Everything Everywhere All at Once

I thought such an unrestrained eruption of creativity was possible only in animation and I’m terribly glad that Dan and Daniel have shown me how wrong I was. On the other hand, no one has ever approached the medium of film with such hyperactive playfulness as they have. While their meta-work is essentially cinematic (in terms of the story being told, the narrative processes and the references), it also personifies the internet in its Web3 phase, with all of its fascinating beauty, pioneering potential, non-linear hypertextual nature and terrifying intangibleness far beyond the possibilities of a single person’s perception. After all, the creative approach of the disparate and yet extraordinarily symbiotic creative duo of Daniels fulfils the principles of decentralisation and blockchain interconnectedness. Everything Everywhere All at Once continues on the path marked out in the field of feature films by the animated movies Spider-Man: Parallel Worlds and The Mitchells vs. the Machines, but its concentration of online popular creativity, both audio-visual and graphic as well as narrative, is breathtaking and rocks the senses by adapting them to the much more production-intensive format of a live-action film. Perhaps it is thus not a coincidence that everything here ultimately revolves around family, though in a completely different and wonderfully imaginative style in terms of family dynamics in relation to the traditional roles of villains and heroes who have to evolve in order to overcome evil. In addition to that, Everything Everywhere All at Once gives Michelle Yeoh the role of her life, in which she puts the experience of all of her previous on- and off-screen roles to good use. (07/15/2022)

What happens when you mix some of Marvel's stinking failed comic book movies with a bit of The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, an attempt at a revolutionary depiction of a story about family values (not) fulfilling their potential and totally WTF (read modern) pop culture moments? An absolutely frenetic travesty, where nobody knows what will happen in five minutes, but at the same time nobody really cares. (03/09/2023)

The creative duo DANIELS were behind the mega-wonderful, extremely interesting, and entertaining movie Swiss Army Man. They raised the middle finger to the hollowed-out Marvel movies this year with their new movie, showing that even with a budget ten times smaller, it is still possible to create a movie with bigger and better cinematic magic and play around with the concept of multiverses. It is a sprawling spectacle, and it is also all, as they say, slightly all over the place so that you might feel quite overwhelmed afterward, and on first viewing, you perhaps are not going to be able even to catch all the details DANIELS put into it. I hoped I would have been more moved and touched by the conclusion, which did not quite happen. However, I have to highlight a really interesting and entertaining movie. I must also say that I have probably never seen a stronger acting comeback than the performance here by Ke Huy Quan (The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)! What a dude! (05/19/2022)

The title doesn't lie. But I was more stunned than dazzled by everything that was happening everywhere and all at once, and I didn't buy on it, even at the end, when it turned out that it made sense and they obviously knew what they were doing and why. If they had only done it for maybe an hour and a half, it would have been more digestible for me. I enjoyed it, Michelle Yeoh is amazing, and the film  straddles genres in a beautiful way, as if was directed and written by Bong Joon-ho... But it's far from him. (02/22/2024)

A woman is trying to pay her taxes… An unexpectedly playful take on parallel universes. Unfortunately it’s unnecessarily long and at times unnecessarily self-indulgent in its weirdness at the expense of a fairly standard story. Swiss Army Man held together much better and it was also more fun. Here they should have trimmed in places and add a little in others to create a coherent ride across what could have been. Kwan and Scheinert put so much into it that I felt terribly overwhelmed by the lines. Michelle Yeoh is fantastic in all her versions and enjoys every one of them. Ke Huy Quan seized the opportunity to play a role tailor-made for Jackie Chan and got the most out of it. I need a few more viewings to take it all in, but for the first time, so far, excellent entertainment that lacks something short of perfection. It’s like a doughnut without the dusting. (01/29/2023)