The multiverse martial arts comedy Everything everywhere at once requires a lot of unpacking. Many sequels by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan Swiss army man goes by at breakneck speed, with pop-culture references, goofy cameos, and effects-driven visual gags that beg the freeze-frame approach of home video. Some of these gags are big and obvious, like a prehistoric sequence in which ape-like creatures fight to the death inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s “Discovery of Tools” sequence.. Others are relatively subtle, like the way the Daniels shape an alternate universe based on the Wong Kar-Wai films. In a world where stressed-out laundromat owners Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) are rich, successful film industry figures, they mourn the romance that never existed between them and the aching emotions, intense colors , restrained dialogue and strong lighting, all reminiscent of Wong films In the mood for love and Chungking Express.
At a Chicago screening of Everything everywherethe Daniels spoke to me about these scenes and said they weren’t modeled on any particular scene – as Kwan put it, their cinematographer Larkin Seiple got a little annoyed with critics who specifically quoted In the mood for love
And Daniel Scheinert shared the photo above, which is probably the case Everything everywhere‘s largest Easter egg. Bear me here.
Longtime fans of Kwan and Scheinert’s work are used to seeing them in their own projects. This is Kwan leading the beat-crazed, ceiling-smashing dance orgy in the video “Turn Down For What” by DJ Snake and Lil Jon. (I learned in a previous interview that while Scheinert doesn’t appear in this video, he does take over the penis puppetry whenever Kwan’s groin takes on an independent, aggressive life.) In one of her best and wildest early shorts, “Pockets,” things get really bad for Daniels’ longtime friend Billy Chew when he tries to rob Scheinert. In one of theirs the strangest Early shorts, “Interesting Ball,” an inexplicable cosmic event, has a variety of surreal effects, including Kwan being slowly and inexorably sucked into Scheinert’s rectum. And in Scheinert’s directorial project, the Southern Black The death of Dick LongScheinert plays the title character, a man who dies under circumstances that bring grief and denial to his best friends.
So it’s no wonder that Kwan and Scheinert are there Everything everywhere at once. What is Surprising, at least for fans who think they were quick enough to recognize their faces, is the fact that they’ve been there a number of times – including, as Scheinert puts it, in a cameo that no one could possibly catch unaided.
Scheinert’s most obvious performance in the film is as a character dubbed the “district manager” – he’s the guy who keeps a small light S&M game in the secret office closet full of whips and shackles and is led out of that closet on a leash. He reappears as the same character in the big stairwell fight against Evelyn, who wins the fight by bending him over and beating him up.
Kwan, meanwhile, makes a brief appearance when Jobu Tupaki activates her cosmic Bagel With Everything – he’s the first guy to get sucked into his maelstrom, the man whose face is ripped off in multiple layers before his whole body is sucked in as well. He also appears earlier in the film, although it’s much harder to see his face in this scene – he’s the mugger trying to steal Evelyn’s purse in the Wong Kar-Wai timeline, where a mysterious white-haired martial artist (Li Jing) saves her and the attack inspires her to learn kung fu.
But cameo appearance Scheinert says no one can catch him? That’s because his face and body are completely covered by a monkey suit. In this 2001-style scene, the Daniels visually explain the origins of a universe where everyone has hot dogs on hand. In the prehistory of this world, the tribe of pre-human primates with hot-dog hands won in a struggle for supremacy over other primate species, as illustrated by a lone monkey with hot-dog hands beating a monkey with normal fingers to death. This is Scheinert in a hot dog monkey costume, delivering a fatal blow on behalf of his species and its evolutionary descendants.
But it’s getting better. Scheinert says the production only had two monkey costumes, so not only is he the lead monkey in the sequence — he plays almost all of them. At that Q&A in Chicago, he described how he “spent all day walking around that ridge,” making triumphant hot-dog monkey gestures in different positions and from different angles so he and Kwan had footage they could could digitally stitch together to make a monkey look like a troop of them. In a movie so full of deliciously weird ideas and fast-paced special effects tricks, the idea of one of the directors playing an army of monkeys with hot dog fingers just seems natural. Strange things happen in this film – but it’s still a special pleasure to see the photographic evidence of Scheinert looking exhausted, overheated and tired from being every ape everywhere at once.
