BEFORE: I swear, for what it's worth, that I drew up my schedule for January BEFORE this movie won two Golden Globes, or I should say they were won by Michelle Yeoh (Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy) and Ke Huy Quan (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture) and it was nominated for FOUR MORE. Look, it's time to start thinking about the Oscars, the nominations voting is now taking place, I helped my boss sign in to the Academy voting site today to cast his ballot - I'm sworn to secrecy, of course.
But my instincts were spot on, this film is now probably considered a front-runner to get an acting nomination or two, and probably ones for editing and special effects also. It could happen, and now I've crossed off at least one contender from my list. As I've said before, I've only got a tight window of January to watch a few likely nominees, because once February 1 hits, I'm back on the romance beat.
Some fun synchronicity, I already determined that this year I watched a Frances McDormand movie, "City by the Sea", exactly one year after watching her in "The French Dispatch", and now that's happened again - for my 13th movie last year, I watched Michelle Yeoh in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", and now on the anniversary of that, she's back in another movie. Of course, I watched 8 movies with Michelle Yeoh in them last year, so that did kind of increase the odds a bit. This sort of thing probably happens all the time, anyway, and it's just weird those few times that I'm aware of it.
Ke Huy Quan got a Golden Globe for this, but where has this guy been for the last...37 years? The last movie I saw him in was probably "The Goonies". I can prove it, I use the IMDB advanced search function every day for every movie, to determine when I've seen each actor last (it's not 100% foolproof, because the IMDB search engine tends to ignore documentaries with archive footage...) and as part of this project, I've watched 4,313 movies in just over 14 years, and Ke Huy Quan has been in NONE of them. I just checked, the guy doesn't have a lot of IMDB credits, so maybe he just dropped out of show biz for a while, it happens. Welcome back, I guess? Maybe he just had a real job for 30 years, I don't know. (Ah, Wiki says he went to USC film school and has been working as a stunt coordinator and assistant director.)
Sunita Mani carries over from "The Death of Dick Long".
THE PLOT: An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, in which she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led.
AFTER: Sunita Mani had a very small role here, she just played an actress appearing as a Queen in a TV show that played all the time in the laundromat. That's OK, small roles count and keep the chain alive. Another actor carries over, too, the guy who played Dick Long last night appears here as a guy getting spanked in a sex room - umm, he also co-directed today's film, he's half of the directing duo known as "The Daniels". Well, that's a step up from having sex with a horse, I guess.
And Key Huy Quan is some kind of Jackie Chan guy now? Good for him! He's come a long way from being that meek, nerdy kid in "The Goonies" and the loud Asian kid in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". Now he gets to play a meek, nerdy adult named Waymond - and also the loud Asian guy when he's Alpha Waymond. Wait, I should explain.
Look, this is a really simple film about people jumping between universes - there's apparently an "ALPHA" universe, which we don't start off in, our story here begins in one of many realities, where immigrant Evelyn Wang has made certain decisions in her life that led her to being a laundromat owner with a quiet husband, Waymond, who wants a divorce, and a daughter named Joy who's dating a woman and Evelyn claims to be OK with that, but she's really not. What would Gong Gong think? Gong Gong is Evelyn's very old father, who's visiting them for Chinese New Year. Life is constant, just laundry every day, but disaster strikes when the family is due to be audited by the IRS, who you might think would turn out to be the villain of the story, but wait, there's more.
Evelyn's universe is invaded by a being from the Alpha Universe, Jobu Tupaki, who is jumping across the various bizarre realities and she can manipulate matter at will, or something. Evelyn learns all this from Alpha Waymond, who she naturally confuses with her husband Waymond, except this one is from the Alpha Universe and is much cooler. His Alpha-Evelyn died years ago, but the Alphaverse developed "verse-jumping" technology which enables people to access the skills, memories and bodies of their other parallel-universe selves by doing things that are statistically unlikely, like saying "I love you" to an enemy, licking the walls, or peeing in your pants intentionally.
