'Everything Everywhere All at Once' explained: Hot dog hands, empathy challenges and meaning in the absurd
From IRS audits to sentient rocks to hot dog hands and beyond, the mundane and the inane collide with the profound in "Everything Everywhere All at Once," the Michelle Yeoh A24 action sci-fi pic that's drawn at-times-ecstatic acclaim since opening in limited release last month.
Where did all these zany ideas come from? Well, where do any ideas come from? Ask filmmaking duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known as Daniels, and they might have a different answer each day.
On this particular afternoon in this particular universe, as they Zoom together in Kwan's lightly cluttered home office in Los Angeles, they trace a line back to their last movie, "Swiss Army Man," a poignant 2016 dramedy about human connection that Scheinert modestly describes as their "feature film about a farting corpse."
"We showed it to our parents and it sparked so many conversations," said Scheinert, who with Kwan spent a decade building their eccentric brand around mind-boggling music videos, shorts and films. "It made us reflect: why did we feel the need to make something so strange — and why is it so hard for our parents to understand it?"
"Everything Everywhere All at Once" follows Evelyn Wang (Yeoh), a woman drowning under the stress of her family's failing laundromat, her ailing marriage to Waymond
