Special 500th Movie Review: Magnolia - a Modern Classic From My Collection

In choosing a movie to watch to mark my 500^th full length review, I went with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia because, along with Pulp Fiction and The Godfather, it’s one of my top three movies of all time. By that I mean I consider it not only a great film, but that I find it endlessly watchable. Incidentally, I chose it several weeks prior to, and started watching the night before, Philip Seymour Hoffman's death. It was merely a thematically fitting coincidence. I have tried to watch it about once a year since it came out in 1999 and have mostly kept up on that vow. I think I may have watched it twice during my five years in Spain and possibly only this time since returning two and a half years ago, but I am intimately familiar with the movie. I also chose it because so much time has passed since last we met.

From My Collection: Boogie Nights Movie Review

On big happy dysfunctional family.

From the explosively charged opening tracking shot that introduces most of the major characters to the quietly triumphant closing, Boogie Nights never lets up. It flogs you with an emotional paddle again and again. The ups are sometimes as extreme in their euphoria as the downs are dismal. For me, it is still the most exciting film Paul Thomas Anderson has made. It was only his second feature, but his dialogue is truly second to none and he squeezes in a remarkable amount of character development. He can economize better than any other writer-director working.

Wreck-It Ralph Movie Review

Wreck-It Ralph feels like it should have been a Pixar Animation Studios project. The premise is exactly the kind of clever idea they latch onto and develop into viable material for an animated feature film. The screenplay by Phil Johnston and Jennifer Lee is from a story by Johnston, Rich Moore, and Jim Reardon. Moore, who learned his animation directing chops on “The Simpsons” and “Futurama” – where he likely learned a great deal about handling culturally relevant material – directed. It concerns a video game villain, the titular Ralph, who has grown weary of destroying a building, doing it well, and then looking on as the game’s hero is rewarded with medal upon medal. Thirty years of the same actions over and over will do that to a guy. He desires the chance to be the hero for once, but his Bad-Anon support group (featuring one of the Pac Man ghosts and King Kroopa from Mario Bros.) tell him he can’t change who he is. You see one of the film’s object lessons in the works from here.

We Need to Talk About Kevin Movie Review

Director Lynne Ramsay takes us on a journey through some dark places of the human condition, although it is not a story of her creation. She and Rory Kinnear co-wrote the screenplay for We Need to Talk About Kevin, an adaptation of the novel by Lionel Shriver. The story’s subject matter is how a mother copes with the aftermath of a murderous rampage conducted by her teenage son that left several people dead, his classmates among them.

Carnage Movie Review

Carnage is an interesting choice for director Roman Polanski. It’s been 25 years since his last comedy, Pirates, and that was a complete flop. He tends toward dramatic thrillers more than anything. Perhaps after the recent troubles he’s had with his arrest in Switzerland and near extradition back to the United States he needed some light-hearted fare to ease the stress. In the French stage farce God of Carnage by playwright Yasmina Reza, who co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski, he found material for his next movie. Among the themes that tie his movies together is an often nihilistic view of a Godless world. The personal tragedies of his life may or may not have contributed to his being drawn to such subject matter, but being stripped of his parents in the Holocaust and losing his wife and unborn child to the murderous Manson family are events that can hardly be ignored when evaluating his work. Though Carnage is a comedic farce, it retains some of the motifs we find in his other work.

Cyrus Movie Review

Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei have an especially close mother-son bond.

Cyrus is a movie about a war of nerves between two emotionally stunted men. John C. Reilly plays John, a man stilled scarred by a divorce seven years ago, and his foil is Cyrus (Jonah Hill), the son of a woman he thinks he may have a future with. The film is directed by Jay and Mark Duplass, who have a couple of minor features and short films to their credit, but finally struck some luck by getting serious financial backing from Scott Free Productions, the production company owned by Tony and Ridley Scott.

Reilly has almost made an entire career out of playing big lovable lugs who wear their emotional insecurities on their sleeve. John, the character, bears a number of similarities to Reilly’s character in Magnolia, also a divorced man perhaps a little too open with his feelings and looking for the right woman.