The Inflection Point

About the 2022 Best Picture…

At this point in my life – and I’m sure everyone else’s, there has become a rhythm to watching movies that has placed a sort of construct on consumption through the big screen. The streaming services have altered it slightly, but the traditional Hollywood formula remains. Grab your popcorn. Settle on in to your couch or movie chair. Here’s the opening scenes. Incoming plot line, dialogue, mis en scene, and actors. There is only so many ways to catch a fish after all.

It’s this formulaic process that has made movies relatively monotonous as I’ve grown older and more aware of what artists are trying to do through the big screen. The first movies of my life were awestriking, a whole new world emerging to take me into for 2 hours. It was a tragic loss of childhood the first time I remember seeing a movie and thinking, “man, that kinda sucked”. The world becomes a little darker when the ignorance wears off – but it makes the movies that are worthwhile shine just a little brighter. Regardless – the movie consumption process has been so boxed in, so rigid in it’s selling of what works and what doesn’t, that we all generally know at this point what we’re getting when we sit down to watch.

It’s here where Everything, Everywhere All at Once flips the zeitgeist, and captures something truly groundbreaking within the 24 mm. An absolute genre-bending film – a breakthrough for just what creativity can mean in the 21st century. There are sure to be a hundred different breakdowns of what this film represents – Asian/American experience, sexuality in Asian Culture, Philosophy, Existentialism, and of course death and taxes among others. What struck me though is the absurdism throughout this thing – it’s clearly what separates this film from the Hollywood norm within just the first 30 minutes. The collective “Daniels” here have gone outside the box, hell maybe outside the FedEx Truck, when creating and developing this masterpiece; a brilliant ode to just the fun and (ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES) that can be created through this medium. The fight scenes are incredibly well shot, but it’s the imagination that peaks (purposefully) it’s way through – consistently keeping us on the edge of our seats and showing just how vast the universe can be, and how small our brains have been to show every movie the past 60+ years the same way.

So I dove into this absurdism that is just incredibly fitting here, right? The movie itself fits the billing – it’s ingeniously an absurd plot line, with outrageous stunts, developments, situations, unfolding at every turn. But, if an overall theme was to be developed, it would be the theory of absurdism, which is precisely defined as:

“The philosophical theory that existence in general is absurd, meaning that the world lacks meaning or a higher purpose and is not fully intelligible by reason.”

Apparently absurdism has its origins in the early 19th century, a theory categorized by Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (above) – who, upon further research, was a devout Christian who used this theory to explain and convert people to Christianity. Immanuel Kant (top 5 philosopher in my book) ran with these documented phenomena’s that run parallel to his time-standing “Categorical Imperative” argument I was forced to spend sleepless nights in a Chapel Hill dorm room languishing over. In my own opinion, it’s quite absurd to think absurdism got it’s start in the 19th century all together – I mean, if there is any universal language or feelings that connects us back to our long long ancestors, I would think a sense of absurdism rang true to everyone at some point or another. It would be the equivalent of saying that I created the chair, because before me, nobody had clearly documented what a chair was.

And what’s not more absurd than that? I won’t dive into the argument that absurdism is the defining pillar of which Christianity and other religions are built on because I’m losing the plot here already. My own opinion if forced to give one – the world is too precise, too fleeting, and too improbable to not have some sort of meaning. What that meaning is though…..well it may just be absurd to think I or we as a people can understand it.

Anyways – great fucking movie here. Jamie Lee Curtis shows up halfway through. It’s fun, creative, spirited, and alters the ways I hope to see the medium change over the next period of filmmaking.

CC