EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE Review

This took me and sat me down like a small child. Multiple times. To an extent that I just felt like I needed to take a walk afterwards.

I pulled into the parking lot near the boardwalk, threw the earbuds in, and tried to keep the momentum of how this made me feel going. The theses hit like a brick wall when I got to the top of a hill and saw, on the very path I was walking and written in electric blue chalk, the words KEEP DANCING THROUGH LIFE.

And then after that: a private moment of a couple fighting in a parking garage. Her leaning against the steel rope handrail, exhausted, and looking out over the water below. Couples in their 50s, 60s, and so on. Holding hands and quietly whispering to one another. Smiling at each passerby (including me twice for one couple that was on my opposite loop). A singular buoy out alone in the water. Disappearing and reappearing amongst the blue, only noticing the violence around it when you look a little closer. A man on the beach with his wife and child, him hugging her as her arms lay limp at her sides. The hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of rocks at the water's edge. Each malformed by water and the decades in different ways. The waves crashing over each and then pulling back. Every movement having micro-consequences on pebble to boulder alike. And then another wave comes.

Nearly everything felt like a mirror back to this film. But cynicism is a black shadow behind that everything. It rears its own ocean over all around it and reminds you not to think with such solipsism. "The rain in a few days will wash the chalk away, Pollyanna," it says. Cynicism v. Optimism is often a one-sided battle today, so stripping any meaning from seeing rolling blue peaks of water crashing against rusted and weathered seawalls becomes the norm. It becomes the easy path.

Once you get in the habit of thinking nothing matters, the brush becomes your constant companion. You can paint anything and anyone with it. A great defense mechanism, sure, but it leaves one lonely in a corner. Only when you flip the perspective and accept that nothing matters, that it truly doesn't matter, only then can you continue actually living. Because the feeling may be fleeting, but if it gets you out into the world and appreciating a spring day, that ball of fire above your head uninterrupted by clouds against the still-freezing spring wind that moves water and numbs your face: I'd say that's worth it. After all, how often do you see an angry person on the dance floor, anyway?

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The above was taken from my Letterboxd review.