A Great Era in Cinema: 2022: The Greatest Movie in 19 years

Martin Scorsese talks about the death of cinema.

Well, I have news for you.

For in 2022, the cinematic equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses or Virginia Woolf's At the Lighthouse was released.

With the cinematic skill of a Spielberg or a Scorsese.

It was called Everything Everywhere All At Once.

And it is unlike any experimental modernist novel ever written.

For instead of reveling in the nerotic darkness, Everything Everywhere tries to find an answer to it.

And succeeds.

And so this is not just the cinematic equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses.

It's also the cinematic equivalent of the Book of Job and Plato's Phaedrus, or something similar which had yet to be written until this movie.

For this is one of the few truly great movies that is primarily, rather than secondarily, a philosophical movie.

Whose plot exists to discuss philosophy.

Intensely.  Passionately.  Desperately.

For the philosophy that the movie discusses is, quite simply, a desperate- and ultimately successful- search for an answer to all the darkness of the modern world.

This is a Golden Age of cinema.

It is 2023, the year after Everything Everywhere came out, and this is a new Golden Age of cinema.

For this one movie.

Even if the Black Panther and Avatar movies were not out there, and they are, and they are great, this would still be a new Golden Age of cinema for this one movie.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has given cinema its Ulysses, its At the Lighthouse.

And in the process, has reinvented the genre.

Has reinvented the modernist novel- only as a movie.

By making it a search for an answer to the darkness.

What is more, this movie is what we need.

This movie has answered the darkness of the modern world.

And it is gritty enough to have more than earned that answer.

It has given that answer in the face of all the 'gritty reality' that even Hollywood can dream up.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has reinvented cinema.

Like 45 years before it, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind reinvented cinema.

Only in a different, new way.

This is a Golden Age of cinema- because of one movie.

And this is the only kind of movie that could do it while satisfying Scorsese's intellectual darkness-obsessed world and people like me who are looking for meaning rather than darkness and usually look to Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Which is a story that actually looks for meaning in the face of the darkness.

(Something which, by the way, Lord of the Rings- books and movies both- do very, very well too!  But they're probably too happy, hopeful, and fantasy for Martin Scorsese's world!)

Everything Everywhere All at Once.

For your consideration.

God loves you!

Sincerely,

David S. Annderson