Last night we checked out the movie everyone’s been raving about: Everything Everywhere All At Once. It was a great film, hilarious and heart-rending, touching on complicated themes[1]I kept thinking about some of Borges’s “games with infinity” stories, especially when Joy was talking about her experiences with the multiverse.. I never thought I’d feel emotional watching a stone with googly eyes roll off a cliff, but here we are. If you’re looking for a film filled with love, despair, tax problems, kung fu, multiverse-hopping, and wild costuming, this is the one for you.
Then, standing in the lobby after the show, we decided to also watch Minions: The Rise of Gru. This was a much less complex film, but fun in its own way. I thought it might be a “How Gru Met His Minions” origin story, but they were already together at the beginning; it’s more of a “Gru’s First Crime” tale instead. If you want a silly caper filled with yellow nonsense-spouting blobs in denim overalls, this is the one for you. (I appreciated some of the sight gags: in one scene, three Minions construct elaborate disguise—including one painting itself like a brick wall—to infiltrate a villain’s lair, even though there’s a stack of blue-and-yellow bags of fertilizer lying on the lawn; in the end credits, there’s a drawing of the Minions’ Halloween costumes—Oompa Loompas.)
The connecting thread: Michelle Yeoh, who played Evelyn Wang (the main character) in Everything Everywhere All At Once and voiced Master Chow (who taught the Minions kung fu) in Minions: The Rise of Gru.
I enjoyed both movies for vastly different reasons. Good times.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | I kept thinking about some of Borges’s “games with infinity” stories, especially when Joy was talking about her experiences with the multiverse. |
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