Showing 1-6 of 6 results tagged “Magnolia”

I was surprised after watching (and then reading reviews of) the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man that there was such a fervent (if small) backlash against it. The movie — about a Job-like Jewish professor in a Minnesota suburb in the late 1960s — struck me as so right that I didn’t allow for opposite reactions.

Yet there they are. Some critics have placed the movie comfortably, derisively in the Coen canon, which is to say that they find it empty and mean — gorgeously made cinema that has no interest in or respect for humanity.

The movie generously allows for (and perhaps embraces) accusations of misanthropy. Whether you love it or hate it, find it cruelly godless or searchingly spiritual, see affection or scorn for the characters, the film will not peep a word of protest. By design, it is what you think it is. And what you think it is depends in large part on how you look at it. Is it a synagogue parking lot, or evidence of Hashem?

But even though art can be interpreted many ways, the text has a voice, too. And the essence of A Serious Man is faith in Hashem, which is illuminated rather than confused by the film’s cryptic core.

Roger Ebert, in his December 17 “Answer Man” column, quoted this essay on Magnolia.

Thanks to Colin Marshall for pointing out the mention.

Also: Ebert’s November 27 “Great Movies” essay on Magnolia.

This is what customer service is all about.

Seven hours after voting closed, we’ve published the Drunken Commentary Track for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia — and the movie’s three hours long.

In reality, the gestation period of this commentary track was seven years. The movie has been digested slowly, primarily with “Magnolia and Meaning” and then through an eight-hour class I led.

Further exploration took place with the essays “Why Are There Frogs Falling from the Sky?” and “The Blossom: Jim Kurring.”

Magnolia continues to surprise me, and my feelings and thoughts on it are still evolving. It’s not done with me yet.

The first images of Jim Kurring involve his morning routine, and it’s nothing remarkable: He eats, he showers, he reads the paper, he exercises.

But there are little hints about how we’re supposed to react to him. He laughs out loud — and not very convincingly — at something on the Today show. When he’s lifting weights, we see one of those inspirational posters encouraging “determination.” And he prays, on his knees at the foot of his bed, with a cross looking down upon him. When he finishes, he gets up and claps his hands together once, as if Team God had just broken from the huddle. We learn through voice-over that he participates in some dating service, or at the least runs a personal ad. He’s a cop, and he gives himself a pep talk in the squad car.

Why does nobody take the frogs seriously? Why does nobody question them?

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, the cataclysmic, apocalyptic rain of frogs seems casually accepted. Nobody says: “That’s some fucked-up shit, those frogs.”

And I guess it’s a testament to Anderson’s script, direction, tone, pacing, and heavy foreshadowing that I’ve never heard anybody say anything along the lines of: “You know, I was with it right up until the frogs.” I led a small-group discussion on the movie last year, and nobody had any problem with the amphibians, and nobody ascribed a grand meaning to them. As Stanley Spector says in the library, with wide eyes but no curiosity: “This happens. This is something that happens.”

Magnolia breaks through the self-aware emotional vacancy of the decade’s cool movies (both sterile and knowingly clever, epitomized by Quentin Tarantino) without losing its edge; it gets inside its characters’ minds and hearts with dazzling style. It is afraid of neither elaborate tracking shots nor a good, fairly won cry.