie Hsu, is 31 years old, though Joy's age is never mentioned.
The conflicts, though, are very similar. In both cases, the more traditional mother cannot accept her daughter's desire to step outside of the limited range of what's expected of her -- in one case a heightened interest in a boy band, in the other, because she's a lesbian. And both inherited their own strictness from the generation before, a mother in one case and a father in the other.
It's just funny to see such a similar theme explored in the same week in two very different sorts of movies that immediately became my favorite and second-favorite movies of 2022, though which is which may be something I can't truly decide for a while yet. (Plus, both could well be eclipsed by other movies as we go along.)
Here are some other thoughts from my first advanced screening since early December:
Security on patrol
As I was walking into the screening, a large bald man in a suit with a big smile said something to me, which was surely related to the confidentiality requirements during the screening -- no use of your phone, etc. I didn't hear exactly what he said but was happy enough to nod along to it, knowing it would be conditions I could agree to, much as I sign various user agreements without reading all the fine print. (Most recently on our agreement with the person who will market our home in Los Angeles. Yeesh.)
Despite his big smile and friendly demeanor, that man took the security very seriously in this movie.
Now, I'm not really sure what he was trying to prevent. Is it really a thing anymore where people try to record a movie on their phone so they can sell a bootleg copy of it later on? His militant desire not to see any phone screens light up during the movie was certainly not just to protect the undisturbed enjoyment of the other patrons.
How militant? He walked the aisles at least a half-dozen times during the movie, a sort of hulking deterrent who didn't mind if he were providing the same sort of viewer distraction that would be provided by the peripheral sight of a mobile phone screen in use. And when one phone did go on during the movie, he walked right over to that person and snuffed it out.
Needless to say, my own phone was conspiring to run me afoul of him.
I tend to forget during Thursday night viewings that I have an alarm that's set to go off at 6:45 to tell me to take out the garbage cans. It used to be on Sunday night at my old house, and caused the same sort of problem then.
Namely, the supremacy of the alarm is considered to be such that it powers on the phone just to let you know it's going off. There is likely a setting I could adjust so it wouldn't do this, but I haven't adjusted that setting yet, and besides, there might be situations where I'd want to preserve the battery, but I'd want the phone to power on at a designated time.
That designated time is not 30 minutes into a movie, when not only does the alarm go off and power on the phone, but while you're trying to shut the phone down again, all the other audible notifications that have been waiting while the phone was off have to chirp out to you. At least the sound of the alarm itself is a peaceful one.
As I tried in vain to power the phone back off again, I noticed the security guard eyeing me. Given how quickly he later squelched the other phone user, I was surprised my frustrated wrestling with my phone didn't draw him over. But because I didn't want to draw him over, I eventually lost the wrestling match, and instead of getting the phone to shut off again, which requires holding down a button for longer than you should need to, I hastily stuffed it in my backpack, where I hoped at least the lining of the bag would smother future noisy emissions.
So annoyed was I by this that it kind of ruined my next five minutes of the film, and for a minute I worried I wouldn't recover my equanimity. Fortunately, this movie is good enough -- and it's one of those movies that gets better, rather than worse, the longer it goes -- that my mental order was soon restored.
Ke Huy Quan returns
I can't remember, if I ever knew, why the erstwhile Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data from The Goonies gave up acting, but presumably it had something to do with him no longer being a cute young kid, and the movies no longer welcoming him after a certain point. In any case, he has no credits whatsoever between 2002 and 2021.
Well welcome back, Ke Huy Quan.
It was lovely to see the boyish charm still present in this 50-year-old man. He's still got the same voice we remember from those movies, he's still got a ton of energy, and he still makes you smile.
He's also sort of this film's secret weapon. Michelle Yeoh is its main weapon, and awesome secondary weapons include the aforementioned Hsu, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis as we've never seen her before. But I don't think this would be the delight it is without Quan.
Is it too late for him to cameo in the next Indiana Jones movie?
The easiest way to get me
This is not giving anything away about the movie, not anything you probably couldn't guess yourself, but I'll be vague about it anyway.
If you really want to bring me to the edge of waterworks, all you have to do is get a character to renounce their previous prejudices.
I suppose this is true in multiple spheres, but I notice it most often when a character gets over their intolerance of homosexuality, as happens in this movie.
You'd think I were gay or something, with the way I'm always pushed to and beyond the threshold between not crying and crying when a character embraces the LQBTQI person in their life. Except that I don't have to be, because cinema is that empathy machine that Roger Ebert described, where you can put yourself in the shoes of others, and vicariously experience the powerful emotion they would be feeling in that moment.
One of the most powerful instances I can think of this happening is in Kissing Jessica Stein -- which, if we're being honest, is really a heterosexual movie masquerading as a gay movie. That doesn't change the power of a moment where Tovah Feldshuh's character is comforting her daughter, played by star Jennifer Westfeldt, and her voice hitches for a moment as it becomes clear she understands something we didn't know she knew: her daughter has been seeing a woman. "I think she seems like a very nice girl," she says.
I'm getting verklempt. Please, go talk amongst yourselves.
I don't think the moment or moments in Everything Everywhere All at Once are as profound or as smartly executed, but that just shows you what an easy target I am.
Daniels are back
This film is directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who directed a previous top ten movie for me, 2016's Swiss Army Man. I obviously loved that at the time for how far it went outside the box of our expectations, and still feel fondly toward it even though it couldn't maintain that high level for me on the second viewing.
Everything Everywhere All at Once has the same sort of rule-shattering craziness in it, and though the core questions are perhaps a bit more traditional than those in Swiss Army Man, the execution is equally joyous, colorful, surprising and hilarious.
I realized while watching it that these guys made a movie in between, The Death of Dick Long in 2019, and I never really heard anything about it, nor noticed it playing in a theater near me. It apparently wasn't a dud, either, as Wikipedia shows the movie having a 74% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Guess I better seek that out, as any chance to luxuriate in their distinct cinematic vision is a good one.
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