snkn2me

Tomorrow Love Streams you are mine. I’m not going to engage with the ethics of logging w/o f-ing because I’m not eating it and I’m going to watch it tomorrow! And on the CC not from the library.

This is heavy stuff. Makes me appreciate PTA’s master confidence, exemplified here,* and how quickly he acquired it, this being his 3rd feature. *Sydney* was confident, *Nights* was even more so, but not once across *Magnolia’s *188 minutes does it ask for permission at all. It so very much knows what it wants to be and is; it’s what it wanted to be, and furthermore knows what it is. I always saw the picture as stripped down in its cinematography in aid of not distracting from the performances, but on this second watch I realized just how ingenious the camera really is.** There’s some shot/reverse shot, but everywhere I can remember it it’s incredibly precise and poignant. There’s not a scene that has it and doesn’t need it, nor vice-versa; every scene that would use it in another movie opts instead for a striking, inventive piece of mise-en-scene that lives on in the mind after the movie’s over. I’m thinking of Earl in profile and Phil to his left but occupying the right half of the frame, handing him a cigarette and whatnot, or Linda’s freakout at the pharmacy, where we don’t see the attendant because there’s no need to, he’s not giving us anything, she’s giving us everything and is given the time to give it. Speaking of, on this watch I felt Julianne Moore was really the one who tied the whole thing together; most of her scenes use unnamed, flat interlocutors, but through her rants and selfward diatribes, gets across a lot of what the movie’s trying to say and really acts her ass of doing it, which gets across the rest of what the movie’s trying to do as a model. If I had to rank all of the rounded characters on their levels of importance (and if we consider **Jim Kurring, Phil Parma, Quiz Kid Donnie, Quiz Kid Stanley, Frank T. J. Mackey, Claudia Gator, Earl Partridge, Jimmy Gator, and Linda Partridge** to be the film’s **9** round characters) I think it would go, a little something, like: **1. Frank T. J. Mackey.** **2. Linda Partridge.** **3. Claudia Gator.** **4. Quiz Kid Donnie Smith.** **5. Stanley Spector.** **6. Phil Parma.** **7. Jim Kurring.** **8. Jimmy Gator.** **9. Earl Partridge.** But of course this is the wrong way to think about it, because everything serves a purpose. *magnolia,* after all, is a mosaic of American life… it’s not 9 stories, it’s not even 3/4 stories (FTJM, LP, EP, PP//SS, JG/CG, JK/QKDS), it’s 1 story, and not just by way of “An Earl Partridge Production.” Nothing matters without all the other stuff, and it all matters; every little thing matters. It’s a movie, to be entirely reductive, about how “the little things” are just as important as all the other stuff people make 3 hour epics out of. *Speaking of “all the other stuff,” and about “PTA’s master confidence, despite the reputation waning, *There Will Be Blood* stands as likely the 21st century’s most unanimous masterpiece. *Magnolia* speaks to the burgeoning Welles-ian magnitude requisite for such a feat. **On my first viewing the U-turn struck me as the most impressive Mildred Pierce-ian cut, but on a second viewing a lot more stood out to me, such as the angled shot of the waitress approaching Donnie Smith. To speak of PTA and S/RS, 2012’s *The Master.*

Pretty ineffable in its simplicity. The sort of punchy, memorable, bum-ba-dum-ba-dum dialogue that fills the fridges of Sorkin and his lot; but this is good. It’s mean-spirited as all hell. The characters are to each other, the world is to the characters, and the script is to the characters—and when I say “characters,” I mean men. It’s all men. It’s the Glengarry guys. There’s a woman in the Chinese place in the beginning and there’s Pope Francis’s wife but that’s it. Men men men men men. Men trying to be men, wanting to be men, trying to figure out what a man should be, can be, doubting that it’s possible, giving up on being a man, giving up on being a mouse, lying, stealing, cheating, fucking over, it’s a mess! It’s a band apart in the hyper-masculine, high-swear-count, “confidence trick” type movies that so often become profitable due to people missing the point. What sets Glengarry apart is that these guys are by no means winning, it’s almost impossible to miss the point (somehow, through pop culture’s preeminent takeaway being the Alec Baldwin scene, I guess they did); these guys aren’t Jordan Belfort, they’re Willy Loman; but they’re not Willy Loman, because they believe in fuck-all bigger than themselves and not even in themselves. In a confidence-trick racket, in a confidence-trick-genre-of-movie, these guys do not project confidence, they have no confidence in what they’re selling, no confidence in the leads they’re getting, no confidence in the leads they’re not allowed to get, no confidence in the corporate structure, no belief in talent, hard work, God, hell, or table manners/cordiality. These are men who have sold their souls for absolutely nothing. Each character embodies an evocative crushed-by-capitalism archetype and each is played to perfection by their respective actors, talk about star-studded cast. Jack Lemmon lives on through time, Space chips in, Harris come here let me kiss you, Baldwin busts all over; Al is so much of what makes him great and is just on the border line of too much it’s like a perfect synthesis of old and young Al; you’ve got some Scarface, some Dog Day, some Heat, some Needle Park, he k-i-double-l kills it. Between the tragic lines, it’s entertaining. It’s fun to see Al sell guys stuff; as fun as it is to watch Leo do it in Wolf or CMIYC, but better because he’s a good guy you root for. Lemmon is the opposite but there’s a Curb-Comedy current. Baldwin, axiomatic. Words couldn’t do it justice. My review? Fuck you, that’s my review. You drove here in a Hyundai he drove here in an 80k BMW that’s my review.