Hacker Cinema
Magnolia
1999 · Film · 189 min
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
On one random day in the San Fernando Valley, a dying father, a young wife, a male caretaker, a famous lost son, a police officer in love, a boy genius, an ex-boy genius, a game show host and an estranged daughter will each become part of a dazzling multiplicity of plots, but one story.
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25 comments on Hacker News
I once fell for three mini docs at the beginning of Magnolia movie. Only years later did I discover they were made up instead of being real. One must be careful with those artsy people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIa77tZaHJA
The film Magnolia dramatizes just such a character. Her father, the perpetrator, is a well-connected, well-respected TV game show host. She's an isolated, mentally unstable drug abuser. Not hard to imagine which person people are incentivized to believe. You're right, we'll probably never know.
Just in case you haven’t seen it:
The director of Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson) actually cast Sandler in a dramatic role a couple of years later (Punch-Drunk Love) that was also received very well. Might be worth checking out if you liked Magnolia (I loved that movie).
Just like the Truman Show movie, I have always felt it's a bit underappreciated. So many great performances in that beautifully shot movie and such an emotional roller coaster. Although in many aspects a totally different type of movie, I think Uncut Gems was the first one since I watched Magnolia that touched me in similar ways. And just like with these other movies, it really changed my view of Adam Sandler.
That Magnolia performance is a standout among fantastic performances. What a great movie.
somehow this reminds me of kids' quiz in Magnolia'1999 movie..
Eyes Wide Shut? Collateral? Magnolia? He can certainly play characters outside the big action hero. He just gets paid a shitload of money to keep making shit big budget action movies and he's a high level cult leader who has an ego the size of a planet.
He could do well in a little indie movie that pushes his range but his life and personality prevents that way more than his range as an actor.
I'm not going to tell you what movies you should like. Magnolia is a long film, and it takes a while to get where it is going. Some people think it's gimmick-y, others are willing to suspend belief and go with it. But either way, Julianne Moore wound tight, desperate William H Macy, lonely John C Reilly, Jason Robards on his deathbed... these are all epic performances (as is Tom Cruise of course). The secondary players as well -- Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Melora Walters, Jeremy Blackman (kid), Luis Guzman -- are superb. I acknowledge lots of people hate Magnolia but if you found it forgettable, I doubt you were even paying attention in the first place.
I recently watched Magnolia in the Prince Charles Cinema in London. I'd seen it multiple times before, but never in a cinema. The bit with the frogs was incredible, going from peaceful to absolutely deafening. That scene is now my most memorable.
The (forgettable) film Crash with Sandra Bullock won Best Picture in the mid-2000s... but it's mostly (for the first half or so) a sanitized, watered down, far less daring or interesting version of Magnolia, which is an absolutely brilliant film.
there are two USAnian movies, of the very few that make sense to me..
Still.Mine-2012 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2073086/
Magnolia-1999 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175880/
IMO some answer is somewhere in them..
My viewing is pretty broad, I’ve seen these movies except Magnolia. What you are describing is the placing of a movie in a cultural context. This is criticism, not learning on an individual level. For example, take Mulan. I can generate a feminist counter-critique that the new Mulan is in fact better because women are born with special qualities men don’t have, and often are superior when given equal opportunities. This isn’t a lesson the movie teaches however, it’s academic bloviating.
I mean I think actual existentialist philosophers would laugh if you tried to tell them that Lost in Translation is an existentialist movie. Also I think you mean ennui not anomie.
Movies (non-documentary) can moot and champion whole ideologies, psychologies, and philosophies, for example Fight Club (nihilism), Logan's Run (progressivism, anti-establishmentism), Lost in Translation (existentialism, contemporary anomie), Magnolia (existentialism, fugue) etc. I suggest you broaden your viewing.
I used to be a huge PTA fan a couple of years ago. I've watched all his movies and none have grabbed me as Magnolia and There Will Be Blood.
His more recent stuff is fantastic, from a production and direction perspective, but the scripts and themes... I don't know. It's like 2 hour long poetry. Very beautiful poetry, but no drama going on.
This is AWESOME.
I have my dads guitars, and he was a guitar Savant (well, a musical savant who could play anything on both piano and guitar just by hearing it once.)
I keep meaning to learn to play - but hadnt known where to start.... as books just didnt make too much sense to me.
I've been having the need for this floating about in the back of my conscious for DECADES.
---
One of my best friends is really close with Gary Brawer, and I missed an opportunity to get to know Gary better...
His guitar shop is the one in that magnolia movie (I cant recall the exact name of the movie...
Anyway - I am happy to have found this.
The first lesson is how to tune the guitar... which I definitely need to know how to do given that the guitars have been with me for years untouched.
None of Office Space, Clerks, or Magnolia were enjoyed by masses upon initial release. And some that got acclaim on your list have faded a lot since then (e.g. American Beauty).
You know what was enjoyed by masses from 1999 that you left out? Star Wars Episode 1.
Check back in twenty years to see what movies from the recent past hold up, and how many of them aren't from Marvel...
Nowadays you have: superhero movies, sequels, remakes, empowerment of certain groups that aren't me, movies with a political message, or some sad dour art house movie that makes you walk out feeling bummed out about life.
Compare 1994 or 1999 movie releases to 2021.
Fight club, the matrix, forrest gump, Magnolia, office space, sixth sense, american beauty, clerks, etc.
Nowadays: the father?, Mank?, black messiah, , chicago 7?
It's not about creating magical new worlds with thought provoking ideas anymore.
Maybe I'm explaining it poorly but film seems to have gone the way of the music industry.
Commodified instead of inspired.
I LOVE going to the movies.
I just wish there was something I wanted to see.
I rarely admit this to people, but when I was 19, I paid $700 to go to a weekend "PUA convention" like what Tom Cruise caricaturizes in the movie Magnolia.
The eye-opening part for me was when we broke out in small groups, went downtown in Austin, and the group leader (employees of the event) cold-approached women with a level of success I only thought was possible in Hugh Grant movies and reserved for nobody other than Hugh Grant in real life. And my group leader was a 39yo bald guy.
Most of the "wisdom" around approaching women are simply superstition and self-sabotage. "No, there's no way that could work so I won't even try."
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
Judging from the two ho-hum movies mentioned (Magnolia, Matrix) the answer is no.
Perhaps Magnolia http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175880/ with all the separate stories coming together in the end is an example?
>This is another odd market where somehow the US incumbents seem unable to implement an obvious feature that is common in other countries.
This is not quite correct. Grocery stores have had delivery in large cities for a while. There's even a pretty famous scene in the movie Magnolia (1999) that revolves around it. The US is big, and has a lot of empty space, and has many different markets that are tough to coordinate. It's no surprise then than it has taken a big player like Amazon to offer wall-to-wall coverage of grocery delivery. It still hasn't been proven to be something a sufficient number of Americans even want.
Capote and Magnolia cemented him, in my mind, as one of this generations leading acts who'd mature into a Mirran/Hofman/Freeman/etc.-class actor.
It's such a tragedy for film - which will outlast us all here now.
The lady in the ad looks a lot like Cleo King. She plays Marcie the murderess in Magnolia.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0454598/
Anyway, it looks like startups are getting better about the advertising game.
Ooooh... 1999. Fight Club. Go. American Beauty. The Matrix. Boys don't cry. Austin Powers. The Sixth Sense. The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Cider House Rules. Magnolia. Mansfield Park. The Red Violin. Trick. American Pie. ;)
That is despite the fact that installment movies of James Bond, Star Wars, Toy Story, etc., that year.
Everything seemed great that year. Or perhaps if was also a good year for me, and therefore everything seemed good because of that...