Magnolia (1999)
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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What critics compared Magnolia to
The homages are obvious, especially regarding What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Magnolia, and The Shining.
Cregger has cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia as an influence…
Inspired by John C. Reilly’s character in the similar ensemble epic Magnolia, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) hides his demons in the most literal way…
…influenced by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999)…
Cregger has stated that the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, especially Magnolia, was a huge influence on the film, and this is clear both in the multi-stranded narrative and some of the characterisation (Ehrenreich’s cop is very similar to John C Reilly’s character in the earlier film) and some kinetic camerawork that recalls the big dramatic moments in Anderson’s film.
The film follows a non-linear structure and has already drawn comparisons to Pulp Fiction or Magnolia, mostly because of the ensemble cast, and dark comedy, but that's where the similarities end.
Clearly modeled after Short Cuts and Magnolia —the latter of which is nakedly aped during a third-act montage of sad characters set to a mournful ballad by Aimee Man-style singer-songwriter Bird York— Crash explores, via interlocking stories, the cultural, racial, and spiritual isolation of Los Angelinos.
Opens Friday in select cities Crash has echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, two other L.A.-centered films about intertwining lives told in a fractured narrative, though it is not as heart-wrenching and complex as the first and not as superficially glib as the latter.
He energetically weaves together interlocking characters and disparate plot elements, in the vein of "Pulp Fiction" and "Magnolia."
It reminded me just a tad of "Magnolia."
“Crash” never reaches the heights of “Short Cuts” or “Magnolia” – two multi-story films that clearly provided inspiration – but it’s a thoughtful road trip well worth taking.
The interlocking stories recall Short Cuts and Magnolia, but they mesh more smoothly into a better-crafted whole.
In a performance that melds his cocky motivational speaker from Magnolia with his belligerent, prosthetics-clad studio executive from Tropic Thunder, Cruise plays powerful oil baron Digger Rockwell…
…think Magnolia and Born On The Fourth of July…
Or his unforgettable performance as Frank TJ Mackey in PT Anderson’s Magnolia?
We still talk about his nasty turn as Frank TJ Mackey in Magnolia, for instance…
…he reminds us he is also the actor who brought life to Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, Rain Man, The Color of Money, The Last Samurai, Risky Business, Eyes Wide Shut and so many more.
Only Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia from 1999 can be rightfully said to predate Amores perros in the creation of this unique narrative form, though it was another 2000 film, Traffic , that really got things rolling as far as making that form so popular as it became throughout the decade, when it began to truly wear out its welcome and go from being a fresh, compelling way to structure narrative threads, to being a wholly irritating cliché in such films as Gonzálex Iñárritu and Arriaga's last collabartion, 2006's shallow, suffocating Babel .
It's Magnolia south of the border, with a grimly realistic car crash taking the place of biblical plague as denouement.
To that end, Amores Perros (loose translation: "Love's a Bitch") is the aching meditation on love and loss and catastrophe and chance that another fiercely talented and Quentin-influenced man of three names, Paul Thomas Anderson, tried and failed to make with Magnolia.
The jokes are significantly zingier than its predecessor, including a wonderful Magnolia reference, and the focus is back on Blanc, who manages to fuse comedy into even the more straightforward mystery portions of the script.
Johnson brings back mainstay cinematographer Steve Yedlin and editor Bob Ducsay, both of them working overtime to keep us engaged and on our toes with their visuals and pacing, capturing production designer Rick Heinrichs’ intricate set nuances and Jenny Eagan’s playful costumes (complete with a Magnolia look from 1999) with care, leaving us to warm ourselves in the sun-soaked surroundings and feel like the upper crust for a brief moment.
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Memorable images abound in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies — frogs dropping from the sky in Magnolia , Adam Sandler stockpiling pudding cups in Punch-Drunk Love , Bradley Cooper yelling in his latest, Licorice Pizza — but the scenes that stick with me most crackle with electric connection between two weirdos who’ve spotted, at last, their match.
Through it all, the platonic couple’s exploits allow Anderson and company to pinball around the same stomping grounds he featured in “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia,” this time with a rowdier, more overtly comedic sensibility, reminiscent of L.A.-adjacent cult classics “Valley Girl” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
His gentle attentiveness and soft self-assuredness recalls his late father’s performance as the tender-hearted hospice nurse in Magnolia who sits atop the jam-packed collection of Anderson’s greatest characters.
It's an explicit theme in Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love, but barely submerged beneath the surface of There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread.
