Everything Everywhere All at Once

When I first saw Everything Everywhere All at Once when it first came to theaters, I left the theater absolutely gobsmacked. I was astounded and confused but I loved it. I had never seen a film like that before, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The film was wild, with kung fu fighting, crazy things happened in nearly every scene, yet it was profound and contained a message about kindness, acceptance and healing. There were people with hot dog fingers and people exploding into confetti, a hibachi chef with a raccoon hidden under his hat! At times it was funny and silly, even with cartoon sound effects, but then somber and serious. It sounds like it would be a big mess, but it wasn’t. It was perfect. 

The story centers around Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a middle aged Asian American woman who runs a laundromat with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). On this particular day, she has a lot on her plate: her father is in town, they’re throwing a Chinese new year party tonight, her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is wanting to introduce her girlfriend to her grandfather and they have a meeting with an IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis) about being audited. To complicate things even further, Waymond starts acting very strange as they get to the IRS building. He says he is from another dimension and together they must save the world. Also, Waymond wants a divorce. 

The multiverse activity we encounter in EEAAO makes Dr. Strange and his movies look like child’s play. We don’t see a lot inside each multiverse, but rather who Evelyn is within them based on different decisions she made throughout her life. She sees who she would have become if she had not run off with Waymond to get married and live in America and many other versions of herself. When Evelyn understands her place in the multiverse more and is better at verse-jumping she realizes that a version of her daughter is the evil that must be defeated before all the universes are sucked into her everything bagel (it’s like a black hole, but way cooler). Rather than kill/sacrifice her daughter to save the multiverse, Evelyn tries to become as strong as her evil counterpart by verse-jumping to gain all sorts of abilities. 

All the actors in this film do a phenomenal job making us believe all the insanity happening in this film. Michelle Yeoh makes Evelyn relatable and surprisingly bad-ass once she gets the hang of verse jumping. In the beginning, Evelyn is a bit cold, no nonsense and bossy, but by the end she’s transformed into someone so much more strong, confident and reckless. Ke Huy Quan switches back and forth from normal wimpy Waymond to bad-ass alpha Waymond with hilarious ease. One moment he’s sweet and dorky, and the next he’s taken off his fanny pack and beat up a slew of police officers with it. Stephanie Hsu has to embody Joy as an awkward young adult who is running out of steam trying to be enough for her mother, but also as Jobo, an evil carefree egomaniac. I imagine filming that first scene with Jobo in the hallway must have been so fun for Hsu. And Jamie Lee Curtis is almost unrecognizable in her fat suit and then is wild as she verse-jumps, fights and plays the piano with her toes in the surprisingly tender hot dog finger universe. 

Everything Everywhere All at Once is nominated for a whopping eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are jointly nominated for best director. Michelle Yeoh is nominated for lead actress, Ke Huy Quan for supporting actor. Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis are both nominated in the supporting actress category. This is each actor’s first Oscar nomination. The film’s other nominations include best costume design, film editing, costume design, original screenplay and original song (This Is a Life). I wouldn’t mind seeing EEAAO sweep and take home ten little Oscars. 

This film is so ambitious and took a lot of risks. All the visual effects were done by a team of nine people, including the directors, who simply learned how to pull these tricks off with online videos. It takes the multiverse genre to new, unexpected heights. It’s an amazing mix of nearly every film genre rolled into one with the actors doing amazing stunts, physical comedy and heart-tugging emotional moments. And it’s weird. I mean as one point Evelyn has to fight two men with strangely phallic trophies stuck up their butts. And yet it works. It’s visually beautiful. It’s funny. It’s sincere. It’s compelling. It’s crazy. It’s amazing. It really is Everything Everywhere All at Once. 

“Your stupid plan to somehow save your daughter has managed to piss off everyone in the multiverse. But it just might work.”

Halloween Kills

Forty years after that fateful Halloween night that killed Laurie’s friends, Michael comes home again. This time, the people of Haddonfield are ready to fight back.

The movie picks up just at the end of Halloween (2018) and skims over what happened there. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) has a daughter, Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) now. It seems their family home became a trap for Michael earlier that night when he finally hunted Laurie down, complete with bars that sealed him into the basement. Shown through some messy flashbacks, the family set fire to the house, believing that they finally killed him. After all, there was no way anyone could survive that, right? 

The poor firefighters called to the scene soon become Michael’s next victims, their corpses sprawled out in front of the burning house. Visually, it’s pretty cool and we enjoy how gruesome it is. But I guess people are not happy that firefighters are being so brutally murdered in movies. Decades of innocent teenage girls can die, but it’s fictional firefighters we can’t allow, right?

Meanwhile, at the local bar, survivors of Michael’s initial attack reminisce and relax until the local TV starts reporting about the house fire and the slain firefighters. Now middle aged Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) and his friends realize Michael is back and prepare to fight back. Fueled with vengeance and Halloween booze, they take to the streets. In an attempt to protect kids at the playground, one group gets picked off one by one. Their deaths bring horror fans joy.

We catch up with Laurie and her family at the hospital, where Laurie undergoes surgery for wounds we assume Michael inflicted. As Michael’s attacks add up, it fills the emergency room. The hospital becomes overrun with victims, people searching for loved ones and the vengeful mob led by Tommy Doyle. And soon Micheal isn’t the only one taking innocent lives.

