Grade: A
I have been writing movie reviews for more than half my life – long enough to know what each grade feels like, maybe even where it lives in my body. I rarely struggle to assign one at this point. Everything Everywhere All at Once is an extremely ambitious film that takes audacious risks. And, for only the 4th or 5th time in my life, a movie has resisted my attempts to pin it down with a definitive rating. I don’t think I’ll know what grade to give it until I finish writing this. We’ll discover together, as I let my brain and heart take me where they will.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a movie so unique and out there, that it makes conventional normal ones look ordinary and inferior in comparison. I have previously felt this way with The Florida Project, and Birdman before that. One of my favorite songs from the early millennium gets a reference, in a rather capricious fashion. A character says “Your clothes never wear as well the next day.” I smiled and mouthed the next line with them. “Your hair never falls in quite the same way.” Without looking it up, do you recognize it? If you listen closely, you can hear the song briefly in the background a couple of times. I was waiting for it to come into play in the end somehow, as part of a cutesy callback (like how The Turtles’ “Happy Together” predictably played over Adaptation’s closing credits). But no, this Chinese character quotes an American one-hit wonder song from 22 years ago, with absolutely no follow-up or tie-in. It’s exactly the kind of random, context-free, unresolved humor that tickles me.
In addition to Adaptation, Everything Everywhere All at Once can most closely be compared to Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The plot involves a laundromat, the IRS, coming out to your parents, and jumping through alternate universes, of which there are hundreds, based on every possible decision you make in your life. The cast includes Michelle Yeoh (from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Ke Huy Quan (Data from The Goonies and Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), and Jamie Lee Curtis. There is humor, nuggets of heart and romance found in unexpected places, and fight sequences as exciting as any I’ve ever seen.
Sometimes I thought this was the best movie of the year. Sometimes I thought it was the worst. It’s a busy movie. I couldn’t stop watching it, and wanted it to keep going – but was that because I thought it meandered and I didn’t want it to end prematurely before it got to the point? Does everything need to make sense in a piece of art anyway? Is structure overrated? Is the fact that I already want to see it again an indicator that it’s up there? Should I ding the grade because I walked out not knowing what to make of it? Will you think I drank the kool-aid if I go high with the rating? Where will my fingers arrive on the keyboard?
It was from “Absolutely (Story of a Girl)” by the group Nine Days.
Grade: A
Film Reviews by Mark 
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