An Everything Bagel for “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Well, it’s official: Everything Everywhere has now won everything everywhere, including the Oscar for Best Picture of 2022. I wish I had liked it better. I was so willing to challenge my initial impression—formed while I (somewhat sleepily) watched it from my living room couch—that last week I sought it out in an actual theatre. This time I stayed wide awake, and discovered lots of new instances of the film’s whimsical cleverness. But at a certain point I started to feel it was repeating itself. Am I the only moviegoer convinced it would have been a better movie if it were 30 minutes shorter? (A friend walked out early, saying the film made her feel assaulted.)  I did love all the leading actors, and felt they earned their accolades, but enough is enough, right? Hotdog fingers can only amuse us for so long.

 I do admit I got a kick of Everything Everywhere’s use of a bagel motif to suggest the mysterious unity of the cosmos. A century ago, a bagel was an ethnic snack known only to Jewish immigrant-types in places like New York City. When I read The Rise of David Levinsky, a 1917 novel about a Jewish  man starting life over in the New World, I came across a passage in which—suddenly homesick—David was comforted by finding on the streets of the Lower East Side someone hawking the  “ring-shaped rolls” he’d known back in Russia. I was momentarily stymied: what in the world was a ring-shaped roll? Suddenly it came to me. He’d found the bagel man . . . but readers of English-language novels in 1917 would not have known the word.

Now, of course, bagels are a worldwide phenomenon, although they take on the coloration of different cultures. (I saw edamame and banana-flavored bagels being sold in Kyoto, Japan.) Everything Everywhere, though, is probably the first movie in which they’ve played a major symbolic role. Yet bagels, I’ve discovered, have also entered the English language (in tennis scoring, for instance), as a slang indication of nothing, or zero. This being so, one of my big regrets regarding this year’s Oscar event was that some mighty fine movies got bageled. I’m not talking simply of small art-house flicks like Living, which was nominated both for its adapted screenplay and for Bill Nighy’s rich performance. Martin McDonagh’s complex and fascinating The Banshees of Inisherin was nominated for 9 Oscars, all of them in major categories, and couldn’t manage a single win. Likewise the admirable Cate Blanchett starrer, Tàr.  Steven Spielberg’s deeply-felt The Fabelmans got 7 noms, including one for its John Williams score, but it too came up empty.

 Some bageling went on in the always poignant obituary segment of the evening too. This year’s tributes seemed to include a larger than usual number of movie craftspeople, along with the vaunted celebrities. That’s entirely fitting and proper., and I was pleased to see recognition of Mike Hill, one of Ron Howard’s longtime film editors, along with Angela Lansbury and producer Walter Mirisch (In the Heat of the Night). Actor Robert Blake, whose checkered career included the role of a murderer in 1967’s In Cold Blood as well as an actual murder rap in 2001, may have died too recently to be included, though host Jimmy Kimmel mentioned him in a tantalizing quip. But it would have been nice to recognize the low-budget side of the industry, where Jamie Lee Curtis got her start, through a reference to Bert I. Gordon, beloved as Mister B.I.G. to millions of B (for Bagel?) movie fans.

Dedicated to the Evelyn Wang I once knew, MIT Professor of Engineering extraordinaire and someone who's probably never been in a laundromat in her life.
 

The Rise of a Tiger Mom: Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

While the cast and crew of Everything Everywhere All At Once revel in a essential takeover of Awards Season, can Oscar glory be far behind? My own enthusiasm for this inventive but strenuously confusing lark of a film is not wholehearted, but I’m happy for the attention being paid to the whole glorious tradition of Chinese action movies. I do love seeing Asian men (and women!) fly through the air while performing feats of derring-do. And I’ve long had a deep affection for the lovely and talented Michelle Yeoh, the Malaysia-born actress who grounds every role she plays—however outrageous it might be—with dignity and down-to-earth humanity.

 Many western filmgoers first met Yeoh as the steely matriarch in 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, a satirical romp that some have found borderline offensive in its focus on wealth and power among the Chinese families of Southeast Asia. Yeoh is wonderful in that film, of course (especially in the pivotal mahjong scene), but it only gives us a small glimpse of her versatility and her physical gifts. That’s why I was thrilled by the re-release of Yeoh’s triumphant 2000 film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This lavish production from Taiwan, an early career triumph for director Ang Lee, was the rare foreign language entry to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. This was the year when the top prize went to Gladiator, but Crouching Tiger won for its cinematography, art direction, and Tan Dun’s musical score  while also collecting the expected award for best foreign language feature. (Clearly, the Academy was in the mood to honor costume dramas of epic proportions).

 Doubtless because of Yeoh’s ubiquity these days (I’m sure the videotape of her outrageous ad lib at Sunday’s SAG Awards has gone viral), Crouching Tiger is now back in actual theatres. How wonderful to see this film as it ought to be seen. Especially in the pandemic era, I well know the charm of curling up on your living room couch to watch a film. Still, large-scale movies are made for—and deserve—larger-than-life screens. As I lounged in my comfortable thaatre seat, everything impressed me: the music, the pacing, all the central performances, the immense scope of the action. This was a long-ago and far-away world I didn’t know, but one I was thrilled to explore.

 The chief critic at the Los Angeles Times, has reported that the film, for all its success in the west, was NOT an enormous hit in Asia. Perhaps it deviated too much from the formulas that Chinese movie-goers expect in their entertainments. In any case, it tells a story that is both highly formal and highly emotional, involving 19^th century warriors trained in the mysterious arts of the Wudang sect. They fight off their enemies, bounding high into the air, in the service of some noble cause—in this case the preservation of the 400-year-old sword named Green Destiny. While fighting hard, they also love hard, but are also bound by strong internal rules, like the one that keeps Yeoh’s character, Yu Shu Lien, apart from the noble Li Mu Bai (Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat). What complicates matters is the exquisite young Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), who sometimes works in close collaboration with Yu Shu Lien and sometimes fights tooth-and-nail against her. A true wild card, Jen may be the crouching tiger of the tale, or more likely its hidden dragon. Her enigmatic behavior in both war and love keeps the plot moving. And I for one adored the fact that women can be fighters as well as lovers.