Two characters I really enjoyed and was almost sad to see die were the gay couple who reside in the old Myers’ house, Big John (Scott MacArthur) and Little John (Michael McDonald). We see they’re good, quirky, sweet people, even running out to help kids they thought were in trouble. But sadly, they aren’t good at locking doors. I could watch a whole series about how they decided to live in that house and then renovated it themselves (or with some helpful lesbian friends who knew to be out of town on Halloween). But seriously, who would live in an infamous murderer’s childhood home? 

Honestly, Halloween Kills is not a good, well thought out, or at all suspenseful horror film, but I still enjoyed it. What can I say? I love the gore, the horror and Michael’s almost random killings as he makes his way back home.

“Evil dies tonight!”

The Fog

In John Carpenter’s The Fog, the town of Antonio Bay is about to celebrate its centennial anniversary.  Around midnight, a group of children listen to the story of a doomed ship, the Elizabeth Dane, that sparked the town’s establishment.  Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) finds an old journal, detailing a conspiracy by perpetrated by the town’s founders.  A young woman hitchhikes into town.  Windows break, cars honk and all sorts of objects start moving on their own all around Antonio Bay.  The local late night DJ broadcasts, looking out over the water from the lighthouse.  And she watches a mysterious, glowing fog roll in.

Fog is perfect tool for horror.  It’s physical, yet has a mysterious quality that naturally intrigues us.  It obscures the most normal places enough to make it suddenly seem spooky. Fog hides people, the good and the wicked.  It hides them from finding each other, letting those lost in the element become easy prey.  And it just looks great.

This fog, this beautiful glowing fog, brings something with it.  It brings the some ghoulish form of the dead sailors from the Elizabeth Dane into town, looking for revenge.  Shrouded by the fog, we feel like the ghosts within are very physically real.  They murder and do physical damage.  We never get an unobscured look at these undead, even without the fog, and that’s probably a good thing.  Horror is almost always better maintained when there is some mystery to the monster.

The terror is nothing without a great cast to hold it up.  Here we have Adrienne Barbeau as the DJ, reporting the whereabouts of the fog, and what’s happening to the entire town like a narrator trying to keep her cool, and sometimes losing it.  There is her son, Andy (Ty MItchell), a loveable innocent kid who happens to be in the middle of it all.  Then there is Nick (Tom Atkins) the truck driver and his hitchhiking new lover Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis) who come to the boy’s aid.  And finally, Father Malone seems to understand what the vengeful ghouls want, and may the only person who can stop them.

I believe that The Fog is a wonderful and underrated horror movie.  Visually, it looks great and intriguing, which is quiet an accomplishment for an 80s film.  The story is simple, with a broad range of characters to hold it up and fill it out.  Best of all, the moments of horror are not campy of left to flimsy looking effects, they work and are enjoyably scary.  There are even a few classic jump moments that turn and become more than a classic jump moment.  The Fog is fun for any horror fan and a true modern classic.

“The celebration tonight is a travesty.  We’re honoring murderers.”

Halloween

The first time I watched Halloween in its unedited entirety, I was about thirteen and babysitting my siblings.  Yes, perfect.  This was the late 90s, and the early days of parental passwords blocking television programs.  My technology-deficient dad needed my help to set the password, so I knew how to watch anything I wanted.  While my brother was excited to see the original slasher film, I remember my sister protesting, saying it was too scary and she’d tell on me.  Oh, please.  Like any smart oldest child, I asserted my dominance and threatened some sort of blackmail I had been saving on her.  Victory was mine that night, and we were all sufficiently scared that runaway maniacs could be roaming around the neighborhood.

John Carpenter’s Halloween from 1978 focuses on a small suburban town, its escaped manic’s return home after fifteen years, and a few teenage babysitters.  Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the bookish sitter, covering for her friends while they run off to fool around with their boyfriends.  She is also the more observant and skittish, noticing the eerie presence following the girls all day.  While Michael stalks the girls and moves in closer, his doctor (Donald Pleasence) is trying to find him, before it’s too late.

The film establishes the legend of Michael Myers perfectly.  It opens with a first person look at the murder from six year old Michael’s vantage point.  It’s perfectly creepy and brutal and seems to lack a soul.  In the present, the Myers house looks old, spooky and abandoned.  Local kids say it’s haunted and dare each other to go in on Halloween night.  That moment when a kid runs into Michael outside the school, we don’t know if there is a recognition, but he runs like he had just seen the boogeyman he was just talking about.

One of my favorite scenes is just a small moment towards the end, so please, if you have not seen Halloween, skip to the next paragraph, major spoilers!  I remember perfectly the first time my sister saw this moment, when Laurie thought she had killed Michael upstairs.  She tells the kids to run to a neighbor’s house to call the police and sits in the doorway crying and collecting herself.  Suddenly, we see Michael sit up behind her!  On cue, my sister and I proceeded to freak out, desperately trying to warn Laurie of the danger behind her.

In my opinion, Halloween is the best slasher film out there.  The situation is perfect; teenage babysitters with their guard down in their safe town and a manic is stalking them.  We love to see Michael stalk, biding his time building his eerie presence and our anticipation at the same time.  Our innocent characters are powerless against Michael’s brute, murderous insanity and we love to watch and wait for them to fall.  Enough suspense and fear is established to warrant the brutal and gory images of Michael’s murders.  Whenever I hear music from the film, the back of my neck feels prickly, bringing instant fear and recognition.  Most frightening of all, the film feels very real, like any late night alone in a quiet neighborhood could end screaming and becoming Michael’s next victim.  Happy Halloween!

“Boogeyman is coming!”