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Magnolia

I have so much love to give, I just don't know where to put it.

A review by Mike Shea   Movie Rating: ( * * * * · )    DVD Rating: ( * * * * * )

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Magnolia is the story of the eight most emotionally unstable people in this wide earth. They range from psychotic (Frank Mackey played by Tom Cruise) to simply lost (an excellent John C. Reilly as the cop). Their stories are interwoven with such excellent direction that for the first hour you forget just how boring their individual stories are. It was around this time that I realized that if I had seen any one of these stories by itself, I would have been bored to tears, but by mixing them so well together and with such excellent transitions that they became interesting. Don't get me wrong, the acting is excellent, but the stories themselves don't hold a whole lot of attention. Sure, Tom Cruise using the C word (both of them) over 20 times in five minutes is kind of cool, but almost vulgar to the point of turning me off which is kind of hard to do. About two hours into the movie (yep, a three hour tour, this one) I became much more interested and actually felt myself rooting for the characters to go one way or another. Unfortunately they act as people would and sometimes make drastically wrong choices. The good news is that it call comes out at the end, with a big bang. Fight Club. The double disc set includes a directors commentary, deleted scenes, extra footage and a making of featurette. The picture is a solid but dark 16x9 enhanced transfer with a good solid Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack that does wonders for the excellent soundtrack. Magnolia is a movie about real people with real lives. It doesn't try to candy coat it for us and doesn't even try to make the boring parts interesting. It is an excellent story.