Rating: 
Summary: Worst movie I ever spent the time to watch
Review: Although many people gave this movie 5 stars I don't even want to give it 1 star. This was the most mixed up movie I have ever seen. It jumped all over the place, I did not understand what was going on, it was very weird. I have see hundreds of movies and I can usually find some good in a movie until I seen this one, which I could not force myself to watch until the end.
Rating: 
Summary: A film that changed my life.
Review: P.T. Anderson, has, to put it bluntly, changed my life. He changed my life by making this exquisite, beautiful epic of eleven interwoven, powerful, and stunning characters. When I first saw this film, for the first time in my life, I felt compelled to sit though all of the credits becuase it was so spectacular! People have said enough already about the plot line, so I'll skip that. What I will speak about though are the characters. Many say what makes a film good is if the characters are larger than life. I now and forever disagree. What made this film so exceptional was that the characters ARE life. Every single one of them thinks they are invincible. They all have pain and suffering in the lives. They all experience emotion that we, the audience, as normal people, relate to becuase we feel the same emotions. For instance, when we are confronted that someone we love is dying, we torture ourselves with grief. When we have a dark past, we lie to protect ourselves from pain. When we are alone, we feel lonely. Magnolia, though only nominated for three and won no Oscars, is something that can't easily be awarded because to us, it hits too close to home and we hate to face the realities of death, loneliness, addiction, and love. Certainly this film deserved many Oscars (Cruise especially because I usually despise him as an actor)--Melora Walters was so honest as Claudia. Jason Robards proved that even as a bedridden old fart we still have regret and issues to face. Julianne Moore (my favorite actress) proved once again that she can take on any role given her (this is probably my favorite performance from her). And P.T.A.--What is there to say about P.T.A.? He is surely one of the most honest and controversial filmmakers today, and I can only hope that his career blossoms with Magnolia, definitely his best film to date. P.T.A. has courage to show us what life is, and for that he should be commended. He admits to his sources of inspiration (i.e. Altman especially), and you can tell by the outcome of Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and Hard Eight that he is not going to settle for anything less than the truth. For that, as well, he should be commended. It is now my goal to make films, because of the beauty of this one, and Magnolia is surely not only my favorite film, but also the one closest to my heart.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent characters, decent plot, very confused meaning
Review: This is one of the better films of '99, but nonetheless overrated and hardly deserving of much rigorous analysis. If it wasn't encumbered by pretentious symbolism and a feel-good stench that becomes pervasive by the last few minutes, the simple storytelling ability and innovative narrative structure would make it a superb work. Very believable characters are Magnolia's greatest strength. Despite the wide range of social class and personality, every character has human weaknesses and strengths--no one figure stands out as a hero, except perhaps a loyal hospice nurse (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). I was struck by the (chilling) realism of the relationship between whiz kid Stanley, mature beyond his years and his greedy, childish father. The plot works well enough when left to itself, but the director makes the mistake of rushing to tie all the ends up after most of the action has occurred. The stories were solid enough on their own! And like too many recent films, the soundtrack adds nothing (sometimes even obscuring dialogue and real noise), and seems to be merely a vehicle for promoting new artists. Finally, the attempts at a larger message don't work at all; quasi-cryptic phrases repeated mechanically by different characters, the strange precipitation (funny, but not profound), and weather forecasts don't seem to combine effectively for any unifiying theme.
Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: This is one of the best movies i have ever seen. I work in a video store and I see many many movies. I saw this twice in the theater and all I could say after it was finished was.....wow.
Rating:
Summary: A great film from one of todays most important directors!
Review: Paul Anderson, like Brian Singer, is one of todays most important, watchable directors. While I didn't think this movie was as good as his opus Boogie Nights, I still feel that it was 99% beter than most of the stuff that was released in 1999.I can't fathom why some people, critics included, found this film hard to understand. In a way, it had one of the simplest of plots of Anderson's movies. It just threw a lot of characters at you. But once you get past the introduction, with its kaliope music and swirling camera angles, the film settles in to the simple, beautiful story of reconciliation, showcased in 3 vignettes; that of Jason Robards family, that of Baker-Halls family and that of Bill Macys story. To say that the acting by everyone, down to the children, is superb would be redundant, as Anderson utilizes many of the same actors from his 2 previous, wonderful films. Back again are the incredible talents of william H Macy, Baker-Hall, Julianne Moore, Seymour-Thomas,John Reily and many more that once again show their acting prowess. More credit to them, is the fact that the same director keeps using them in his films, yet we keep getting different, unique chacracter portrayals each time. On board this time, in addition, are most notably Tom Cruise and Jason Robards. Cruise was once again again ripped off by not getting the best supprting actor oscar ( I wouldn't want to have been the one to try to determine who was a supprting actor & who was a lead actor in this film!). He desrved the oscar here, giving a magnetic performance with such jumpy electricity not seen from Cruise since the Color of Money. Robards was also incredibly effective, given his charcaters state of being. Robards has been under used in the 80's & 90's, and we quickly remember some of his best, past performances (such as in Johnny Got His Gun) while watching this movie! Along with the "regulars", director Anderson gives us a truly moving movie that tackles depressing subjects while never pandering to humanity's baser nature, which is something that a lot of 1999 films were guilty of ( American Beauty, Boys Dont Cry...). The only thing that keeps me from giving this 5 stars is the bit of the silly, Biblical plague-like ending which attempted to unite all of the plot threads. I don't think that that was neccessary. I thought all of the stories and characters stood up nicely on their own. I can't wait for the DVD release to see if there's anything that Anderson left on the cuting room floor( you might think that thats impossible with a 3 hour movie, but check out the 9 deleted scenes from Boogie Nights DVD, and that movie ran over 2 & 1/2 hours!)
