Alternately: Extremely Twee and Incredibly Soy, a Chuck Wendig film.

The Russos said “What if we made a super hero movie but instead of catty little quips we made the characters talk about what they learned in therapy?”

Sickeningly cloying, Baby’s First Deep™️ Movie. 2022 Requiem For A Dream. Marvel movie for gifted kids. Full of Facebook meme “philosophy” and a baffling amount of rAnDOm Tumblr humor for a movie released 12 years after the year 2010 ended, an interminable 2.5 hour runtime means we get almost 3 jokes to Swiss Army Man’s tight 90 minute/1 joke ratio. Another movie that could have been a music video, or maybe a contest-winning Mountain Dew Super Bowl commercial by some precocious YouTubers. Jamie Lee Curtis was great though and the love subplot was affecting, even if that was probably just because they were blatantly ripping off Wong Kar Wai. Speaking of, rule number 2 of filmmaking: never remind the audience of much better films and filmmakers in the middle of your shittier movie. I guess they had some trouble getting the rights to the actual Cranberries song. (It also breaks rule 1, by the by: you better have a very very good reason to make your movie longer than 100 minutes)

A24 is apparently angling to become Disney for people who like to think a little more highly of their own taste. As an audience, do we no longer expect artists to take their influences and actually DO something with them? Wearing them on your sleeve is all well and good, but Everything seems content to just toss them onto the floor like a dead fish, completely inert. “Hey look at the movies we’ve seen.” The arthouse Ready Player One, the indie No Way Home. 

A kaleidoscopic assault of imagery that quickly overloads and numbs the senses so that the rest passes through your optic nerve and brain and out the back of your skull sans resistance. At the same time, in what is supposed to be this massive sprawling multiverse movie, we almost never leave the incredibly beige office building where we begin.

Seriously guys, come on. The “everything bagel” is some “teh spork penguin of d00m!” level shit. Is this just all zoomers who have never been exposed to quirky culture before?

If we had our 2021 Crash in Nomadland, this feels like a 2022 Scott Pilgrim. I think in 10 years a lot of people will be disowning the religious fervor they’ve adopted for this movie. I suspect many of the people claiming this as their favorite movie of all time ever will not really think about it much at all 6 months from now.