Every Minute of Everything Everywhere All At Once

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Lester and Kynan attempt to explain, evaluate, enlighten and elucidate the Academy Award-winning film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, minute by multiversal minute! Now, you may only see a couple of chuckleheads trying to talk about a movie and getting distracted by all the cool references and easter eggs…but we see a story! Follow us through the multiverse as we explore each individual minute of this amazing film!

  1. 20h ago

    Minute 109 - We Put Laundry And Taxes On A Bagel!

    We made it to the line. Foxy Waymond finishes it — in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you — laughs a small rueful laugh, and walks out of the alley and out of the movie for good. And then the film does something you don't expect: instead of cutting to Cinderella Evelyn's reaction, it cuts to our Evelyn, in the atrium, receiving that speech while looking at a completely different Waymond sweeping up broken glass in a laundromat. She crosses the room and hugs him. He drops the dustpan.We spend a good chunk of this one on translation. A listener sent us a Tumblr post years ago arguing the English subtitle is a slight mistranslation, and that the Mandarin is closer to "if we had another life, I would still choose to do taxes and open a laundromat with you" — a rich man explicitly saying he'd trade all of it. We dig into both versions, and then Kynan points out the chronology runs backwards from what everyone assumes: the English was in the script first, and the subtitles came from the script rather than from the performance.Plus: the smiley face stamped into the dustpan, why the sound of it hitting the floor isn't the sound a dustpan makes, the googly eye Waymond snuck onto a lantern two hours earlier that the movie deliberately didn't show us at the time, and Evelyn laughing so hard the tears come out sideways. This is the end of Act Two.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

  2. Oct 7

    Minute 108 - We Put A Shave And A Haircut On A Bagel!

    Evelyn says "It's too late, Waymond." And then, after a long pause, reaches out and takes his hand. That single touch opens everything: the two of them as newlyweds with their hands stacked on the couch, Waymond turning from the TV to ask if she saw that (she didn't, she was looking at him), tearing the newspaper off the windows of a brand new laundromat, twirling in their apartment, finding the remote under the couch and being genuinely delighted about it. He taps a service bell in a shave-and-a-haircut rhythm and asks what song it is. Then green light creeps across her face and we're in the Hong Kong alley, where Foxy Waymond turns around and says: in another life.And that's where the minute ends. We had to cut the most famous line in the movie in half, which we assume was done to us on purpose.We work through what "it's too late" means when she immediately contradicts it, and land on this: it's too late to be Jobu and too late to be Waymond, and what's coming next is Evelyn mode. We talk about how these aren't flashbacks — she's actually present in these moments, which is exactly the thing Jobu swore she'd never manage again. And Kynan spent most of his research week on that service bell: shave and a haircut goes back to 1800s minstrel songs, becomes the rhythmic skeleton of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" and Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," and was used by American POWs in Vietnam as a knock-code because the locals didn't recognize it.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

  3. Sep 30

    Minute 107 - We Put The Last Temptation Of Evelyn On A Bagel!

    Atrium Waymond finally finds the words — the only thing I do know is that we have to be kind — and then turns and aims it directly at his wife: please be kind, especially when we don't know what's going on. In the Hong Kong alley, Foxy Waymond tells Evelyn he knows she sees herself as a fighter. So does he. This is how he fights. The music swells. Evelyn is waking up. And then Jobu's voice cuts through with one word — bagel — and the whole thing stops dead. Alpha Gong Gong orders the attack. Jobu steps forward, completely earnest, and tells her mother she could still turn around and avoid all of this.Lester makes the case that this is The Last Temptation of Christ, and Kynan — who covered both the Kazantzakis novel and the Scorsese film on the other show — agrees completely. The temptation on the cross wasn't power or bread or kingdoms. It was a normal life: come down, get married, have children, grow old, don't be the son of man. That's the one that actually lands for a regular person, and it's exactly what Jobu is offering here. You don't have to be the hero. You can just walk away.We also dig into why the be-kind speech doesn't exist in the 2017 draft, what changed between 2016 and 2020 to put it there, and how differently it hits now. Plus: why Foxy Waymond calling kindness a strategy reframes the whole thing, and how that connects to the genuinely radical pacifism of Jesus, Gandhi, and King, which was never about overcoming anyone.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

  4. Sep 23

    Minute 106 - We Put A Plea For Peace On A Bagel!

