it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Well, good morning. Music is tremendous, camera-movement is tremendous, the acting is tremendous and the plot itself is tremendous. But, it just dosen't work out. Really, for me it was one of the most cruel, psychotic, sad and arrogant movies i've ever watched.But was keeps me alive and emotional, is Tom Cruise or Frank Mackey, sitting by his fathers bed, and acting the living hell out of the movie. He saved it from letting me give it a 3 star rating.Then, there was John Reilly or Officer Jim Kurring crying while it's raining, because he can't find his gun. He lost the gun. It hurt him. He acted with heart throughout that scene, that us, the viewers, couldn't stop caring for him, and that performance alone, made me give the movie a 5-star rating.

Magnolia is a very long and complex movie. It contains many themes and issues but it doesn't explore them with much depth. Magnolia ended without giving any new perspectives on its themes. It did leave me bored and impatient. It's impossible not to think when watching Magnolia, why not tackle half these themes, explore them more thoughtfully, say something, ask some questions, and do it in two hours? There are at least three movies contained in Magnolia. Some of the stories are captivating while others are one-dimensional and weightless. Julianne Moore threatens to sink the whole ship with her soap opera-level portrayal of a drug addict with almost-zero characterization. In stark contrast, the characters played by John C. Riley and Tom Cruise could have been entire movies unto themselves. Multiple characters are set up as "bad people" but then the "twist" is that they were abused as children. But as a movie about child abuse, Magnolia has nothing to say at all. Two characters confess that they cheated on their spouses in long monologues. But is Magnolia about infidelity? I don't think so. Is Magnolia about regret? Yes, it's about that, and guilt, parenting, child abuse, substance abuse, law enforcement and crime, honesty, dating, death and dying, child prodigies, show business, unlikely coincidences, loneliness, it never ends!Magnolia is very intense and melodramatic. I don't think intensity and melodrama are substitutes for pathos and insight. The meta-narrative about coincidences and interconnected lives is self-indulgent and self-congratulatory. Magnolia is only bearably watchable from beginning to end because of a few strong performances and excellent cinematography and editing.Ingmar Bergman apparently like this film. Well, if you want a movie about imperfect fathers, check out Bergman's Wild Strawberries. It's way better, and it doesn't have three music videos in it, and it's not over three hours long.

"The book says, "We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us."Magnolia is a masterpiece. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of my favorite filmmakers and this film is definitely his best. When I finished school this year, I got home and realized there was only one PTA film I had not seen and that was Magnolia, so I popped it in. It was very late and I expected that I was going to get halfway, however I ended up watching all of it. When it ended, I sat there speechless. I called so many people telling them that I had just witnessed cinematic history and that it was the best dialogue driven film of all time. Over the last month, I have re-watched it about four times and shown it to several people. This film is too good not to see more than once. The way PTA blocks a scene, his realistic and well-written dialogue, and of course the performances. The performances are amazing as well. This ensemble cast knocks it out the park. The story revolves around a group of people in the San Fernando Valley, each of which have plot threads that tie into one another. This is one reason why the film's poster is sheer brilliance. It is a Magnolia flower and each petal has a character/characters. All of the petals go back to the middle of the flower. This is because while each of these stories are taking place at different times and sometimes different places...they all relate back to one another and are connected. This story is so well developed and it makes you care about each of these characters, whom you are with for over three hours. This film is very important in the way it depicts relationships. While some of these characters may not share any scenes together, their topics of story lines are certainly very similar. Stanley's story is almost identical to Donnie's. Stanley is a young boy who is clearly very intelligent and his father wants money, which he can win on Jimmy Gator's game show. This is exactly what happened to Donnie when he was on the show in the 60s and his parents took the money he won. These characters are developed in the way that any film character should. They are given depth, meaning, and flaws. Many of these characters are at their core good people, while some of them have questionable behavior. Take Claudia and Linda: two women who both use drugs excessively. In the beginning of the film, I clearly had a somewhat wrong impression of Claudia. When Jimmy arrived to tell her about his illness, she went ballistic and did not even acknowledge the situation. I was thinking that she was just some crazy junkie and she is disrespectful to her father. But once it was revealed that Jimmy had molested her, I totally felt for her and understood her previous actions. While you might dismiss Frank as a sexist pig in the beginning, you can certainly understand his pain later on when you see that his father abandoned him and his mother, who was also ill. In my opinion, the most kind character is Jim. He certainly means well and as an officer of the law he definitely cares about others' well-being. For example, at the end of the film Jim catches Donnie climbing up the side of the store he used to work at. He helps him out and lets him return the money he stole and even sets him up with a guy who works in oral surgery. Donnie Smith was in love and he thought getting braces would impress Brad the bartender. I think that that scene in the bar where a drunk Donnie gives a speech about love and admits his love for Brad is one of the best scenes of the whole film. William H. Macy delivers a great performance in that scene. While many may be confused with the frogs, it is actually brilliant. The frogs represent the plague in the book of exodus, as many of the characters and the narrator quoted the book throughout the film.What makes Magnolia so good and so unique is that it is about life. A lot of these situations are real-life situations that audiences can relate to. This is the best film of 1999 and of the decade.

