spotatoes
Joined Apr 2001
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spotatoes's rating
Everything Everywhere All at Once, which stars Michelle Yeoh in a superb performance, lives up to its promise of being a magnificent sensory overload that is both profoundly disorienting and intellectually captivating. The film's distinctive fusion of genres, styles, and insights creates a wholly new immersive experience that is what makes it so original. In a style that is both visually magnificent and emotionally potent, the movie deftly combines aspects of drama, fantasy, and science fiction.
Although it is never explicitly mentioned, Everything Everywhere All At Once implies that what gives life purpose is the understanding that everything and every moment has equal value because there is no inherent meaning. It's a daring cinematic reflection on all the insignificant but essential things that give us and our life significance in an uncaring cosmos.
Although it is never explicitly mentioned, Everything Everywhere All At Once implies that what gives life purpose is the understanding that everything and every moment has equal value because there is no inherent meaning. It's a daring cinematic reflection on all the insignificant but essential things that give us and our life significance in an uncaring cosmos.
Right, let's dispense with all this talk of political correctness are arbitrary gender-swaps - they just muddy the waters.
Apart from two genuinely funny jokes right at the start of the movie, all the other jokes are annoyingly unfunny. They're annoying because their setups require leaps of logic that don't make sense, and maybe it's my pedantry, but I started counting how many times logic was elbowed aside in the name of ultimately mediocre jokes; it happens a lot. It became irritatingly distracting. Add to that, that you've got jokes - obviously improvised jokes - that lasted way too long and which, on the whole, fell flat, and you start to see why I was quite so irked.
The writers, Paul Feig and Katie Dippold, also plainly think that, in order for these characters to be funny, they've all got to be stupid. For heaven's sake! These are supposed to be clever people, but they're not. With the exception of Kate McKinnon's Holtzman, everyone is unbelievably stupid.
Talking of Kate McKinnon - bless her heart - she tries so hard to keep this film watchable. I could practically see the strain on her face. It's McKinnon that made me smile most whilst watching this, for which, she deserves a medal. It's her and her alone that kept me watching this otherwise irredeemably terrible movie.
Apart from two genuinely funny jokes right at the start of the movie, all the other jokes are annoyingly unfunny. They're annoying because their setups require leaps of logic that don't make sense, and maybe it's my pedantry, but I started counting how many times logic was elbowed aside in the name of ultimately mediocre jokes; it happens a lot. It became irritatingly distracting. Add to that, that you've got jokes - obviously improvised jokes - that lasted way too long and which, on the whole, fell flat, and you start to see why I was quite so irked.
The writers, Paul Feig and Katie Dippold, also plainly think that, in order for these characters to be funny, they've all got to be stupid. For heaven's sake! These are supposed to be clever people, but they're not. With the exception of Kate McKinnon's Holtzman, everyone is unbelievably stupid.
Talking of Kate McKinnon - bless her heart - she tries so hard to keep this film watchable. I could practically see the strain on her face. It's McKinnon that made me smile most whilst watching this, for which, she deserves a medal. It's her and her alone that kept me watching this otherwise irredeemably terrible movie.
I used to be a huge fan of Tim Burton. His eccentricities and oddball imagination made him a true visionary artist and his sense of humour was sufficiently askew to make his work not only funny but pleasingly strange and refreshingly unlike that of any other Hollywood director.
However, increasingly these days, his work is (I want to tear my tongue out for saying this) stale and samey, and the trademark Burton humour seems to have been replaced in large part by a need to show just how eccentric and weird he can be.
This trend, I think, began here, with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Rather than being warm, charming and funny with just the right amount of weird darkness, which used to be the way of things when it came to Burton projects, this movie, as far as I can see, has dispensed with a lot of its predecessors' warmth and charm, instead opting to put the onus on the strange.
Depp's performance here, too extracts the intimidating aspects of the character of Willy Wonka together with any interesting traits of the character that have made him such an appealing and intriguing figure, and just kept the unsettling weirdness.
The positives here are that, in the main, the acting is pretty good; the look of the thing, as always with Burton, is lovely; and this version of Roald Dahl's novel is a lot closer to the source material than the 1971 Gene Wilder version.
In the end, as films in general go, this is probably about average, but, as Burton films go, it's below par, or rather, it was when it was released. Now I'd say it's there or thereabouts in terms of what to expect from Tim Burton, and that makes me sad.