Worth Mentioning - The Dream You Never Wake Up From

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody wasn't too thrilled with a couple spectacles.

NOPE (2022)

Writer/director Jordan Peele’s Nope was meant to be his biggest and best movie yet. A “horror epic”. A spectacle designed to draw people back into theatres after the pandemic emptied them out. And it did well in theatres, drawing in $171 million – which is still around $80 million less than both of his previous movies, Get Out and Us made. But while it certainly is Peele’s biggest movie to date, for me his career has been a case of diminishing returns so far. I didn’t like Us quite as much as I liked Get Out, and I didn’t like Nope nearly as much as I liked Us.

The story centers on siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer), who have inherited their father’s horse ranch, located in an isolated valley, and his company Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, which trains horses for use in film and television. Something strange is going on in their valley, though... and it started on the day their father Otis (Keith David) died, killed when metal objects came raining down from the sky. Now the electricity keeps going out. Something has the horses spooked. And there’s an unusual, you could say unidentified, object in the sky above them. OJ and Em decide they need to capture this UFO activity on camera, and they’re aided in this endeavor by electronics store employee Angel (Brandon Perea) and cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott).

The set-up is interesting and there are some fun, creepy sequences... but oddly, the creepiest sequence has nothing to do with the thing in the sky above Haywood ranch. A thing they take to calling Jean Jacket. Instead, the creepiest moment is a prank where kids in alien costumes are lurking around in the dark. I probably would have enjoyed Nope more if it had been about an invasion of diminutive aliens instead of a weird cloud / saucer / jellyfish thing in the sky. Really, my biggest issue with the film was its length, as it felt entirely too long at 130 minutes. There were definitely some unnecessary elements that could have been trimmed from the script. Personally, I could have done without everything that involves references and flashbacks to an incident involving a chimp on the set of a sitcom back in the ‘90s. Gordy the Chimp is an ultimately pointless side plot that doesn’t add anything to the story but minutes. The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun is present as Ricky “Jupe” Park, who was an actor on that sitcom and now owns a tourist attraction near the Haywood ranch. Jupe is very flippant about the incident that saw a chimp going on a face-ripping rampage that saw his co-stars being maimed. 

In the end, we find out that Jean Jacket only attacks people and things that look directly at it, and you could say that Gordy the Chimp is in the movie because it shows that Jupe wasn’t attacked by the chimp because he didn’t look him in the eyes. But it doesn’t need to be there, because Jupe himself is a minor character and we already have the Haywood horses to show us that an animal will be bothered by the wrong look.

Nope isn’t a bad movie. It’s worth watching and provides some entertainment. But it could have been shorter and more streamlined. 

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)

People often say that the Academy plays it too safe when it comes time to pick the Oscar winners... but if Everything Everywhere All at Once sweeping up the awards this year is any indication, the Academy is quite willing to go weird. In fact, by pouring the accolades on this particular movie they’ve gone even further into weirdness than I was able to follow. This is certainly a unique, one-of-a-kind movie, and it’s one that I found to be a grating chore to sit through.

Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a.k.a. The Daniels, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a story of the multiverse, which is a hot topic at the moment. Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese immigrant who is struggling to keep her family’s laundromat in the U.S. afloat while being audited by the IRS – represented by Jamie Lee Curtis as a very unpleasant woman named Deirdre. While they’re at an important tax meeting, Evelyn’s unhappy husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) has his consciousness taken over by a different version of himself from another universe. This other Waymond informs Evelyn that Jobu Tupaki, another universe’s version of their also-unhappy daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has created something called the Everything Bagel that threatens to destroy the multiverse.

And so begins at 139 minute battle against Jobu and her lackeys, who take over the consciousness of people around Evelyn and attack. And during this battle, we get extensive glimpses into the lives other versions of Evelyn are living in other universes. There’s one where she’s an actress who knows martial arts, much like Michelle Yeoh herself. There’s one where she has hot dogs for fingers and is in a relationship with Deirdre. There’s another where she’s familiar with a raccoon who’s a cooking whiz.

This sounds like the set-up for an entertaining action movie, and for a while it is fun to watch Yeoh and Quan bust out martial arts moves. But the action and the ridiculous amount of slow-motion got old for me with about half the running time left to go. And every quirky thing that might have made me smile or chuckle at one point became tiring, as the Daniels saw fit to beat every single joke into the ground, going back to them over and over again. 

I found this movie to be absolutely mind-numbing and, after about the halfway point, quite annoying. That said, there are some nice, heartwarming moments in the film. I am very glad that Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan took home for Oscars because of this film, and I even would have liked to have seen Stephanie Hsu awarded for her performance as Jobu / Joy. Unfortunately, she had to share the Supporting Actress category with Jamie Lee Curtis, who I don’t think really earned an Oscar for playing her character. Her win was more of a “congratulations on your career” win. But hopefully Hsu will have more chances to go for the gold in decades ahead.

The Academy definitely was not playing it safe when they chose Everything Everywhere All at Once as Best Picture. It wouldn’t have been my choice, because it’s so damn strange I was rooting for the bagel to destroy the multiverse and bring the movie to its much-anticipated end.