Tag Archives: 2022

Capsules

CAPSULE: BEST WISHES TO ALL (2022)

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Mina ni ko are

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Best Wishes to All is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

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DIRECTED BY: Yûta Shimotsu

FEATURING: Kotone Furukawa, Masashi Arifuku, Yoshiko Inuyama

PLOT: A nursing student returns from Tokyo to visit her grandparents remote village, where she finds they are acting oddly.

Still from best wishes to all (2022)

COMMENTS: We first meet the nameless young star of Best Wishes to All as a kindly nursing student who, based on sinister musical cues and subtle expressions, seems nervous to travel back to the village she grew up in to visit her aging grandparents. Part of her reluctance may be the family’s obsession with happiness. Since she was a young girl, they have been asking her “are you happy?”; her affirmative replies ring uncomfortably insincere. Dim, disturbing memories from childhood centered around bumps in the night and a perpetually locked door in the upper level of the house also give her pause. And perhaps she also foresees her outwardly pleasant grandparents’ odd behavior, such as their tendency to snort like pigs when eating pork.

In fact, their strange habits are accelerating, to the point where the heroine wonders if they might be experiencing dementia. But her own reactions become equally strange as the movie goes on. Relatively early on, the true horror of the situation is revealed; and while, at first, our heroine reacts as expected, then the movie shifts into a more dreamlike register. Beginning with an absurd automotive accident, the semi-logical horror story dissolves into a more impressionistic and nightmarish experience. It goes from ominously eccentric to full-on surreal, ending up in blood, betrayal, and, somehow, a middle aged man dancing in his underwear.

The village nonchalantly accepts the unnatural brutality of the movie’s premise, and the heroine is pressured into believing that this is just the way of the world. The happiness of the lion is the misery of the gazelle. Best Wishes to All posits the logically questionable but metaphorically sound proposition, “does the happiness of one person require the misery of another?” Although the thesis, taken literally, is absurd, the hypothetical is provocative. Who makes the smartphones, coffee, chocolate, diamonds, pornography, and food that you enjoy in your daily life? Wouldn’t you be happier if you didn’t know? Or, at least, if you could pretend that you don’t?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…almost 90 minutes at the intersection of happiness and weirdness.”–Sharai Bohannon, Horror Movie Blog (festival screening)

Apocryphally Weird

62*. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)

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“If we say that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds.” ― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

DIRECTED BY: Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)

FEATURING: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong

PLOT: Evelyn Wang is overwhelmed operating a Simi Valley laundromat, caring for her elderly father, enduring an ongoing IRS audit, and trying to maintain her strained relationship with her daughter. Into this maelstrom steps an alternate-universe version of her husband, who informs her that a rage-fueled supervillain incarnation of her daughter is threatening to destroy the entire multiverse. Only Evelyn, using martial artistry and emotional intelligence that she never knew she possessed, can traverse dimensions and embody wildly different iterations of herself to stave off disaster.

BACKGROUND:

  • The original script was written with in mind, with Yeoh envisioned in a supporting role. Once the lead character was switched to a woman, Yeoh was the only choice for the role.
  • The Daniels cited inspiration from sources as diverse as the films of Wong Kar-Wai, the video game Everything, and the children’s book “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. “
  • The directors began work on the film after turning down an opportunity to work on Marvel’s “Loki” series, itself a show set against the backdrop of a multiverse. The duo worried that other contemporaneous multiverse projects, including Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and “Rick and Morty,” would make their concept out-of-date.
  • The film was released under different Chinese-language titles depending upon the market, including In an Instant, the Entire Universe in mainland China, Mother’s Multiverse in Taiwan, and Weird Woman Warrior Fucks Around and Saves the Universe in Hong Kong.
  • The team of martial arts performers and choreographers includes self-taught brothers Andy and Brian Le. (They are showcased in the fight over a suggestively shaped IRS auditing award.) Daniels discovered them on YouTube and hired them based on their familiarity with Hong Kong-style fighting techniques.
  • Appropriate to the diverse backgrounds of her family, Evelyn speaks Mandarin with her husband but Cantonese with her father, while her daughter’s Chinese is that of someone unskilled in the language.
  • An unexpectedly dominant force at the 95th Academy Awards, snagging 11 nominations and taking home seven statues for Best Picture (one of only a handful of films with science fiction/fantasy elements ever to take the top prize), Directing, Original Screenplay, Editing, and acting honors for Yeoh, Quan, and Curtis. More importantly, Yeoh took home the Weirdcademy Award for Best Actress.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: I know, I know. The hot dog fingers, right? They do make for a superb visual shorthand (sorry) for the film’s breed of weirdness, it’s true, especially when an alternate Jamie Lee Curtis uses her encased-meat digits to tickle the ivories in a rendition of “Clair de Lune.” But is it truly greater than a spectacular bagel that truly has everything on it? Or the transdimensional power of eating lip balm to imbue the consumer with extensive martial arts abilities? Or the introspective moment featuring two rocks as the only souls in the world? EEAAO luxuriates both the oddities of universes different from our own and the peculiarities unique to each realm. Fortunately, the film spares us from having to pick one of them by concocting a spectacular montage of our heroine across all universes and timelines, including some we will never explore outside of this split-second vision. It’s a dizzying triumph of editing and a wonderful visualization of both Evelyn’s dilemma and her power.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Hot dog fingers; rocky relationship

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Everything Everywhere All At Once is a family drama festooned with the trappings of Matrix-style ontological discussions, multiversal alternates, elaborate martial arts set-pieces, and parodies both reverential and cheeky. That mix alone would garner our attention, and the decision to center the story on characters well outside the Hollywood norm —Asian, immigrant, working-class, gay—further pushes it outside the mainstream. On top of that, the glorious and unexpected choice to ground all this mayhem in an atmosphere of playfulness and joy gives the film further offbeat credentials. It exemplifies this movie’s wonderfully deranged logic to employ googly eyes to stave off the apocalypse. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fun.

Original trailer for Everything Everywhere all at Once

COMMENTS: “I thought you said when she says (stuff) like that, it Continue reading 62*. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022) →