Writer David Foster Wallace was spot on when he called "Magnolia", "pretentious, hollow and 100% gradschoolish in a bad way".Robert Altman's "Nashville" is what this film really owes its debt to, since it was the first to pioneer the longform, intersecting characters narrative that is tied together by a unifying, traumatic event that all the characters share in somehow.Though I suppose you could say that on a surface level, "Magnolia" is still a closer ripoff of "Short Cuts" (rather than "Nashville") since they both take place in 1990s Los Angeles (as opposed to the 1970s Nashville in the film of that title). Structurally speaking, "Magnolia" is a direct ripoff of these two films. The fact that most fans of Anderson's work don't even realize this just goes to show how most of today's tastes of the so-called film community is built around ignorance of film history. When a fanbase is ignorant of an art's history, it allows charlatans to walk in through the front door and pass themselves off as either original or innovative. The main difference, apart from the showy camera moves in "Magnolia" that call attention to themselves without enhancing the narrative in any substantial way, is the fact that the writing in "Magnolia" features banal, obvious, soap-opera style dialogue that produces over-the-top, two-dimensional characters, whereas "Nashville" and "Short Cuts" feature far more sophisticated and realistic dialogue that develops fully realized characters through their actions, choices and words that are never sophomoric platitudes. Typical examples of Magnolia dialogue include: "Dad, you need to be nicer to me."; "I have so much love to give! I just don't know where to put it!"; "The g-damn regret! Oh, and I'll die. Now I'll die, and I'll tell you what... the biggest regret of my life... I let my love go. What did I do? I'm sixty-five years old. And I'm ashamed."; "I'm sick. I have sickness all around me and you f-ing ask me about my life? 'What's wrong?' Have you seen death in your bed? In your house? Where's your f-ing decency?"; "You listen to me now. You're a good person. You're a good and beautiful person and I won't let you walk out on me. And I won't let you say those things - those things about how stupid you are and this and that. I won't stand for that."; "Respect the c-ck! Tame the c-nt!"; "This isn't funny. This isn't cute. See the way we're looked at? Because I'm not a toy. I'm not a doll."...The entire film is written this way. I'm not kidding you. What is quoted above is just a very small sample. And yet the fans of this film seem to actually embrace and encourage this form of awfulness. They can read the above passages and not even chuckle at how bad it is. Some even claim that this dialogue contains real emotional insights(!?!). You can't quote "Nashville" or "Short Cuts" this way because the dialogue is never trite like this. The characters are built up over the entire course of the nearly 3- hour film, not presented or spelled-out in a melodramatic monologue. Their personalities are shaped by their realistic interactions with others - not just what they say, but what they choose not to say and how they behave in some situations but not in others. Then there is the instance where Anderson further boxes himself into a corner with his dialogue and plotting, and thus can only appeal to cinema fanboys by going "meta" by having Phillip Seymour Hoffman deliver the following lines: "I know this sounds silly, like this is the scene in the movie where the guy's trying to get ahold of the long-lost son, you know, but this is that scene. And I think they have those scenes in movies because they're true, you know? Because they really happen. See, this is the scene in the movie where you help me out."Of course it is indeed silly, and Anderson knows it. But rather than having the writing chops to avoid it, Anderson actually embraces it and hopes that his audience will mistake it for genius. And among his many sycophantic fans desperate to anoint a new "auteur" of their own generation - they have. Which then brings us to the awful acting throughout Magnolia that mistakes rank emotionalism for emotional depth. Has there ever been a more over-the-top performance than Julianne Moore's constant crying, yelling and screeching in this film? I defy you to name one. It substitutes soap-opera-style tragic situations that are simply presented to us with the expectation that we will respond with Pavlovian sympathy, rather than developing these situations in an engrossing way. Fighting terminal illness, infidelity,abandonment, child abuse - all the "tragedy" boxes are check marked here with the expectation that we will sympathize and react accordingly. But this isn't a meaningful exploration of tragedy. Its simply grief porn presented in a manner such that Anderson announces, "aren't I edgy and insightful?" Any fan of Magnolia owes it to themselves to see both the truly pioneering "Nashville" as well as the outstanding "Shot Cuts". Those are examples of real filmmaking rooted in genuinely great dialogue and plot development. The taste of those who love "Magnolia" is simply awful beyond words.