Magnolia - Paul Thomas Anderson

Three hours long and the movie captures your attention for about 2 1/2 hours, which is a testament to how good the movie is. Not many movies may go on that long without your starting to look at your watch and hope for the end. But, from the moment the frogs start falling from the sky, it meanders into a general parable about how "shit happens" and there is sometimes just nothing we may do about it. (The histrionics of Tom Cruise - who let's face it, is out of his element with any role more complicated than Rain Man - doesn't help anything either.) The gun's falling from the sky to the feet of the policeman who had lost his gun, is just more of the sort of "All's well that ends well" ending that PT Anderson favors (think, Boogie Nights and The Beach Boys' God Only Knows).

The three stories offered as true at the beginning of the movie, as a sort of backdrop to the movie's "truth is stranger than fiction" theme, aren't all true - and might be all as mangled as the idea of frogs falling from the heavens - in other words, all the by product of poetic license or urban legend. When a movie tells you that something is true (think, Fargo) it ain't necessarily so.

Weak ending, good movie.

"Magnolia" is one of those rare films that works in two entirely different ways. In one sense, it tells absorbing stories, filled with detail, told with precision and not a little humor. On another sense, it is a parable. The message of the parable, as with all good parables, is expressed not in words but in emotions.