Everything Everywhere All At Once is a flash bang of a film. One might even call it a big bang.
You’re sitting in your dark, cool theater seat — the first you’ve taken since the pandemic — and Bang! The movie explodes in action and exposition, and doesn’t give a damn if you can keep up with the cosmology and quantum physics and action and raw emotion that ripples through the most original and profound film in more than a decade.
Think The Matrix meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as directed by Christopher Nolan.
But even those comparisons are unfair, because Everything acknowledges and bows openly to its cinematic origins. Then it bows to the universe’s origins, which it embraces like Stephen Hawking on crack.
From the multiverse to quantum entanglement, Everything packs a silly kung fu movie into a story that may be as scientifically sound as the Hubble telescope. And still focuses the story into a narrative singularity — accessible, yet still awe inspiring.
The plot is a trifling, disposable matter: Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, an aging laundromat owner trying to juggle tiny receipts, big customer complaints and a family that includes a judgmental father and rebellious daughter. After an unintended peek into another dimension, Evelyn learns she must face down an existential intergalactic threat.
It’s pablum. But as Everything points out, insignificant moments are the only things that DON’T exist in reality — particularly in the multiverses we build for ourselves in a world sinking into a black hole of digital chatter. Everything reveals itself as a poignant drama about finding your place in the world only after nearly dazzling us too much with dazzling concepts and computer effects. At 2 hours 19 minutes, the frenzy numbs a bit before it pierces.
Everything looks much bigger than it is. The film, which cost about $25 million, underscores what Hollywood used to be: audacious, loud and opinionated — and hustling a shoestring budget. Maybe that’s why it drew Oscar-caliber talent including Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis, unrecognizable under makeup as an oppressive tax auditor.
It is karate with a pinkie, kung fu with a pocket pup, pyrotechnics with polygons. And it nearly sets the screen ablaze with its brashness.
So as Hollywood crows over the box office haul of a colossus like Top Gun: Maverick, Everything will control its own delightful corner of the universe.
Now THAT’S a reason to have hope for moviemaking. Everywhere, all at once.
(The Scientific American) Some editorials simply hurt to write. This is one.
At least 19 elementary school children and two teachers are dead, many more are injured, and a grandmother is fighting for her life in Uvalde, Tex., all because a young man, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, decided to fire in a school.
By now, you know these facts: This killing spree was the largest school shooting since Sandy Hook. Law enforcement couldn’t immediately subdue the killer. In Texas, it’s alarmingly easy to buy and openly carry a gun. In the immediate hours after the shooting, President Biden demanded reform, again. Legislators demanded reform, again. And progun politicians turned to weathered talking points: arm teachers and build safer schools.
But rather than arm our teachers (who have enough to do without keeping that gun away from students and having to train like law enforcement to confront an armed attacker), rather than spend much-needed school dollars on more metal detectors instead of education, we need to make it harder to buy a gun. Especially the kind of weapons used by this killer and the white supremacist who killed 10 people grocery shopping in Buffalo. And we need to put a lasting stop to the political obstruction of taxpayer-funded researchinto gun-related injuries and deaths.
In the U.S., we have existing infrastructure that we could easily emulate to make gun use safer: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Created by Congress in 1970, this federal agency is tasked, among other things, with helping us drive a car safely. It gathers data on automobile deaths. It’s the agency that monitors and studies seat belt usage. While we track firearm-related deaths, no such safety-driven agency exists for gun use.
During the early 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to explore gun violence as a public health issue. After studies tied having a firearm to increased homicide risk, the National Rifle Association took action, spearheading the infamous Dickey Amendment, diverting gun research dollars and preventing federal funding from being used to promote gun control. For more than 20 years, research on gun violence in this country has been hard to do.
What research we have is clear and grim. For example, in 2017, guns overtook 60 years of cars as the biggest injury-based killer of children and young adults (ages one to 24) in the U.S. By 2020, about eight in every 100,000 people died of car crashes. About 10 in every 100,000 people died of gun injuries.
While cars have become increasingly safer (it’s one of the auto industry’s main talking points in marketing these days), the gun lobby has thwarted nearly all attempts to make it harder to fire a weapon. With federal protection against some lawsuits, the financial incentive of a giant tort payout to make guns safer is virtually nonexistent.
After the Uvalde killings, the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, said he’d “rather have law-abiding citizens armed and trained so that they can respond when something like this happens.” Sen. Ted Cruz emphasized “armed law enforcement on the campus.” They are two of many conservatives who see more guns as the key to fighting gun crime. They are wrong.
A study comparing gun deaths the U.S. to other high-income countries in Europe and Asia tells us that our homicide rate in teens and young adults is 49 times higher. Our firearm suicide rate is eight times higher. The U.S. has more guns than any of the countries in the comparison.
As we previously reported, in 2015, assaults with a firearm were 6.8 times more common in states that had the most guns, compared to the least. More than a dozen studies have revealed that if you had a gun at home, you were twice as likely to be killed as someone who didn’t. Research from the Harvard School of Public Health tells us that states with higher gun ownership levels have higher rates of homicide. Data even tells us that where gun shops or gun dealers open for business, killings go up. These are but a few of the studies that show the exact opposite of what progun politicians are saying. The science must not be ignored.
