Comment thread repulsion: “I was convulsing with misery and dying to escape but boiled down EEAAO isnt so much about generic verse-jumping (although it is) or the IRS audit or Ke Huy Quan’s nerd husband wanting a divorce or James Hong’s grandfather Gong Gong or the hot dog fingers, etc.
“Boiled down the central story tension is about the discomfort and denial that Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn, a laundromat owner, is going through about her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and her lesbian relationship with Becky (Tallie Medel) and particularly Becky’s annoying hair style — a situation reflected in the multiverse by Joy’s Jobu Tupaki vs. Alpha-Evelyn and Jobu’s threatening, Darth Vader-ish behavior (“omnicidal” in the multiverse) blah blah.
“The big EEAAO catharsis manifests not so much with a resolution over the audit (although that’s welcome) as much as Evelyn’s ultimate acceptance and embrace of Joy’s queerness. Evelyn has travelled outside of and within herself to find peace with Joy not being straight.
“Kill me now with a steak knife.”
Friendo: “EEAAO has everything that Woke Twitter needs to feel safe. Bad white lady vs. good older Asian woman at the nominal center, augmented or flavored by a neutered dweeb-husband type plus gay daughter representing how people SHOULD think.
“The whole movie is the gay daughter chasing her mother around saying ‘why are you like this?’
“It’s basically everything we’ve all lived through from 2020 onward. CG purée made out of woke dogma. Or, alternately speaking, a 2013 Tumblr thread made into a movie.”
Back to HE: “Imaginative, metaphorical, transportational cinema should never be (and never has been) this confusing or infuriating or painful to sit through. Or so dependent on Marvelish CG tropes that lead to dark William S. Burroughs fantasies about injecting heroin into one’s veins. Not to mention the torture of Jamie Lee Curtis’s broad, overbearing performance.
“To wokesters everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) is about race, gender and sexuality. If you’re not on board with the new tyranny you’re a racist, and must therefore be killed or denied or otherwise terminated.
“From hell’s heart I stab at thee. For hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
Posted on 1.24.23 by L.A. Times critic Justin Chang:
