Posts Tagged ‘ drama ’

Paul Thomas Anderson was allowed to make Magnolia only after the commercial success of his previous film: Boogie Nights.  Anderson was given free reign, or as close to it as a Hollywood studio would ever get, to complete his project which is deeply spiritual and explores the lives of people in nine different, but connected, plots whose common trait is a distinct dysfunctionality whether within their family life, or more commonly their personal lives.

William H. Macy plays Donnie Smith, a adult who gained a great deal of celebrity as a child on a long-running quiz where he amassed a large amount of money in winnings which were stolen by his parents and now laments his useless collection of knowledge and wants something to replace the loneliness in his life, and despite having flawless teeth, he convinces himself he needs braces so that a local bartender will love him as much as Donnie thinks that he loves him.

That quiz show is hosted by Jimmy Gator, played by Philip Baker Hall, and is still going strong, more than thirty years later.  Gator is an alcoholic who has a fatal case of cancer and wants to make amends with his wife for his many infidelities over the years, which he now regrets, and to his daughter Claudia, who he molested as a child and whose relationship with him has been incredibly strained ever since.

Claudia is played by Melora Walters and is a very troubled young woman, addicted to cocaine with many psychological and psychiatric problems stemming from her father’s abuse of her as a child. When Gator comes to visit and try to begin mending his relationship with his daughter he is greeted at the door by a man Claudia picked up at a bar the night before and sees the evidence of cocaine use before having his daughter explode with anger at his presence and screaming at him to leave.

This commotion causes complaints from her neighbors, who summon the police in the form of Officer Jim Kurring, played by John C. Reilly, who is a good-natured person with a lot of insecurity and loneliness in his life.  He uses a telephone dating system and often narrates what it’s like to be a police officer when there is seemingly no one else in his cruiser.  Kurring explains the noise level and the screaming complaints which were the cause of his arrival and makes an awkward effort to talk to Claudia, eventually gathering the courage to ask her out on a date, which she accepts.

The producer of Jimmy Gator’s quiz show is Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) who is literally lying on his death bed lamenting all of the mistakes of his life, but often still acting like an abusive prick to his personal nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and trying to believe his young wife Linda (Julianne Moore) loves him for him, not for his money.

Parma is genuinely a kind person who takes an interest in Earl’s wishes, especially when he expresses a desire to reach out to his son Frank T. J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) whom he abandoned years ago during Mackey’s mother’s death from cancer.  Mackey resents his father and has taken his mother’s name, claiming she’s alive and that they are close and that his father is dead.  He makes his living selling advice to men about how to use subliminal psychology and hypnotic tricks to control women and get them to sleep with them.

Linda Partridge is deeply troubled by all of the infidelities and lies that have come from her marriage to Earl, which was for his money, but has since transformed into a genuine love for him as a person and a desire to not accept his fortune upon his death as a penance of sorts.  At the same time, she is unable to even contemplate that Mackey will receive the money if she refuses it, believing that to be the last thing Earl would want to happen to his money.

Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) is the current version of Donnie Smith; gifted to the point of genius with knowledge in general and as such, a tour de force on a quiz show, where he is quickly approaching the record in earnings, but is under constant pressure from his father and the employees of the show.

Finally Anderson presents us with the character Dixon, who interacts with Officer Kunning at an earlier incident, trying to help him solve the case and get some money in return.  He is trying to act like a gangster and Kunning doesn’t tolerate it very well, leaving a bit of a rift between the two, with Kunning leaving and giving him cliched advice like “Be cool, stay in school.”  Dixon will later be the one to discover Linda in her luxury car, parked, unconscious and in the middle of a suicide attempt and robs her of her cash before using her cell phone to call 911 and get her to a hospital.

Mackey’s well-developed psychological and emotional barriers begin to breakdown initially when a TV reporter informs him that she has found that his father is actually very much alive, but abandoned him and his mother during his mother’s terminal illness, and that his mother died some significant time ago.  Mackey is unable to handle this and it is during this interview that he receives a relayed telephone call from Parma regarding his father and urging him to come to the Earl’s house and visit the dying man as a last request.

The film is more than three hours long and very, very intricately designed and crafted by writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson.  As evidenced by the interconnectedness of the storylines, it is an unusual film that features a lot of typically almost-taboo features. At one point the entire cast summarized above sings along to Aimee Man’s Academy Award-winning song for the movie, “Save Me.”

