The other night at a local library, I did an Oscars presentation, offering some uneducated guesses on who and what might win on March 12. When the subject turned to “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — a film that entranced roughly half the folks in attendance, while exasperating the other half, like some sort of love-it-or-hate-it rebuke to nuance — I said, well, here I am, right in the middle, careening wildly from admiration to exhaustion on this one, often within the same eyeblink moment.
For a likely minority, that’s the sort of movie it is. You can thrill to the breathless, clarifying skill of the editor (and now Oscar winner) Paul Rogers, even as you wonder if writer-directors (and now Oscar winners) Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert will go on to make all their movies together with the same nutty too-muchness.
At the library, we talked about how “Everything Everywhere” has become more divisive than the political divide in this country, even. That’s saying something. It’s Ron DeSantis’ woke-mob nightmare jammed into two hours of multiverse freestyling.