Alpha Waymond gives non-Alpha Evelyn the ability to universe-jump, and she learns about other versions of herself that made different choices, like not marrying Waymond, or becoming a kung fu movie star, or being an opera singer. And while Alpha Waymond considers this Evelyn to be an enormous failure, all this verse-jumping slowly gives her the knowledge and skills to just maybe defeat the dreaded Jobu Tupaki, who might be a version of her own daughter, but with a splintered mind. All of this jumping around the multiverse is no good for one's mental health, it turns out, cracks start to develop in the brain, or something.
Jobu, meanwhile, has been searching the multiverse for a version of Evelyn who could see the world the same way she does, so it's possible that this whole film is just an allegory for the generation gap. Right? Every person believes that their parents just don't understand them, but then every parent probably has difficulty understanding why their kids can't be more like they are, or were. But very few children will attempt to destroy the universe over this, by building a giant everything bagel that functions like a black hole of sorts. That's gotta be a metaphor for something, too, right? But what? And then probably very few parents would jump across the multiverse and spend a few days as a rock just so they can maybe attempt to see things from their kid's point of view. Still, you have to wonder if all of this could have been avoided if Evelyn could have just accepted her daughter as gay and told Gong Gong about it.
The best parts for me were learning that Jamie Lee Curtis' character was named "Deirdre Beaubeirdre", because that just makes me want to say "Banana fana Fo-feirdre", like from "The Name Game", and the spoof of "Ratatouille" which probably came from somebody mis-hearing the title, but then again, in some alternate universe, perhaps there's an animated movie where a chef is controlled not by a mouse but by a raccoon, and that movie would indeed be called "Raccacoonie". Because of course.
What I don't usually like are these multiverse stories - when they did "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and followed that up with "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" I knew we were only seeing the tip of this dreadful iceberg. It's way too confusing to keep track of the events of three or four universes at the same time, just as having THREE Spider-Mans in one movie didn't clear anything up, it just made the MCU continuity much, much worse. If there are three Spider-Mans in three universes, why is Green Goblin only in ONE, and Venom is in...TWO? What do I call the other version of Venom when he's played by Topher Grace, and in which universe is he played by Tom Hardy? At least here they kind of get it "right" because there is or was an Evelyn and Waymond in each parallel universe - their stories may be different, but at least they all exist.
Here I can't help but think that the universe-jumping is a big screenwriting cheat - think about it, most characters would have to train for years to get good at martial arts, but thanks to verse-jumping, all someone has to do is push a button a cell phone, piss their pants, and suddenly they've got the gymnastic skills of another version of themself, from another universe.
I did invent a word the other day in the comic book shop, I was talking with the kid at the counter about the Avengers book, which is doing a storyline right now where the modern Avengers team up with the Avengers from the year 1,000,000 BC to fight the Multiversal Masters of Evil. The latest Ghost Rider (aka the All-Rider) also travels the multiverse looking for other versions of Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and the Captain Marvel Corps to help - and I accidentally called the characters from the other universes "multi-versions". Yeah, that kind of works. When that sticks, please tell everyone you know I came up with that.
I also thought the name "Waymond" might be racist - you know, like that's how an Asian person might mispronounce the English name "Raymond", and I know that some Chinese immigrants take on English names when they move to the U.S. or the U.K. But there's a cameo here from a Chinese movie producer, Waymond Lee, so I guess I'm mistaken.
Also starring Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "Last Christmas"), Stephanie Hsu (last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Ke Huy Quan, James Hong (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Jamie Lee Curtis (last seen in "You Again"), Tallie Medel, Jenny Slate (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Harry Shum Jr. (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Biff Wiff, Aaron Lazar (last seen in "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Andy Le (also last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Brian Le, Audrey Wasilewski, Peter Banifaz (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Li Jing, Daniel Scheinert (also carrying over from "The Death of Dick Long"), Timothy Eulich (last seen in "Swiss Army Man"), Michiko Nishiwaki, Dan Kwan, Freya Fox and the voice of Randy Newman (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution").
RATING: 7 out of 10 hot dog fingers (I thought this might have been a Grand Theft Auto reference - just me?)
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