Science points to laws that would work to reduce shootings, to lower death. Among the simplest would be better permitting laws with fewer loopholes. When Missouri repealed its permit law, gun-related killings increased by 25 percent. Another would be to ban people who are convicted of violent crime from buying a gun. In California, before the state passed such a law, people convicted of crimes were almost 30 percent more likely to be arrested again for a gun or violent crime than those who, after the law, couldn’t buy a gun.
Such laws, plus red flag laws and those taking guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and people who abuse alcohol, would lower our gun violence rate as a nation. But it would require elected officials to detach themselves from the gun lobby. There are so many issues to consider when voting, but in this midterm election year, we believe that protection from gun violence is one that voters could really advance. Surveys routinely show that gun control measures are extremely popular with the U.S. population.
In the meantime, there is some hope. Congress restored funding for gun-related research in 2019, and there are researchers now looking at ways to reduce gun deaths. But it’s unclear if this change in funding is permanent. And what we’ve lost is 20 years of data on gun injuries, death, safety measures and a score of other things that could make gun ownership in this country safer.
Against all this are families whose lives will never be the same because of gun violence. Who must mourn children and adults lost in domestic violence, accidental killings and mass shootings that are so common, we are still grieving one when the next one occurs.
We need to become the kind of country that looks at guns for what they are: weapons that kill. And treat them with the kind of respect that insists they be harder to get and safer to use.
And then we need to become the kind of country that says the lives of children are more valuable than the right to weapons that have killed them, time and again. Since Columbine. Since Sandy Hook. Since always.
This is Scott, from the dog park. You may know me as Jadie and Charlie’s poop scooper. But, according to YOUR poop scooper, I’m now your uncle, too.
You see, recently, your dad called and said he’d entered you in The American Rescue Dog Show, a Disney program. Think the Westminster Kennel Club for strays.
Your dad said that, if you were picked for the show, he couldn’t attend because he was not vaccinated. He asked if I could take his place as your “wrangler” and walk you before judges. He wanted to place you in the “Best in Ears” category.
I immediately said yes. I’ve known you for months, and the cause is unimpeachable: Each pup and human to win their made-up category — Best in Belly Rubs, Best in Snoring, Best in Wiggling, etc. — would earn a $10,000 contribution to the shelter of their choice. And every pup to even make it onto the show would score a $500 rescue donation.
But that’s only half the reason I agreed. The other half was that I didn’t think you’d make it onto the show.
Don’t get me wrong, Dodge. You are a year-old miracle, 70 pounds of Shepherd-mix exuberance that matched Jadie’s at six minths. And your ears make Prince Charles look like he had his pruned. But this was a national show; I figured you would be ignored like most Tinseltown dreamers.
Wrong.
The producers called in early April. You were in! Oh, and the show would tape in 10 days.
So we began our “wrangling.” If you were wondering why we walked through an off-leash dog park on-leash, that’s why. If you were wondering why you practiced jumping into a creamsicle Fiat, that’s why. If you were wondering why I spent a week and a half cooing “Ear of the tiger, eye of the puppy” while I massaged your fur lobes, that’s why.
As you hopefully don’t recall, you were terrified the day of the show. You had never been out of dad’s charge. The doggie green room on the Warner Bros. lot was a spacious kennel, with plenty of room for both of us: a bed and water for you and a folding chair for me. Nonetheless, you were petrified.
When they closed the gate of our pen and we sat, you tucked your head between my knees. And when you get scared, bud, your ears become AERODYNAMIC. I could barely see them. I guess even a deluxe kennel is still a cage, and that was probably the last thing you wanted to see.
So we moved down to the cot, and I swear this is true: We locked eyes for a full second, maybe a second and a half. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we came to a meeting of the minds. I think we realized: ‘We’re in this crate. The humans want a show. They want to see second chances lived right. That fortune can follow fortitude. That you regret NOT taking a chance more than the chance itself. So let’s do this goddamn thing.’
And we wrestled and fetched and asked Hoozagoodboy? and answered I Am! in our cage for 30 minutes. You waited for me to go to hair and wardrobe, then we wrangled another half hour. You dandered the jacket and slobbered the makeup and neither of us cared. By the time producers fetched us, you were on your back, grinning, paws asplay. You could have entered the belly rub race.
And we were off. The set was another strange first for you: crowds, lights, celebrity vets in sequins, a live pig (it was Disney) — and a half-dozen pups with wild observatory flappers.
But you were long done being scared. By the time cameras rolled, you were cloud busting: yipping, twirling, trying to make time with the cute pit rescue Bunny next to us. Halfway into the show, you two belly scooched toward each other until you touched pads. The crowd loved it.
I hope you did too.
As you saw last night, another pup nipped the top prize. But you were a champion true. You overcame a terrifying fear, trusted a new human, resisted eating live bacon — and scored $500 for Sunny Day Acres, the shelter that took you in. You even nabbed an emerald-green medal I hear your dad plans to frame.
You were courage incarnate. And that’s not just an uncle’s pride talking. Dodger dog: Best in Valliance.
Of course, titles come with trappings. Namely, this one: Show us how.
