Nothing Nowhere All At Once

 

Here's a movie review almost a year in the making.

I never bothered to see "this movie" (I will refer to it in this manner because the title is too freaking long to type) when it opened last April despite amazing reviews.

I continued to not see "this movie" during the fall months, primarily because everybody I know who did told me it was incomprehensible...in a bad way.

I held off seeing "this movie" despite a curiosity in seeing a supposedly brilliant performance by Jamie Lee Curtis.  

I refrained from seeing "this movie" even after it got 11 Oscar nominations including one for the actor who played Short Round in the second Indiana Jones installment back in 1984.

I held myself in check when "this movie" won the Directors Guild Award for not one, but two directors both named Daniel.

And then I saw it rack up a bunch of trophies at the SAG Awards including one for Ensemble Cast.  Wait, I said as I watched the ceremony.   Is that legendary Asian actor James Hong among the cast on stage?   I mean, he was in one of my favorite "Seinfeld" episodes.  Remember "Seinfeld, four!"?

That put me over the edge.  I finally succumbed and dialed it up On Demand. Hey, maybe all my friends are wrong about "this movie."

PS, always trust your friends.

"This movie" is an abomination.  The on-screen equivalent of what a toilet bowl in a sleazy bar must look like at 4AM on a Saturday night.   

For those that care, "this movie" starts off innocently.  A dysfunctional Chinese family owns a laundromat and must go to the local IRS office and pay off back taxes to a nasty auditor.  The latter is Jamie Lee, who got an Oscar nomination but was much better off in one of the 15 "Halloween" flicks she did.

Well, the tax office visit ends up plunging star Michelle Yeoh into one of about a dozen levels of the universe or the multiverse or whatever that shit is called.  In one, she deals with a hibachi cook with a raccoon on his head.  In another, she is a boulder on a hill who is fighting with her daughter...another boulder on said hill.

I tried really, really hard to make sense of any of this.  Creatively, it looks like somebody took the worst of about 500 student films and spliced them together. Now I would like to visit the multiverse where the Oscar voters who gave "this movie" 11 nominations.  No, strike that.  I don't want to go anywhere where those Oscar voters are.  

By the way, this is going to win a whole bunch of Oscars in two weeks, including one for the unlistenable song that plays over the final credits.

You want to see what Chinese food looks like when you leave it in your refrigerator for a year or so?  See "this movie."

Or simply trust your friends.

LEN'S RATING:  Zero stars.

Dinner last night:  Hamburger.