Cemetry Gator posted:Eleanor's multiverse excursions Obviously bad auto correct or whatever, but the media that EEAAO reminded me most of upon watching was the rapid fire resets episode of The Good Place.
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# ? May 18, 2024 18:39 |
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Simply Simon posted:Waymond is by far the smartest character in the movie, that comes across extremely clearly in every scene he's in, and if you didn't catch that then you are like Evelyn at the start Evelyn at the beginning is the real villain. You can look at Joy and Waymond and see two opposing forces, but in the beginning of the movie both of them are planning on leaving Evelyn. While Joy is in pessimistic despair, it is driving her to try to make her life better (or she thinks it will be), and optimistic Waymond is divorcing Evelyn. Both are fighting against Evelyn's apathy. Opposing apathy is the reason universe jumps are made by doing something uncomfortable. Choosing to care about something, and acting on that care is uncomfortable. Caring takes optimism, but can lead to despair; both Joy and Waymond are coming from the same place. It's Evelyn's apathy that's hurting everyone because she doesn't want to face the uncomfortable things.
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I don’t think it’s quite apathy for Evelyn in the beginning. We see her overwhelmed at the start because she is trying to care about too many things: taxes, running laundry mat, planning the party, impressing her father, who her daughter is dating, etc. It’s more a matter of priority. All these other factors keep her from focusing on her family and their issues first.
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killer crane posted:Evelyn at the beginning is the real villain. You can look at Joy and Waymond and see two opposing forces, but in the beginning of the movie both of them are planning on leaving Evelyn. While Joy is in pessimistic despair, it is driving her to try to make her life better (or she thinks it will be), and optimistic Waymond is divorcing Evelyn. Both are fighting against Evelyn's apathy. To further hammer the point home, a character that's just goofing around with naive optimism doesn't prepare divorce papers as a last-ditch effort to get his wife to snap out of a spiral of fugue and hated routine. He's extremely proactive and there is very deliberate purpose to everything he does, even - especially - the goofy stuff.
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Simply Simon posted:Waymond is by far the smartest character in the movie, that comes across extremely clearly in every scene he's in, and if you didn't catch that then you are like Evelyn at the start "Please, be kind. Especially when we don't know what's going on." That quote is what hit hardest for me in this whole movie. I think there's a lot of things that Waymond is oblivious to, or that he just doesn't understand. But what he does know is how to act when he's in over his head. Be kind. I think that's something important to be said. I think when people are confronted by the unknown, when they don't see the shape of a situation or don't know how deep the water is, they're scared. They're defensive. That's a perfectly natural survival response to a hostile world. But most of us are in a much different place than when those instincts developed. Our world is controlled by other people, and other people will react to your instinctive defense and hostility with hostility of their own. An instinct we don't really have enough of is to just try to be kind first. Especially when we don't know what's going on. Showing some vulnerability can absolutely be to our advantage. The final scene in the movie is what really drives this home for me. Evelyn has trouble concentrating during the tax audit. She keeps getting asked "are you even paying attention?" Before she would defensively say, "Of course I'm paying attention," in a tone that suggests it was a stupid thing to even ask of her. She's confused and defensive and the conversation gets worse. At the resolution of the movie she hasn't learned to concentrate. She still has her problems in that context. But when she zones out and is angrily asked "did you hear me?" she responds, "Sorry, what did you say?" [Smash cut to credits to emphasize the point] In a world of people, even in the coldest most procedurally inhuman contexts like a tax audit at the IRS, be kind. The worst that can happen is it gets mistaken for naivete. But that first step of expressing kindness even when we feel vulnerable- especially when we feel vulnerable- can make things better, not just for the world, but for ourselves. It's honestly a good survival strategy in a world where just being kind usually costs nothing.
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https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1147854196/everything-everywhere-michelle-yeoh
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At the end, Evelyn still has the multiverse powers right? But she now finds satisfaction in what she has and isn’t even tempted to dive in anymore?
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She still gets on twitter and watches YouTube but knows to hang with her family too.
