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All-Reviews.com Movie/Video Review
Magnolia
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  out of 4
| *Also starring: | Ezra Buzzington, William R. Mapother, Jim Beaver, Michael Bowen, Melinda Dillon, Jeremy Blackman, Henry Gibson, William H. Macy |
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Review by Susan Granger
3 stars out of 4
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As a follow-up to the porn movie scene of Boogie Nights,
writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson examines the emotional effects of
physical and spiritual cancer in this manic, rambling tale of dying
fathers and their pathetic children in the rootless '90s. In what is
basically an ensemble movie, set in a single, very long day in
California's San Fernando Valley and not unlike Robert Altman's Short
Cuts, Jason Robards provides the connective tissue as an irascible
television producer with terminal cancer and a grieving,
guilt-stricken trophy wife (Julianne Moore). He begs his male nurse
(Philip Seymour Hoffman) to find his long-lost son so he can make
amends. Played with fervor by Tom Cruise, the son's now a charismatic
sex evangelist, motivational guru and host of a TV info-mercial,
teaching "Seduce and Destroy." Strutting and swaggering, he goads his
male audience into sexual exploits. In a somewhat parallel story,
Philip Baker Hall, the guilty host of a popular TV show, called "What
Do Kids Know?" and married to Melinda Dillon, is also ailing, as his
estranged, coke-snorting daughter (Melora Walters) becomes involved
with a good-natured cop (John C. Reilly). One of the current Quiz
contestants (Jeremy Blackman) is desperate for attention, while a
former Quiz Kid (William H. Macy) watches his life disintegrate in a
bar. Three hours, ten minutes is a long time to keep an audience
involved in 10 characters, connected by chance and coincidence, even
with Robert Elswit's inventive cinematography and Aimee Mann's "Wise
Up" song interwoven into the fabric of the convoluted, overly talky
narrative. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, Magnolia is a
cacophonous, kinetic, audacious 7 with a bizarre, illogical, climactic
conclusion related to the Bible, Exodus 8:2.
Copyright © 2000 Susan Granger
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