The director of “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia” riffs on the very early ’70s, back in the seriously unfashionable Encino in “The Valley,” where as “Boogie” reminded us, porn was king and those who never quite achieved Hollywood stardom could afford to live while they longed for the Big Brass Ring.
Anyone nostalgic for the “Magnolia” days will be delighted by the latticework of tracking shots and long dollies he busts out here, which evoke the verve of that earlier work but without the same biblical anxiety.
En las antípodas de su cine coral (Magnolia, Boogie Nights), aquí el foco está en sólo dos personajes, con tomas son sencillas, poco uso de travellings, close-ups constantes y sin planos secuencia llamativos.
I imagine many Anderson acolytes — the ones who value the irony of Boogie Nights or the pomposity of Magnolia, for instance — will find this one of their least favorite PTA films.
Hard Eight and Magnolia, the hunger for reconciliation.
But keep in mind this is a flick by PTA, one of the most meticulous filmmakers of his time, if not all time – “Magnolia,” “Boogie Nights” and “The Master” are among his many gems – and it’s a gasp to behold in composition alone.
The film is framed as a love story, but it never swoons, and it’s enough to make you wonder: Why does Anderson, whose work back in the late ’90s (the transcendent “Boogie Nights,” the enraptured “Magnolia”) pulsated with off-kilter humanity, now make dramas that are essentially didactic studies of fantastically cold brutes?
Si Embriagado de amor (2002), a pesar de su ambición en todos los niveles, supuso una suerte de (auto)contestación por parte de Paul Thomas Anderson a Sidney (1996), Boogie Nights (1997) y a Magnolia (1999), como si realizase una película, en apariencia, más sencilla, pero desde luego, e incluso dentro de su gran complejidad y singularidad, menos ampulosa en un sentido narrativo.
“Inherent Vice,” while not as satisfying as Anderson’s masterpiece “Magnolia,” is a strange, twisting (and sometimes-twisted) tale that reminded me of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” because it shares Hunter Thompson’s “gonzo” vibe.
As with Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, the filmmaker has created another vivid Los Angeles, one that doesn't lean too hard on its pop-culture references to TV's Adam-12 or Neil Young's gentle Harvest album.
This is the first time revered and reclusive American author Thomas Pynchon has been adapted for the big screen; you could say he’s found his perfect match in the man behind Magnolia and There Will Be Blood .
As with previous Anderson films, which include “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia,” the movie contains colorful and questing characters looking for familial or spiritual connection in Los Angeles and thereabouts.
As a director, Anderson painted on the large canvas before he had the material to fill it: Boogie Nights and Magnolia now look drastically overambitious and it wasn’t until There Will Be Blood that he succeeded in matching form with content.
His heir apparent, Paul Thomas Anderson, however, has had success following a similar format of telling complex tales filled with lots of characters, such as occurred in "Magnolia," "Boogie Nights" and "The Master."
She demands him to “get up,” and get it up he does, signaling a theme that courses through the veins of Anderson’s filmography (Magnolia, The Master): the shift from hubris to humiliation that keeps powerful men up at night.
…an emotional punch I haven’t felt in a PTA movie since Magnolia.
My favorites of his are still Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love…
He’s dealt with families and father figures before, of course, most notably in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and The Master, but never as keenly and perhaps as sensitively as he does here.
Indeed, there’s a kineticism here that he hasn’t achieved since Magnolia.
For PTA, it’s been one battle after another to take home Oscar gold for landmarks that include, in addition to the peerless “There Will Be Blood,” “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “The Master” and “Phantom Thread.”
Take, for instance, his four main films to date: "Boogie Nights" (1997), "Punch-Drunk Love" (2002), "There Will Be Blood" (2007), and the subject under discussion here, "Magnolia" (1999).
Paul Thomas Anderson�s decision to cast comic Adam Sandler in the lead role of his new film Punch-Drunk Love combined with the film�s ninety minute runtime and superficially lighter subject matter make it seem a deliberate attempt by the director to distance himself from the cries of excess that greeted the release of his last film, the magnificent Magnolia.
Paul Thomas Anderson whose previous films including the Oscar contenders “Magnolia”, and “Boogie Nights” gives the viewing audience something to hope for, and something to feel good about from beginning to end.
Mr. Anderson, normally accustomed to epics lengths that went along with Boogie Nights and Magnolia, makes things nice and lean at around 95 minutes.
Writer-director P.T. Anderson ("Boogie Nights," "Magnolia") has created a highly original and intelligent movie.
For his latest film, director Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights," "Magnolia") has made, by his own admission, "an art house Adam Sandler film."
