“There is something out there in the ether”, my best friend, Scott, has been saying… I have been feeling something uncanny in the collective (a Mandela effect of sorts?)
Now it seems the metaverse is all over the place. My theory was that after David Bowie died, we all went fell into some surreal wormhole and came out into a strange Matrix that is like the life we once knew…but not quite. Convergence of an unknown level of consciousness is perhaps the best way I can put it into words without being too out there in the stratosphere. But come on. Everything Everywhere All at Once ….this film blew my mind because I have not related to a film so profoundly in a long….long time. Or have we become so meta that meta is like an unending “inception”, a Jean Baudrillard “simulation” that we are now discovering can be acknowledged in waking life and manipulated through our desires? People are all over the place, cyberspace is chaos… and I thought I was alone in my disorientation.
Let’s do some Film 101 Housekeeping…Michelle Yeoh was brilliant…I LOVE still having heroes. And having men well into their 60s and 70s being “action-heroes..” well let’s just say seeing her kick ass was so awesome to see; like watching women into their 50s training and kicking butt in Wonder Woman, well that really speaks to me. Bad assery amongst women has no age limits lately, finally. I love that Gen X spirit too of “we’re not done yet…” We still have a life to lead. Speaking of Gen X… Lo-Pan, in a wheelchair no less! What a valentine! And a dear Goonie still out having adventures!
Between the graphic matches that would make Kubrick proud and thematic postulations that “our institutions are crumbling” while commenting that through all this social media, political, cultural postmodern nonsense…”none of it matters.” This film is art and frigging straight up from the heart. Old school style. Which is what I crusade for in this never-ending void of vapid tentpole crap Hollywood post-COVID keeps dishing out. (Chalamet…these are the type of projects you should be involved with!)
I feel like something huge is both ending and beginning. The writers read my mind. Or all of our minds? That’s the phenomenon of cinema. The unsaid experience of it moving something inside of you and resonating. When Waymond was asking Evelyn about questioning “reality” that something was a little off…the taste of coffee, etc, I raised my hand “Yes!” I actually saw this the day before I did my taxes looking at the pile of invoices and crap with melancholy, I was like, “no way!”… the serendipity was pleasantly unnerving. And then a guy left when the movie in the movie ended and then the actual movie went black shortly after. All of us in the theater were tripping out at the “movie within the movie within the movie” ending? trying to puzzle it together. Sadly, the AMC worker waltzed in and broke our reverie telling us all the movies in that wing were down and it would be fixed in 5 minutes.
My mind is still “cracking like the clay pot” trying to still grasp the elements I witnessed. I look at my life pre 9/11 and it seems like a distant dream or TV show I once saw. All these versions of “me’s” from the past are combining like a giant Voltron into the convergence of my Self within these multiple realities into what I am becoming. Not having seen the film, you may think I’ve gone mad. If you saw it, you’ll get it. Everything has led up to this moment.
So yeah, did I love this film? I guess you could say that…..
