Review – Magnolia

How sad it is when good filmmakers take a successful film as a cue to make their next picture as self-indulgent as possible. This movie is a prime example. Many of the folks who worked on this effort also worked on Boogie Nights. But the two movies are little alike. Gone are the senses of time, place and humor that were such a big part of the previous success. In their place, well, to be honest there just isn’t much here. The characters and their stories (all loosely connected by an uninteresting lattice of coincidence) pack all the emotional depth of the “gloom, despair and agony on me” routine from Hee Haw, and the script is executed with the aplomb of the old, drugged-out Elvis stumbling through the lyrics to “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” I kept hoping that once I made it through the nerve-grating opening sequence of jump cuts set to the tune of Til Tuesday refugee Aimee Mann crooning “One Is the Loneliest Number” that things would settle down and the movie would stop sucking. No such luck. The picture just kept stinking right up to the final joke. And as if the rest of the production wasn’t enough of a plague, the last gag served as ample support of the David St. Hubbins adage about the fine line between clever and stupid. Wish I’d skipped it