    Two Waymonds. Two speeches. At the same time. In the Alpha Verse, a stabbed Waymond stands between Evelyn and a dozen armed jumpers — one of whom is holding an office desk phone as a weapon — asking if they can just stop fighting, and admitting that he doesn't know what's going on but somehow feels like it's all his fault. In a green Hong Kong alley, Foxy Waymond tells Evelyn that choosing to see the good side of things isn't naive. It's strategic. It's necessary. It's how he's learned to survive through everything.Here's the realization that reframes this whole stretch of the film: Ke Huy Quan has two famous speeches in this movie, and almost nobody thinks of them as separate. People quote both constantly — laundry and taxes, and be kind especially when you don't know what's going on — but they're braided together so tightly that they feel like one continuous thought from one person. They're not. They're two characters in two universes making two different arguments. We spend the episode pulling them apart and then arguing about whether they're secretly the same speech in different dialects.We also sit with "somehow this feels like it's all my fault," which is factually wrong — this is the Waymond who says Raccoon Waymond and Raccoon Joy, he has no idea what's happening — but lands on Evelyn at exactly the right moment. She's been telling herself that her whole life. She's also been saying it out loud to him for twenty years. Hearing it in his voice is what finally breaks it.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

  5. Sep 16

    Minute 105 - We Put Being Too Sweet On A Bagel!

    Deirdre pauses at the door on her way out, shares a look with Evelyn, and staggers off looking like someone dropped a bomb on her. Waymond, still kneeling in front of his handcuffed wife, tells her he doesn't know how he did it — he just talked to Deirdre — and he is openly, unmistakably crying while trying to look like he isn't. Then he stands up, picks up a broom, and sweeps the broken glass while quietly singing a Chinese New Year song. Meanwhile, in a green-lit Hong Kong alley, Foxy Waymond says Evelyn's father used to call him too sweet for his own good, and maybe he was right. And in the Alpha Verse, Waymond stands in front of the wife who stabbed him, arms out against a dozen jumpers, saying please.We stop the episode to sit with what Ke Huy Quan is doing here — real tears, in a performance where the character is trying not to cry, in a conversation that's clearly scarier to him than facing down the police. We talk about the specific kind of masculine melodrama that wrecks audiences, and about the twenty years Hollywood took from all of us by not casting this man. And then Lester looked up what Waymond is humming while he sweeps: "Gongxi Gongxi," written in 1945 to mark the end of the war, tied to an older myth about a beast that came each winter to eat villagers — so at dawn, neighbors ran out, saw each other alive, and shouted congratulations. Not on winning. On surviving. Waymond is standing in the wreckage of his marriage singing a song that means we made it through the dark together.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

  6. Sep 9

    Minute 104 - We Put Nothing Special On A Bagel!

    Jobu is outside the laundromat window with a cigarette, grinning, telling Evelyn to come back to the bagel — and then to ignore it. But Evelyn can't stop watching Waymond whisper something into Deirdre's ear. We're too far away to hear it. We just watch Jamie Lee Curtis take it in with her whole body: straightening up, clutching the eviction papers, breathing out, and then telling the cop to let Evelyn go before slumping hard against the washers like the fight has left her. Waymond walks over with his hands going into his pockets — somehow both aw-shucks-it's-just-me and John Wayne after saving the town — and crouches down in front of his handcuffed wife to tell her everything is going to be okay. Evelyn says that's impossible. Jobu, nearly talking over her, says it's just a statistical inevitability. Nothing special.Daniel Kwan originally wanted ADHD to be a running theme in this film, and this is the minute where Evelyn's distractibility saves her life. We spend most of the episode on Deirdre — this is the second time she's let this family off the hook, which makes it a pattern rather than a Grinch moment, and we build out a theory of who she was before her divorce and why she became who we met at the start. We also get into the two different faces Jobu is wearing in the same minute, why "statistical inevitability" echoes a line from a deleted Thetaverse scene, and the trope that doesn't have a name but should: making excuses to do the right thing.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