The films of Paul Thomas Anderson concern odd “families,” people who collect around an idea or profession or a bond of necessity — the porn industry (“Boogie Nights”), a driven oil man who adopts a son (“Let There Be Blood”) or a loose collection of characters that suggest a theme (“Magnolia”).
“The Master” was ideally situated to pick up on those forces, elaborating on the themes Anderson so tantalizingly suggested in the previous film -- just as Lancaster’s nascent cult and its mostly middle-aged, female adherents present an inviting opportunity to plumb the group dynamics that gave the director’s 1997 “ Boogie Nights ” and 1999 “ Magnolia ” such psychological density and tender pathos.
The Master is the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, critically-beloved auteur of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood, a roman á clef about Scientology starring Joaquin Phoenix as a drifter named Freddy Quell that’s sure to be debated for years to come.
And like every Paul Thomas Anderson film, The Master primarily deals with a toxic father-son relationship that is about to come to a head ( Magnolia, Boogie Nights , Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood ), so looking at such an incestuous subtext is not out of bounds.
One of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s most notable traits to date has been to take the style of an existing well-loved director and give it a bit of a personal spin: Scorsese in Boogie Nights , Altman in Magnolia , Kubrick in There Will Be Blood .
The newest film is here from Paul Thomas Anderson, one of our greatest filmmakers, who has directed such disparate great films as “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “There Will be Blood.”
They’d naturally love its non-spatter deaths, its three-named director (Paul Thomas Anderson, director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia and other notable crap), its literary pedigree courtesy of source material by an earnest socialist, Upton Sinclair, whose books they haven’t read but they’ve heard his name somewhere, perhaps in some undergrad American Lit class, and knew that they were supposed to like him whether they read him or not.
Until now he's been widely respected, but his ensemble pieces such as "Magnolia," "Boogie Nights" and "Punch Drunk Love" all had a similar, angst-heavy, modern tenor.
On the heels of Anderson's previous films "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," both of which chronicled the recent history and culture of Los Angeles and its environs, Anderson has now joined the ranks of such definitive California writers as Nathanael West and Joan Didion in crafting his own personal and potent version of the state's creation myth.
Anderson, the man responsible for the transcendent "Punch-Drunk Love," "Magnolia," and "Boogie Nights," has based his screenplay on another's work for the very first time and as a result "There Will Be Blood" is as far removed from his previous films as it could possibly be.
Paul Thomas Anderson knew it was going to take something special for me to trust him after the overwrought crap that was Magnolia .
Speaking of not realizing how good we had it, it’s telling that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” deliberately evokes so many different movies from 1999 (Daniels also tap into the manic thrum of “Magnolia” in order to depict the entropy of Evelyn’s daily life, and exhume the swaggering nihilism of “Fight Club” for the villain’s self-destructive mayhem).
Even the most alive segment of the film, a montage of the intervening of fate, will have astute viewers harkening back to Paul Thomas Anderson's magnificent "this...cannot be that" prologue to Magnolia and giving no credit to Fincher for expanding upon that idea in any meaningful way or teasing us that his flair for the theatrics will make another appearance.
It also occasionally diverges into some great sequences depicting the cruelties of fate and irony, in a way that is not dissimilar to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia .
Fincher is acutely aware that the audience is not going to be able to distance themselves from their public perception of Affleck, and much like Paul Thomas Anderson and Tom Cruise in Magnolia, there’s the feel of an actor that’s as much manipulating your perception of who you think or believe that they are, as they are wrangling a character.
The idea of romance through the years, or just the idea of focusing on multiple interrelated stories, is nothing new, having been seen in films ranging from the beloved Christmas classic Love, Actually or the more trite Valentine’s Day to those more thought-provoking in nature, such as Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Magnolia or Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s Amores Perros .
On a scale of “Magnolia” to “Crash” to “Collateral Beauty,” this one is closer to the lattermost.
This is one of those Crash, Babel, or Magnolia-esque dramas where all of the seemingly disparate stories are connected in some type of way.
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You’re reminded of the technique adopted by Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia , that start stop, marginally meandering approach, that in his hands felt assured, the mark of a director in command of the material, but here feels imposed, breaking two part stories into tens of intercut fragments.
Fans of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia may sense a kinship here, but that (truly great) film's rain of frogs is nothing compared with Rubber's randomly vicious antagonist, a sentient tire that rolls up out of the California desert and goes on an inexplicable rampage that’s viewed from afar by a binocular-wielding "audience."