Rating:
Summary: 1 is the loneliest number
Review: It took some convincing for me to actually go to a theater to see a movie with Tom Cruise in it. But i did, and it was one of the top best decisions i've made this year so far. I could never understand why i hear this movie being called "boring." Magnolia had me laughing, angry, and in tears. Julianne Moore's angry pharmacy scene was fantastic and powerful. With the movie's brilliant variety of characters, you will find someone to relate to in this movie. Magnolia gives its audiences subject topics that we all deal with at some point of our lives, directly or indirectly, but nonetheless we are faced with these topics: death, abuse, adultery, nonexistent relationships between relatives, drug use, insecurity, the desire to always succeed, and the yearning to find someone who will love you unconditionally. I probably forgot to mention some stuff because just thinking about this movie gets me feeling like i'm still in the theater. All these characters have obvious flaws that they bring to the screen with realness. This isn't about Hollywood glamor and wealth. Magnolia has such an eerie, breathtaking way of making you feel at home.
Rating:
Summary: What Happened To Magnolia At Oscar Time?
Review: I tuned into this movie primarily because I'd heard lots of good things about Tom Cruise's performance. I expected that the film itself probably came in way behind the major contenders for the Oscars, especially "American Beauty". That was a big mistake on my part. This film should have been up for a lot of Oscars, including best picture, and not just Cruise's performance. There are many wonderful performances in this film since there is no lead role. This gives everyone a chance to dig in and give it his or her all. It reminds me of Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" but I felt this film was even more artfully done than that one. All of the characters have some point of intersection in their lives and in the film. This fits since Magnolia is the name of an intersection in the San Fernando Valley where the movie is set. I was left the longest ruminating about Cruise's character, a man who has made a strong, chauvinistic stand with women into a business with seminars for male wimps who want to be like the seemingly powerful, charismatic and sexually in-your-face Cruise. (One glance at the audience tells you they lack the basic material to model themselves after their leader.) Eventually, I decided the Cruise character was really trying to sell power in relationships between men and women. Somehow he's come to believe that the most vital thing is to set oneself up as the one with the power right from the start. When the truth of his own past comes out, we discover how badly this man needed power at the turning point in his life with his parents. The other characters seem to lack power as well and the most powerless are the ones who used to have the most power, the two powerful show business men who are going to die of cancer very close together. I saw this film on video so was not bothered by the length of it. It is long but you can stop it and take bathroom breaks! Writer-director Anderson is a talent I am going to keep my eye on, you can bet. Next movie of his, I'll be there.
Rating: 
Summary: Magnolia
Review: Magnolia Magnolia, P.T. Anderson's 2000 follow-up to his very strong 1997 effort Boogie Nights (which launched the by now very successful film career of one-time disco rapper Markie-Mark Wahlberg) is a confident, brazenly directed piece of Altmanian-Scorseseness that keeps the tempo pounding, the effects coming, the actors Heroding, and the old melodrama successfully dripping for three or so odd hours. It is brave, fearless, ambitious, gonzo filmmaking that puts most of 1999 to shame, and seems alongside a movie like DiCaprio's The Beach (new on video this week) a dollar to a donut. It is heartbreaking for me to say, therefore, that in the end Magnolia fails, badly, and though more worth your while, probably, than all but five other films you can name made during the last year, simply because it points ahead at the coming artistic success of a talented director (which Boogie Nights also did, unfortunately), Magnolia is an uneven, derivative, and obviously written corn-husk doll dressed up to look like Barbie. There isn't a storyline as such. If you are familiar with Boogie Nights or the ensemble films of Robert Altman (and here I'm talking Nashville or, even more so, Short- Cuts) then you know the idea: here are a bunch of seemingly un-related characters--a game show host (Baker Hall), his wife (Melinda Dillon) a dying old man (Robards), his unhinged wife (Moore), his empathetic nurse (Hoffman), an infomercial uber-stud (Cruise), a wacked out drug addict (Walters), a dim but good-hearted cop (Reilly) who is in love with the wacked out drug addict, who is also the game show host's daughter, a child genius (Jeremy Blackman) with family issues, and an ex-child genius (Macy) in love with a brawny bartender--and part of the fun, ostensibly, is figuring out how they all connect in the end. And connect, of course, they do, but to reveal these connections in this review is to disservice the film of one of its most effective powers. But there are many powerful moments of acting and direction in Magnolia that I can mention. PT Anderson, and I am nowhere near the first person to have said this, is an actor's director. He trusts them invariably to do their thing, and seems loathe to stop them. Hence, and thankfully, we have Julianne Moore laying down some serious character work as a goldbricking wife with a change of heart; John Reilly turning leaden