  7. Sep 2

    Minute 103 - We Put A Hard Time On A Bagel!

    Jobu rises out of the rock universe and back into the Bagel Temple, and finally says the thing the whole movie has been building toward: she didn't build the bagel to destroy everything. She built it to destroy herself — to see if going in meant she could finally escape and actually die. She holds out her hand, Evelyn takes it, and Jobu says at least this way she doesn't have to do it alone. Then static cuts in, and Evelyn wakes up handcuffed in the laundromat while Deirdre tells Waymond that everyone she knows is going through a hard time.This is the minute where the Trojan horse opens. Underneath the hot dog hands and the raccoon voiced by Randy Newman, this has been a mother-daughter drama about a daughter contemplating suicide the entire time. We spend most of the episode there, and with Camus — Kynan reads from The Myth of Sisyphus, which opens by declaring suicide the only truly serious philosophical question, and uses Galileo as its central example: a man who chose to keep living over an argument about whether the Earth orbits the sun. It takes Camus 180 pages to conclude that suicide is the wrong answer, which is exactly why so many people stop halfway and take away the opposite. Same warning applies here: don't stop at this minute.We also track the creation metaphor carrying over from the rock scene, why the shot of their two hands forms a yin-yang without ever saying so, and what got cut from the scripted version of this conversation — including a line about Evelyn forgetting her silly husband's name.If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text in the US.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

  8. Aug 26

    Minute 102 - We Put A Big F**king JOKE On A Bagel!

    Two rocks on a clifftop, still no voices, still just text. Joy says every new discovery is a reminder — and Evelyn finishes it: we're all small and stupid. Then Joy wonders what discovery is coming next to make us feel like even smaller pieces of shit, and Evelyn responds with a single word: language. In a theater where you could hear a pin drop, that gets the first laugh in what feels like ten minutes. Then Joy stares at her, and Evelyn clarifies: I'm joking, that was a joke. They laugh in text — ha ha ha, white and black, filling a wide shot of a dead planet — and in the silence afterward, you can hear the desert wind. Joy says f**k. She's been trapped like this for so long. And she admits what she actually wanted: someone who would see something she didn't. Someone who'd convince her there was another way.Lester takes a swing this episode and argues Jobu might be the perfect villain, and we trace that through Nurse Ratched, Syndrome, Miss Havisham, Darth Vader, and the xenomorph in Alien — landing on the specific archetype Jobu belongs to: the broken hero who ran the journey first, failed, and needs the new hero to prove the game isn't rigged. What makes it devastating here is that Evelyn failed too. We also break down how this scene is engineered: why "language" is a popcorn joke and "I'm joking" is the better one, why rendering laughter as text makes it an idea rather than a sound, and how sound itself slowly evolves back into the scene — wind, then chimes, then one clumsy piano note — like life restarting.Show archiveBanana for Scale Facebook GroupConnect with Kynan on Instagram or LetterboxdConnect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X --- Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more. Check out the other podcasts in the Banana for Scale family of podcasts:The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil Through Art & LiteratureThe Exorcist Minute

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Lester and Kynan attempt to explain, evaluate, enlighten and elucidate the Academy Award-winning film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, minute by multiversal minute! Now, you may only see a couple of chuckleheads trying to talk about a movie and getting distracted by all the cool references and easter eggs…but we see a story! Follow us through the multiverse as we explore each individual minute of this amazing film!

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