Movies are incredible. They can heavily affect a person life, depending on where they are in their life. For me personally, seeing my favorite movie for the first time somewhat shaped who I am today.
By Alex Richard
(Everything Everywhere All at Once poster currently on my dorm wall)
My favorite movie of all time is Everything Everywhere All at Once directed by The Daniels. I’m sure that if that was told to some members of the film community, some of the responses would call it recency bias and tell me that I just haven’t seen enough of the classic films throughout history. And that may be true, but over the past few years of watching the old hits that are regarded as the greatest movies of all time, none have come close to dethroning EEAAO.
I will never forget my first viewing experience seeing Everything Everywhere All at Once. I remember seeing the trailer for it online and thinking it looked so awesome and weird. I went to the movie theater with my dad, my common moviegoer partner at the time, and it legitimately may have changed my life. I left the theater in awe.
What was annoying was that my dad didn’t even like the movie that much. Normally we would just go see the new action or superhero flick in theaters, so this was somewhat new. All I wanted to do during the car ride back was just discuss every minute detail about it.
It may sound corny, but this movie unironically changed my life, but not in a way that shook me to my core. Nothing like that, but how some things of my life have proceeded. This has been my ultimate movie recommendation to anyone who will listen, and I have a core memory of watching this movie over Facetime with a friend and it was a key moment of us becoming friends. This movie made me buy YouTube TV just so I could watch the Oscars because I wanted nothing more than for my favorite movie to be recognized. Lucky for me, Everything Everywhere All at Once pretty much won everything.
Seeing the incredible performances by Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu (who should have won the Oscar this year) got me into the drama side of movies. It led me to see brilliant movies that are now my modern favorites like The Banshees of Inisherin and Babylon which came out that same year, and the movies of years prior like all of Wes Anderson’s film catalog. Who knows if I would have participated in Barebhiemer, which turned out to be one of my favorite theater experiences of all time, if I hadn't watched Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Now I don’t want the takeaway of this to be “fuck the MCU and any other major blockbuster action movie” or something dumb like that. To this day, I am still a massive Marvel and superhero movie fan. I don’t think there is a movie I’m more excited about that comes out this year than Deadpool & Wolverine and in general, I enjoy the fun, action, sci-fi adventure.
There isn’t something I’m trying to make you take away from this, it’s more of showing that trying new things can turn out pretty sick sometimes. I don’t think that there are many things better in the world than the feeling after watching an incredible movie. Now what you do after that is up to you, whether you never revisit the film, or it becomes a comfort movie that when you're having a shitty day, you can just put on, covered in blankets and it can bring up your mood immediately.
I asked 4 University of Maine students what their favorite movie of all time was. Click the photo below to see the students' favorites.
Let me know what your favorite movie is and what about it keeps bringing you back in the comments of the new Instagram post below.
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