Well since I am finally finished with my Editing Asthetics class, I should hopefully have more time to review much more movies then I recently have been able to. (sorry about that.) Now there's been a couple of movies that I've watched in that class that I haven't seen before and thus would like to share my thoughts about them in my next couple of reviews. And I would like to start that with the last movie we saw in class which is also by far the most peculiar out of all the movies we watched and possibly one of the strangest movies I ever seen: Magnolia.
Plot: Magnolia contains a series of stories that are connected, roughly like in Cloud Atlas and Love Actually. The main stories have to do with a police officer who begins to fall in love with a drug addict, the addict's father who is dying of cancer, a boy who is in a game show, an old man dying who is trying to reach his son whom he left a long time ago, and his wife who married him because of his money.
What really makes this movie so enjoyable are the stories and the characters. While I was preferring some more then others, there is no denying that almost each and every one of them does a great job at getting you hooked and wanting to see more of the story and what happens to these characters. That's not to say some stories/characters could've had more work then what they gave us. Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character Phil for example debatably didn't have a whole lot of clear motivation to help Earl find his son, and this young African American kid ESPECIALLY gave a mixed message as to what his goals where and how he achieved what we partially think those goals are from what little we saw from him. (at least in the view of me and my fellow classmates who have only seen the movie once as of now.) Anyway, the acting in this movie is terrific. This film has a great cast, with actors like Julianne Moore, Phillip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman (as I've already mentioned) and even Tom Cruise who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. In fact, a good portion of the editing has a lot of moments where they mostly don't cut at all whenever an actor or a pair of actors give a very deep and emotional performance and the editor was right to do that. The most notable performances to me seem to be Julianne Moore and Tom Cruise. With Moore, she probably had the most time in the film to express how tortured her character is about how she feel about her husband dying and how she takes a look back at all the years she's been married to him. This also suggests for me that there's just much more to this actress then what I already know from Crazy, Stupid, Love and her brief role in 30 Rock. So maybe I'll look more into her career to see how much more. Now Tom Cruise...probably gave the best performance that I've ever seen him do. And that's saying a lot. Now that's not to say I haven't seen him give some good performances before, but I guess with this movie, I feel I got to see him go all out and really, truly act in possibly the best way that he can. All the different kind of emotions and body movement he did, he gave his all at and it was very enjoyable to see that...even if the beginning of his breakdown later in the film kind of made him sound like a panting dog. *audience boos* I'm really sorry but he did. He was still great and all, but that was still a little distracting. Anyway, with all this said and done, this makes the film very enjoyable...but then we have the problems that make it very strange. Without giving too much away, the movie takes a completely different turn rather then gives us a genuine climax and after that turn, they kind of just give us the ending of the stories. Even before that, the first 5-7 ish minutes tells us these stories that have little to do with any of the characters throughout the rest of the film. I know I'm not entirely saying a lot about what happens, but these certain things become a problem because when you think about what the movie is trying to do on the grand scale of things is not very clear. My professor and classmates have their own opinions like the film was just 'trying to be symbolic' or that it was 'like Love Actually but with no message' or as my professor bluntly put it, 'life sucks, and then you die'. So it varies as to what you may see in this movie in what it was trying to do as a whole.
And that's my review for Magnolia. You may have trouble with it with what the meaning of it was and might not really like it as a whole, but what makes it enjoyable despite the confusion is the great acting and interesting stories that it's giving you throughout most of the movie. It's not a great film, but for the kind of certain entertainment it gives, it's worth a try if anything.
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