Is the joke two guys sticking something up their ass? Is it the power that they find when they do it? Is it the revulsion Evelyn feels after defeating them by removing the objects from their orifices? When the joke turns into a whole scene, where two henchmen (played by the film’s choreographers Brian Le and Andy Le) going after Evelyn, the owner of a laundromat played by Michelle Yeoh, furiously race to insert the trophy into themselves to “verse jump” and find the martial artist within, its humorous goals get muddied. Or, given the rules established by the film, perhaps it's both and neither at the same time. The filmmaking duo’s trick is mostly done so well that one is unsure of whether it’s a joke fractured into epistemological inquiry, or epistemological inquiry shattered into a joke. Everything Everywhere All At Once is, in its way, directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's take on wonderland, if wonderland were an infinite multiverse. It wouldn’t be so far-fetched to call Curtis’s character this film’s Red Queen, capable of both laying down a law of cruel realism as well as its intended opposite: pure illogical chaos.
Generosity could call the gag absurd, but only so that the attribute can be used defensively later. And then the joke is dilated beyond its limits. This image gets a laugh, perhaps because of its incongruousness or that its visual metaphor is barely veiled. They sit, three in a row, forebodingly in the corner of Deirdre’s little cubicle, almost overrun by paperwork. Each trophy is bulbous, unmoving, the neck tapered-and quite obviously, they are butt plugs. Jamie Lee Curtis’s dour IRS agent Deirdre shows us just how much bullshit she has to take doing her job in Everything Everywhere All At Once as the camera cuts past her to a line of awards, black and bruising like their recipient.
0 kommentar(er)