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checkplease posted:She still gets on twitter and watches YouTube but knows to hang with her family too. Lol
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Steve Yun posted:Frantically mailing the Daniels my spec scripts for Everything Everywhere Once And Again and Everything Everywhere Once And For All
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GateOfD posted:At the end, Evelyn still has the multiverse powers right? But she now finds satisfaction in what she has and isn’t even tempted to dive in anymore? There's a universe where she has the powers and chooses not to use them and there's a universe where she never had the powers and the whole movie is an allegorical fever dream. I mean, this isn't what the movie is about, Evelyn uses her infinite powers to give her daughter a nice hug, the movie isn't about the sci-fi aspects of dimension hopping, by the end of the movie Evelyn is in the exact same reality she started in with all the bad decisions she's always made, the interdimensional quirkiness might as well never happened, she didn't need the magic powers to stop alienating her family.
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emanresu tnuocca posted:...the interdimensional quirkiness might as well never happened, she didn't need the magic powers to stop alienating her family. I don't see the point of these kinds of reads. "Indiana Jones could've just stayed home!" It's not suddenly a shaggy dog story just because the character circled back around to a familiar place. Evelyn's experience verse-hopping gave her perspective she otherwise wouldn't and couldn't have had, there's no way she could've reconnected with her husband and daughter again without it. I like the read that this was an intense, psychedelic form of therapy for Evelyn. Because yeah, she could've not done any of it and simply made better choices in her life as it was, but that's the whole point of therapy: it's a necessary and possibly traumatic reframing of your beliefs and relationships that allows those different choices to feel possible.
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edit: nevermind
Steve Yun fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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every film twitter type that i follow that hates this movie has matrix 4 at 5/5 on their letterboxd
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Hmm I love matrix 4 but love this also, probably more. Lana Wachowski was a big fan of this one also .
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Mantis42 posted:every film twitter type that i follow that hates this movie has matrix 4 at 5/5 on their letterboxd
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Mantis42 posted:every film twitter type that i follow that hates this movie has matrix 4 at 5/5 on their letterboxd I'm not a "film twitter" person, but I have Matrix 4 at 4 stars on my Letterboxd, and EEAAO at 5 stars, so I don't know what this says about me. Matrix 4 was very good, if a little lazy on the action at times. But that's fine, because that's not what that movie was really about. Just worth noting after how groundbreaking the action was in The Matrix.
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Matrix 4 was okay at best, which also unfortunately makes it easily the best Matrix sequel.
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Nessus posted:Was it bad? I haven't had the chance to see it. I'm generally OK with Keanu Reeves getting money, though.
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Matrix 4 is really a stealth Sense8 movie and that's okay. But yeah the action scenes were a letdown.
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Nessus posted:Was it bad? honestly haven't seen it, it looked bad
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I like matrix 4 but the action comparison between that movie and this one is telling in which people remember. People will remember butt plug or Fanny pack or Evelyn/joy duel at end more than helicopter explosion of matrix. Not all in the budgets.
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Amusingly Waymond trying to shock Evelyn out of her spiral with divorce papers reminds me of the Bigheads' arc in Rocko's Modern Life, where at the beginning of the story Ed is in the same position as Evelyn, ignoring and pushing his spouse away because they are too burnt out with the minutiae of their lives, and it's not until the relationship is threatened, in Rocko's case it's when Bev starts having Rocko around to do odd jobs and not-too-subtly flirting with him which leads Rocko to call Ed out on being the reason she did that in the first place, and he makes very clear to Ed that his wife has started shopping around, so needs to pull his head out of his rear end and treat her better.
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I thought the only real lame part of Matrix 4 was the Merovingian cameo, if that was taken out I'd have liked it a lot better. Anyways, really glad EEAAO swept the Oscars, it definitely deserved it. I didn't see a whole lot of last year's releases but it made a big impression on me.
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Mantis42 posted:honestly haven't seen it, it looked bad Matrix 4 is bad, yeah. It's just incredibly extraneous, something Lana Wachowski seemed to understand, so there's relentless meta commentary throughout trying to lampshade the irrelevant cash-grabbiness of it all. And that truly makes the whole thing worse. On top of that, Keanu Reeves couldn't really devote the time to prep action scenes for it, so the main draw of watching John Wick return to his biggest action franchise falls flat (he uses a kind of Force Push move instead of crazy wire-fu, which is as lame as it sounds.) And despite the nostalgia bait premise of the entire project, only Keanu and Carrie Anne Moss are back (and Jada, I guess), so it's asking you to care about these pointless recasts of Morpheus and Agent Smith who spit pages of exposition trying to justify why that is. Everything Everywhere is inconceivably better, as "your reality is a construct" head trip sci-fi genre films go.
