Magnolia

I just thought this was an excellent film. Love the intro scene. The movie is too detailed to go much into the plot but essentially ties together several people/families like the petals of a magnolia flower connected to the stem. We have different forms of suffering throughout the film: addiction, growing up (moving past being a childhood celebrity), dealing with parental abuse, sexual abuse and what it means to be a father, isolation, guilt, etc. The frog scene, serving as an opportunity for redemption amidst all this misery, is a very memorable scene. My shout out performances would be (1) Tom Cruise- imo his best ever- as basically incel Frank T.J. Mackey, a man who gives speeches to men on how to seduce women, establishing a whole persona for himself after his father Earl neglected him and his dying mother while cheating with several women, forcing Frank to grow up fast. (2) Julianne Moore as Linda, Earl’s second wife who feels guilt for cheating on him and wants to be written out of his will, attempting suicide to relieve her suffering. And (3) Jeremy Blackman as Stanley Spector, a contestant in “What Do Kids Now”, basically a version of Jeopardy, who is continuously pressured by his dad to excel and is basically locked away in the library studying. The best feeling I can describe watching this is like a less intense Requiem for a Dream. You just feel sad watching these people suffer and not getting the help they need. The film just felt very real, excluding the frog scene, and moved me. Probably my favorite PTA film.