There are a great deal of thematic connections, in addition to to the connections of relationships between the characters in the movie, including infidelity, happiness, loneliness, misogyny, suicide, the meaning of life, love and death.  It is often considered a very spiritual movie and perhaps the most raw emotion the movie provides to the viewer overall is a palpable sense of regret.

Each of the characters seems not only to have many regrets about their pasts, they also continue to make decisions in their presents that will be regrettable ones later.  The message of the movie is far too complex and personal to have stated in a review because it requires multiple viewings and is going to be different for virtually every viewer.

That said, the film is phenomenally well-made.  From its cast of powerhouse actors to its strong writing and direction from Anderson and musical contributions from Mann, there is very little about the movie that can really be said to be flawed; certainly controversial, difficult to understand, challenging to the viewer, and perhaps even unappealing to some viewers, but still not flawed.

The infamous scene of frogs raining from the sky has been explained by Anderson as originally being kind of a joke, but as he made the script evolve he came to believe that it best illustrated the absurdity of much of the worries in life and there came a point in one’s life where a doctor is telling them that they are dying and there are just frogs raining outside at the same time.  This becomes a recurrent theme in reference to Exodus 8:2, with Anderson hiding probably a hundred or more references to the numbers throughout the movie on clocks, walls, booking shot ID numbers, etc.

Since the film means different things to different people and takes quite a while to digest, I can really only speak for me when I say that what I took from the movie overall is to not let the worries that are going to seem ludicrously trivial distract one from living one’s life in the more important areas.  Think about what you’ll have wanted to have done when you lay dying and do that.  Try to be a good person and as is demonstrated by Parma’s actions and Officer Kunning’s monologues, avoid harming anyone else so that one won’t end up like the characters in the film: all regretting various things in life.

This was best illustrated by Stanley in a scene towards the end of the film where he stands in the doorway and tells his father that he needs to be nicer to him.  After being told to go to sleep, Stanley remains and is insistent that his father be nicer to him.  A message there and with the lack of regrets from Phil Parma shows that Anderson is trying to suggest that it is both possible to live such a life, and possible to change one’s life back into that state if it is veering off of that.

As I said when I began discussing this, Magnolia is a difficult movie to understand and takes many viewings and some thought.  It doesn’t just give up itself easily to the audience, you’ll need to put in some effort in your own part, but if you’re willing to do so, a jewel of the cinema is waiting for you with something deeply meaningful and different to say to you.  So make the decision for yourself and if you’re able to handle the challenge, you should find yourself with a very unusual and very enjoyable film experience that you can watch over-and-over again finding deeper meanings and messages left by Anderson in his writing and direction.

Conspiracy is so accurate and realistic, forcing the viewer to see by proxy a real meeting held by Nazi Germany’s administrators to plan The Holocaust that it actually leaves the viewer quite literally on the verge of nausea.  It is a horribly sad, but true tale, based upon the one surviving copy of the meeting’s notes found in the aftermath of World War II.

With its story and its screenplay written by none-other-than James Cameron, Strange Days is director Kathryn Bigelow (K19: The Widowmaker) vision of a beautiful dystopian Los Angeles on the precipice of the turn of the millennium where violence is everywhere, the police are out in force like something in Bosnia or Northern Ireland with full-on riot gear and automatic weapons.

Martin Scorsese‘s fantastic follow-up to 1990′s Goodfellas, again teaming up with Nicholas Pileggi, who is also again both the author of the book and the writer of the screenplay.  Many of the faces of Goodfellas return here to Casino to tell the true story of how the mafia took Las Vegas from a small-scale military stop-over and turned it into the money-making machine that it is today–and how they screwed it all up on the way.

Chaos is such a waste of cast, script, film, and money.  The writer and director Tony Giglio has little previous directorial experience and his IMDb resume provides associations with mostly B-movies in general for his career.

In this horrible movie we are presented with a bank robbery in Seattle led by Lorenz (Wesley Snipes) and a crew of loyal men organized as smartly as an accountant’s records, who hold the contents and people of a bank hostage and demand to negotiate only with recently-suspended Det. Quentin Conners (Jason Statham).  Conners has been suspended and his partner fired for their involvement in a bad shooting in another hostage situation in the recent past, referred to as the Pearl Street shooting.