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If The Matrix 4 was supposed to be a love story, or an action movie, or a good movie, then EEAAO is the Matrix 4 we deserve. If The Matrix 4 was supposed to be a meta commentary about the film industry and the push for excessive sequels against the original artists wishes, then it succeeds only on the surface level. Matrix 4 is ultimately a boring and shoddily put together movie with heavy Netflix Original vibes, and I don't think it lives up to even the low standards of Revolution
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Matrix 4 is a good bad movie.
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Xealot posted:And despite the nostalgia bait premise of the entire project, only Keanu and Carrie Anne Moss are back (and Jada, I guess), so it's asking you to care about these pointless recasts of Morpheus and Agent Smith who spit pages of exposition trying to justify why that is. Yea when you really look at it a not insignificant chunk of the movie is dedicated just to explaining the recasting. And given the premise of the movie, the recasting wasn't even necessary, they could've just left those two characters out completely.
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I don't know if I agree with that, those characters are as central to the story as the leads in my mind. But they clearly couldn't get the original actors, which should've been fatal for the whole project. I just wonder what leverage some suit at WB had to incentivize it despite all its setbacks, since Lilly Wachowski wasn't even involved and Lana clearly felt a way about what she was making. Maybe "money" is a good enough answer, I don't know. I see no "in development" credits on her IMDb, so it wasn't a "one for them and one for me" situation.
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Xealot posted:Matrix 4 is bad, yeah. It's just incredibly extraneous, something Lana Wachowski seemed to understand, so there's relentless meta commentary throughout trying to lampshade the irrelevant cash-grabbiness of it all. And that truly makes the whole thing worse. Keanu Reeve's character is told directly that if he doesn't make a fourth game in his videogame series when he said he was done at three the studio will get someone else to make it in the first ten minutes of the film. I think it was very much Lana Wachowski being "I don't want to do this, but I'd rather do it than see someone else do it."
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She should have let someone else do it
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I enjoyed the meta commentary, it made an otherwise bad movie better for me I love secret “help me I’m being held hostage in a movie making factory” messages
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Ibexaz posted:She should have let someone else do it Yes. I suppose it's her baby, so sure. If I didn't need the money, and I knew the sequel would suck out loud either way, I'd want to wash my hands of the whole thing. But yes, artistic pride is a reasonable enough explanation. She still should've gotten more out of it. "I'll make you a 4th Matrix, if you fund my space western about trans cyborg outlaws robbing an ore freighter or whatever."
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Covid interrupting production and not being able to get the same crew when filming resumed didn't help either.
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Xealot posted:"I'll make you a 4th Matrix, if you fund Jupiter Ascending 2." ![]()
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I liked the meta commentary because it allowed Christina Ricci to have a cameo and good for her.
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I wonder how often studios don’t realize a movie is making fun of them and how often they know but don’t care because it’ll make money anyways and too few audience members will catch on to make a difference
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It’s the latter. Also most producers are really stupid and have no artistic bone in their disgusting body so they don’t understand what anything is. They just make money and are evil
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Steve Yun posted:I wonder how often studios don’t realize a movie is making fun of them and how often they know but don’t care because it’ll make money anyways and too few audience members will catch on to make a difference I mean they literally call out Warner Bros in the movie which got some befuddled laughs in my theatre.
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# ? May 18, 2024 18:39 |
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Xealot posted:I don't see the point of these kinds of reads. "Indiana Jones could've just stayed home!" It's not suddenly a shaggy dog story just because the character circled back around to a familiar place. Evelyn's experience verse-hopping gave her perspective she otherwise wouldn't and couldn't have had, there's no way she could've reconnected with her husband and daughter again without it. My point wasn't that the movie shouldn't exist and that it is pointless or something like that, my point was that Evelyn's growth ultimately was based on grounded and real understandings, she didn't "need" the multiverse hopping, it just helped, that's part of the message of the movie ultimately. Yes, it's therapy, the multiverse was just therapy. Yes you don't "need" therapy but maybe if you're at a point where your life is falling apart and you're actively emotionally eviscerating your loved ones on a daily basis you could use some help, or something.
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