morality into a kind of suave sophisitication; Tom Cruise lampooning, very effectively, his cocksure, macho-man image as cartoonish self-help guru Frank TJ Mackey; William Macy as the man who passed his prime at age eight; and finally, pitching in around the corners, we have the Phillips, Baker Hall and Seymour Hoffman (regulars, along with Moore, Reilly, Macy, and Melora Walters, in the Anderson stable), who lend a grace and dignity to the histrionic melodrama swirling around them in the pages of Anderson's script. But Magnolia is, in the end, Melora Walters' movie, and if she is an unknown name to you (if you haven't seen her bit part in Boogie Nights or her strange, early turn alongside Chris Elliot in the execrable and under- rated Cabin Boy) then you really ought to tune in and watch her go. Her character, an egregiously wronged and unstable daughter in a script full of familial (and-all- too-familiar), movie-of-the-week sin, becomes the uncanny center of a chaotic, mutinous sideshow. Does she hold the film together? Somehow, through her conviction and her commitment to the sometimes two-dimensional script, yes, she does. The film's most memorable scenes (and for me, the most well- acted) are hers, and with her slight frame, her hair as strung out as her character, she wades into the maelstrom and passes through re-forged, unharmed, and ready, one hopes, for a full-time, successful career. If somebody out there besides PT Anderson doesn't take Melora Walters seriously, well, somebody better had. But it is the writing that does Magnolia in, as PT Anderson panders to obviousness (the child-genius tells his father, "You have to start treating me better," and in a case of incest/molestation that did, or did not happen, the camera focuses on a nightmarish painting on the victim's wall, and zooms into the caption, "But it really did happen."). This was much the same fault Anderson made in Boogie Nights, which, when you take away all the hair-pulling, camera bravado, and jumping about, becomes a darker kind of after-school special in which boy does good, boy does drugs, boy gets strung out, boy gets clean, and boy does good again. Obviousness is a problem Anderson will have to watch if he's going to make good on his promise of auteurism, a promise which his "style" fairly screams out. In order for me to put him alonside Spike Jonze or David O. Russell (1999's Being John Malkovich and Three Kings, respectively), he'll have to show some restraint, learn to keep (as in Boogie Nights) the penis hidden from the camera and (as in Boogie Nights and Magnolia) trust his audience to do some imaginative work on their own. He wants to show us everything (which can be good; Magnolia's breathtaking, climactic, revelatory final sequence testifies to this); but most of the time he ends up treating us like t.v. baby knuckleheads, like horses in need of the proverbial carrot. The dramatic frame, which enlists a television-like Believe it or Not format in order to excuse the rest of the movie, is largely throat-clearing, a useless, nervous energy expended for the audience's benefit (and therefore stylized pandering). PT Anderson is in a tough place, at once making shadows like he might be the next auteur du jour, but then again too interested in being a box-office success. He's going to have to decide, and soon, whether he really wants the money or the blood.
Rating:
Summary: A badly overrated film
Review: What an piece of garbage. Terrible, over-the-top acting, stupid and offensive characters, abundant profanity, drug addiction, pyschoses, wailing, knashing of teeth, biblical plagues, misery, sorrow, regret, yada yada yada. A 3-hour paean to over-indulgent, narcissistic directing. I want my money back.
Rating:
Summary: I really expected better
Review: I loved "Boogie Nights", and I was really looking forward to Anderson's next movie. But I have to say that I was pretty disappointed with "Magnolia". I know that right now a lot of people are thinking that I just didn't "get it." Well no, that's just it, I DID get it, but I still thought it was stupid. I've taken film classes and made some films myself (one of which was shown at a film and video festival), so I know enough to keep my mind open and not to judge a film too quickly. But when you hit the 2 hour mark of a 3 hour movie and you're still waiting for it to get good, it's indicative of a stupid movie. Even then, I thought to myself, "Well, maybe it'll really have a good conclusion", which would have redeemed it somewhat. But no. I'm willing to go with the frogs falling from the sky, or the group sing-along. Those are actually things I would really love if the rest of the movie was any good, but...well, it's not. As a matter of fact, it's the rest of the movie that is just a wandering mess. Sitting there listening to a sick Jason Robards moaning and rasping voice-over for 10 minutes makes me want to eject the cassette and break it in half, not go out and but the DVD. I love the extended Steadicam shots, and the intro sequence is really promising, but I do NOT recommend this movie. And I ESPECIALLY recommend that you see it before you buy it. (I would have bought it had the video and the DVD been released simultaneously...dodged a bullet there!) I ask that nobody automatically assumes I don't understand what Anderson was trying to do with this movie. Once again, I reiterate that I do in fact "get" the film, I just don't like it. Respect my opinion and I'll respect yours. All in all, I'd rather watch "Boogie Nights" again and wait for Anderson's next film (he still has a lot of promise) than watch this mess again.
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