Magnolia, some thoughts

[CharlieDontSurf]

[ QUOTE ]
One of my Top 5 films. I love this movie for its cinematic power.

I do often wonder, however, if the froggy ending could have been avoided and another ending inserted. I'm not saying it was a bad ending, but I wonder what effect a less supernatural ending would have had.

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Frogs have rained from the sky's prior....he got all of the "acts of coincidence"
from several books he had been reading..that is what inspired the script.

[Andrew Karpinski]

Magnolia was a tremendously complicated movie. The first time I watched it I wasn't really sure what was going on, although that may have been a product of the influences I was under at the time. After a few subsequent viewings, I must say I am a big fan of it. What really made me fall in love with the movie wasn't the outburst in the pharmacy (which was awesome), or the rant in the bar (also great). I think the interplay between the cop and the coke addict chick is just a plain tremendous scene. They both play the role convincingly... as they talk you can almost feel her nervousness and his niavetee drips off the screen.

[HLMencken]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
One of my Top 5 films. I love this movie for its cinematic power.

I do often wonder, however, if the froggy ending could have been avoided and another ending inserted. I'm not saying it was a bad ending, but I wonder what effect a less supernatural ending would have had.

[/ QUOTE ]

Frogs have rained from the sky's prior....he got all of the "acts of coincidence"
from several books he had been reading..that is what inspired the script.

[/ QUOTE ]

I understand that... just don't think the movie was really about acts of coincidence, but more about 'we're all basically alone but somehow alone together, and still can reach out and make each other a little less lonely once in a while'. The frogs didn't do much along those lines, but didn't hurt it either... I liked the "wtf?" when I first saw that scene, but upon rewatching this film several times, I just wonder if it spoiled a possibly better unwritten ending. Just a thought.

[CharlieDontSurf]

pta on frogs and the bible:
It truly came from a slightly gimmicky and exciting place. I'd read about rains of frogs in the works of Charles Fort (His "Book of the Damned" is the genesis for the rain of frogs), who was a turn of the century writer who wrote mainly about odd phenomena. So I just started writing it in to the script. It wasn't until after I got through with the writing that I began to discover what it might mean, which is this: you get to a point in your life, and [censored] is happening, and everything's out of your control, and suddenly, a rain of frogs just makes sense. You're staring at a doctor who is telling you something is wrong, and while we know what it is, we have no way of fixing it. And you just go: "So what you're telling me, basically, is that it's raining frogs from the sky." I'm not someone who's ever had a special fascination with UFO's or supernatural phenomena or anything but I guess I just found myself at a point in my life where I was going through some [censored] stuff, and I was ready for some sort of weird religious experience, or as close as I could get to one. So then I began to decipher things about frogs and history things like this notion that as far back as the Romans, people have been able to judge the health of a society by the health of its frogs: the health of a frog, the vibe of a frog, the texture of the frog, its looks, how much wetness is on it, everything. The frogs are a barometer for who we are as a people. We're polluting ourselves, we're killing ourselves, and the frogs are telling us so, because they're all getting sick and deformed. And I didn't even know it was in the bible until Henry Gibson gave me a copy of it, bookmarked to the appropriate frog passage.

an excerpt from exodus 8:2:
1 AND the Lord spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me.
2 And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs.

it became a pasttime on set for paul and the crew of magnolia to hide as many references to the numbers 8 and 2 as they could in shots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnolia_%28film%29

[Roybert]

I loved the movie. Def one of my top-5.

I loved the whole thing, frogs and all. To me, the frogs were an essential part of the movie. The movie, up until the end, is basically a melodrama ... You have these people whose lives (at least in their own minds) are spiraling out of control. To their way of thinking, everything bad in the world is happening to them, and everything that is happening is bad. It makes them remarkably self-centered; they can only think about how messed up they are and how wrong it is that they are because they thought they had it all figured out. The madness crescendos in an amazing 15 (or so) minute stretch culminating with Robards death, Moore's suicide (attempt), Jimmy Gator's admission and suicide (attempt), Cruise coming to grips with all that has happened to him over the last few hours, Macy's f'd up burglery, the kid's bladder problems etc, etc.

Then it rains frogs.

And they all have this stark, ice-water-to-the-face reality that it isn't all about them. It took something so ridiculous, so improbable (but certainly possible) to show them that EVERYTHING is possible.

Then it's the next morning. They all look dazed and confused and almost hung over. They're left to wonder wtf happened, and in the process they realize that the Sun doesn't rise or set around any of them and they are all left feeling kind of ridiculous for getting so lost in life's mundane insanities that for the first time they realize their own stupity and limitations.

That's what I got out of it, anyways.

[prohornblower]

I thought this movie was lackluster in just about every way.

The only movies in recent years that were worse are: Battlefield Earth and About Schmidt

[CharlieDontSurf]

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I thought this movie was lackluster in just about every way.

The only movies in recent years that were worse are: Battlefield Earth and About Schmidt

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somehow, based on the march of penguins thread, I don't find that statement surprising

[BeaucoupFish]

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... just don't think the movie was really about acts of coincidence

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It was heavily promoted that way, though. I found it entirely non-coincidental, and completely manipulated.

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The frogs didn't do much along those lines, but didn't hurt it either... I liked the "wtf?" when I first saw that scene, but upon rewatching this film several times, I just wonder if it spoiled a possibly better unwritten ending.

[/ QUOTE ]

The frog ending made an annoying story into a joke. For me, anyway.

[mason55]

I'm bumping this because I've tried to start 2 or 3 magnolia threads in oot since I joined 2p2 2 years ago and they all died and I'm in the middle of my weekly viewing.

I love pta and in my book he can do nothing wrong. for those of you educated in literature, I think this is the movie version of the wasteland by eliot. its enjoyable on its own, but if you do the research and learn all the references, you realllly appreciate the brilliance. some people love smart movies/poems/stories. some people think works should stand on their own. it probably has to do with a level of pretension. but for me, I like something where I have to do more research to really understand what the artist is doing. if you want to be entertained watch mtv. my real art, from van gogh to dw griffith to keats, true art is only able to be apprecoated with the proper background.

which is why, even though his structure is mediocre, eliot is an amazing poet. same with alligheri. art that takes work is that much rewarding once you understand it, and magnolia takes some work to truly understand. luckily we have imdb to explain everything. much easier than looking up every line in the love song of j alfred prufrock (btw I did a project comparing that to rock bottom by eminem my senior year of high school... won many awards for it)

[BigPoppa]

The cast each singing their own bit of that song while alone in the rain is one of the finest bits of filmmaking I've ever seen in my life.

The idiots in advertising tried to market this as a "Tom Cruise Movie!!!". So I can imagine more than a few pissed off people in the theaters and more than a few people who would've liked the movie but never saw it because of what they thought it would be like.

It's my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson film.