While the sun still spends his fabulous money
For the kingdoms in the eye of a fool,
Let us continue to waste our lives
Declaring beauty to the world
—Kenneth Patchen
Greetings from the far left coast where autumn rolled in cool and damp right on schedule. Yesterday brought an end to a week of drizzling cloud with a cool autumn day brilliant with sunshine. A treasure.
My poem "View from the Deck September 2023" appears in the October issue of Quill & Parchment. I would like to express my appreciation to Quill and Parchment Editor-in-Chief Sharmagne Leland-St. John for her encouragement and support through twenty-plus years of a lovely literary friendship and to Senior Editor Michael Escoubas, who has been a pleasure to work with on this submission.
Cranky memo from the cinema desk. Last week I watched Everything Everywhere All in Once in four or maybe five segments over three days. Each time I stepped away thinking this is really dumb only to return later because mildly curious how it would play out.
I have no quarrel with praise and awards laid on the fine cast: Oscars for Michelle Yeoh for best performance by an actress in a lead role and Jamie Lee Curtis for best in a supporting role, nominations for Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan. Nor, I should add, would I quarrel with a friend who would have given the Oscar for best actress to Cate Blanchett for Tár.
The film is long (two hours, nineteen minutes), repetitive, and tedious. Crude, juvenile humor is dispensed in heavy-handed, hit you over the head fashion. Think Mel Brooks on acid laced with speed. I'm typically good for about fifteen minutes of Brooks before tiring of his gags. This may put me outside the target audience for Everything, Everywhere.
The storyline has Evelyn (Yeoh) and Waymond (Quan) as husband and wife owners of a family laundromat facing a tax audit. Evelyn is overwhelmed by the paperwork, stressed, and generally unhappy with her life. The laundromat is only the beginning. She has a contentious relationship with her seventeen-year-old daughter, Joy (Hsu), who among other things has a girlfriend Evelyn cannot bring herself to acknowledge. A visit from her overbearing father Gong Gong (James Hong) ratchets up the tension. Waymond is a nice guy, kindly, who tries to help but his efforts are ineffectual.
Things begin to go haywire in an elevator up to the tax auditor's desk when out of nowhere Waymond assumes an alternate persona from an alternate universe and dragoons Evelyn into a mission to save the multiverse from the demented, evil Jojo Topaki, who is of course an alternate persona of daughter Joy. Evelyn whirls into and out of multiverses and personas based on ways she imagines her life might have gone differently: Hong Kong movie star, Peking opera singer, chef. For the most part she is battling for her life, or lives, against an array of security guards, cops, and IRS goons, all set within alternate universe variations of the IRS building in fight scenes that go on and on and on. Jamie Lee Curtis is amusing, almost a hoot, as a Republican paranoid fantasy of an IRS auditor who in one of many alternate universes has the persona of a villainous professional wrestling entertainer, her signature move the backbreaker. Luckily for Evelyn, somewhere along the line, she picked up some martial arts kung fu.
The basic elements of the story and the first-rate cast could have made for an engaging film if told without the gimmickry, something that I readily admit would have less appeal for contemporary mass audiences, and anyway is not what writer-director team Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schwienert, also known, it seems, as the Daniels, have in mind.
“How far can I take this, the manipulative quality of cinema?” Kwan explained. “Can I create things that are so stupid, so ugly, so profane, and make it feel profound?…We realized that as long as we went really far with the absurdity, we could go as corny as we wanted to be.” (Shirley Li, How Hollywood’s Weirdest Filmmakers Made a Movie About Everything, The Atlantic, April 7, 2022)
I must have missed the profound. Maybe it went over my head.
The multiverse conceit might, possibly, maybe have been passable with some directorial discipline and judicious editing down to eighty or ninety minutes. As it is, themes of acceptance and reconciliation are all but lost in the incoherent mishmash. When they surface at the end, it is without the emotional resonance that might have rewarded us for seeing it through to the finish.
As you can see Everything Everywhere is not up my alley. As I have said before, that is okay. We do not all have to like the same things. If you enjoyed it, that is great. If it got people into theaters that is great too. I remain baffled by the acclaim. But, then, I remain baffled by much.
Reviews from an alternate universe:
You may have heard that Kevin McCarthy finally defied the House blockhead caucus with a continuing resolution to fund the government at present levels (fiscal year 2023) for forty-five days that passed only with considerable Democratic support. This was followed by some late drama in the Senate. Rand Paul (R-KY) dropped his hold on an earlier Senate bill because the House CR did not include additional funding for Ukraine. Michael Bennett (D-CO) put his own hold on the CR because it did not include additional funding for Ukraine. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Chris Coons (D-DE) reportedly talked sense into Bennett, he dropped the hold, the Senate passed the CR, and the president signed it with minutes to spare. I share Bennett's fury about Republican efforts to abandon Ukraine. The bitter but better course is to keep the government funded and continue the fight for Ukraine in the days ahead. Now who among us thinks we will not be right up to the wire again in forty-five days?
McCarthy's maneuver outraged the blockheads. They are reportedly out for blood. The question now is whether Democrats will vote to preserve McCarthy's speakership when someone makes a motion to vacate. Nancy Pelosi said they should not help McCarthy because he cannot be trusted. She is right that he is not trustworthy, but I do not know who among potential replacements might be better.
Matt Gaetz's personal vendatta against Kevin McCarthy would be hysterical if it were not part of a blockhead caucus campaign of dysfunction and disruption.
Opening day of the House Oversight Committee's Hunter, I mean, Joe, Biden impeachment inquiry did not go well for the Trumpist team saliviating for impeachment on the grounds that "they did it to us." Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark summed up: "The charitable view is that the first hearing was a dumpster fire inside a clown car wrapped in a fiasco" (Comer's Fiasco, September 29, 2023).
New at Portable Bohemia Substack:
Incident at Chapin High, September 19, 2023. The photo on the Washington Post home page of a teacher standing at the entrance to Chapin High School drew my eye to the headline: Her students reported her for a lesson on race…read more>>
Blueprint for the Presumed Restoration of the Trump Regime, September 27, 2023. Plans are afoot to turn the clock back to the nineteenth century with a radical overhaul of the executive branch of government…read more>>
Keep the faith
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
