I watched Magnolia because it’s supposedly a good movie but it turned out to be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s convoluted. It’s annoying. It’s a waste of time. In fact it took me three days to watch it because it was so disengaging. The opening sequence with the three urban legends is interesting but it takes too long and doesn’t really do much for the plot… not that there is one. After that, it’s character introductions. Lots and lots of character introductions with fragmented back stories all in different scenarios and times shown in rapid sequence. This was the first time I stopped watching the movie. It was going for so long that I was starting to think that the whole thing was going to be like this, and I decided that I didn’t have patience for that shit. When multiple characters doing separate things are depicted in a movie you can always fall back on the formula that says everything will unify into one story eventually. The problem with this movie is that it never actually does this. It sort of does, on and off. But ultimately it’s just alternating between five or six stories the whole time. Why do they have to do this? It’s just exhausting and upsetting to have to keep up with that many developing stories mixed together. It’s like some kind of endurance test. It’s such a twisted knot of circumstances that you immediately stop caring about anything happening. I’d have a more satisfying experience turning on five random movies I’ve never seen before and watching them all simultaneously.
The whole point of the movie is that all of these people either know each other or incidentally have tangent meetings before continuing onward, creating an ever-expanding circuitous network of bullshit. And what does it all accomplish in the end? Absolutely nothing. They might as well all have nothing in common. They spend the entire movie drifting around and then nothing is gained by it. There’s no payoff. What it should have been leading up to is some kind of chain-reaction or series of events spawning a catastrophe that only occurred because each of the people somehow contributed a small part to it. I could see a good short film based on that but this movie is three hours long. Three excruciating hours of nothing.
What really makes this movie bad is the characters. Every single person in it is either a humongous asshole or a whiny dumbass that won’t shut the hell up. Every last one of them is ready to fly off the handle and throw an epic tantrum of biblical proportions at even the slightest inkling of opposition. Hell, Julianne Moore’s character is ready to curse you blind for making eye contact with her. My point is that they’re all terrible people with no redeeming qualities. Now one of the most important elements in any movie is to have a character that the viewer can latch on to, to experience the story through. While watching this movie I kept thinking, *if a nuclear bomb went off and the entire town was leveled would there be a single person I would feel remotely sad for.* The answer was always no. *None* of these people fit the bill. If the town *was* nuked, the world would just be a better place.
Then, for whatever reason, frogs fall from the sky on top of cars and buildings and all over the town. (Yes I know it’s an urban legend.) This is actually a pretty cool scene; too bad it’s too little, too late. The movie still sucks. My recommendation for watching it is skip to the frog part and turn it off when it‘s over. For those of you who’d like to experience Magnolia without having to see Tom Cruise, do this; clone the most despicable, irritating, loathsome person you’ve ever met 10 times. Now lock yourself in a white room with the clones for three hours. And that’s Magnolia.
