Magnolia

Been a long time since I last watched this but even though this was 3 hours long, never felt the length and I was pretty much captivated throughout (although I did pause a few times to get refill on my drink or grab a snack). The performances all around were great, most notably Tom Cruise, Melora Walters, John C. Reilly and the young Jeremy Blackman (Stanley). It does get heavy-handed and while I "get" the raining fr…

I remember seeing this in the theater with one of my friends, during our first year in college. We had all found our way back to town and... given we lived in the sticks... we ended up going to the movies out of habit and for lack of anything else to do. And I'll be honest, at the time, I walked out of the theater kind of blown away. I hadn't really seen a movie like that before. I mean, the closest thing that…

Julianne Moore at her's Peak & and also all of em. **What the Frogs!**

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson I'm not sure if this entire film was built around Aimee Mann's "Wise Up," or if Magnolia is really a love letter to Aimee Mann herself. What's clear is that Paul Thomas Anderson wrote his sprawling, three-hour epic with her music as the foundation. Nine original songs from Mann comprise the soundtrack, her dark, sardonic style meshing perfectly with Anderson's vision of damaged peo…

This isn't so much a piece of cinema as a cinematographic exercise is crochet-work! There are nine folks central to it's plots - for there are at least three - yet as we progress we realise that there is a degree of integration between the characters that becomes less tangential as the stories unravel. "Jimmy" (Philip Baker Hall) has hosted a quiz series for thirty-odd years that showcases the precocious wisdom of th…