Magnolia’s themes of metaphysics, connective consciousness and moral redemption feed into each other well and create a great sense of searching for truth and meaning by asking life’s ultimately unanswerable questions - How do we forgive? Forget? Move on? Let go? When should we return? Stay? Take responsibility? Atone? Sadly the weight of these lofty philosophical subjects overshadows character development and that in turn makes space for the script’s numerous structural inconsistencies (sorry no spoilers) making it both existentially breathtaking and hugely narratively unfulfilling. Magnolia’s script is so human in its need to keep asking questions in order to self define… one *could* argue that it’s confusion and inability to answer the very questions that it poses make it even more human… Personally I would equate Magnolia to a child avoiding bedtime by asking for a tenth glass of water. Magnolia craves attention, with its quick edits and disjointed thoughts - it insincerely hints at a depth that never materialises - much like the dishonest child that asks for what it wants and distracts from what it truly needs - structure and discipline. Although the performances throughout are excellent with Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise and John C Reilly being obvious standouts - the direction, edit and script inconsistencies leave Magnolia just shy of being both brilliant and unforgettable. ****

It's a marvellous and most ambitious idea for a film, and then an even more ambitious endeavour altogether to go ahead and make the film at very nearly 3 hours long. My word.

The first thing I felt is that it is a very well made film indeed, a monumental task, carried off quite brilliantly. Quite only, though I get the feeling that WAS the ultimate intention - to be, or nearly to be, only QUITE brilliant. To have a clear, even though, to me, reasonless, unfathomable limit. If you take the concept of the film, to me it's stunningly ambitious - that is to suggest by inter-connected strands that, wait for it, every detail of every life and happening is pre-determined, planned, organised, arranged to happen that way. And so the film begins with ridiculous, part funny, part terribly, terribly tragic unfolding, distant, quite ridiculous events which relate, which, it's suggested have been planned to relate, have been planned with every minute co-inciding correspondence.

I've just been writing about the symbolism in the suggestion of total universal pre-determination in the film "Knowing", and having to deal with that, so I'm really thrown at the moment.

Magnolia actually begins by suggesting the concept is all, and that it will be a very detatched, and perhaps very fast-paced, frequent moving exposition of events which appear natural, synergenic, organic, random etcetera, but which are suggested to come from, minute movement by minute movement, a pre written storyboard in life.

The fragmentary strands which relate more as time goes on recalls Altman's Short Cuts. (Which is less deep, more an excuse for a detatched look at people living, though I remember thinking with Short Cuts, many years ago - is Altman having us wonder a little about pre-determination?) I thought the film would keep to this detatched, quite distant Altman-esque tact to develop the concept I've mentioned. As in Short Cuts, there is an attempt to bring the audience into the people and situations from the initial fragments. But this is much more in Magnolia, it becomes most of the film actually. The idea is to make a lot from bringing the distant, detatched, fragmentary subjects in close, to allow personal identification, emotion, affection for the characters in the audience.

(The *** next 2 paragraphs *** MAY BE *** SPOILERS *** to the developing character of the film.)

It works, though at the same time is very obvious, and a little clinical also, by the end. Further, more than just obvious, it's below the belt in plainly going down the path of looking for something of heavy meaningfulness in life. It over simple, banal even. It is painting by numbers that certainly has an effect, as desired, but perhaps tends towards the shallow, bare and superficial. I think, perhaps, that this is somewhat clinical, in a partly obvious way, was also intended, but I don't really know why. (Though, strangely, this has me think of 'Shutter Island', mostly for reasons I'm not going into. Though one of those reasons I'll bother to suggest is linked to the mainstream culture of film which we're used to, applying the notion of pre-determinism to that.)

The last thing to say is that the film (1) very much does, and (2) also doesn't live up to the excellent, long opening sequence which brags about how the film is going to suggest pre-determinism in fragmentary events and lives over the course of around 3 hours. There is something both detatchedly scientific while innately human about the opening sequence, with its striking apparent co-incidences and the suggestion of pre-determination. That becomes more mellowed out as the film progresses, which does serve the purpose perhaps of suggesting that this is how it is blended into the fabric in real life. The film is firstly saying it's not so stark and obvious most of the time - this pre-determination lark that we, ahem, may be all affected totally by. Then again, as the film becomes less fragmentary and shmaltzes into giving us a 'meaningful vision' of life even in pre-determinism, a quite sacharin one, this perhaps is the main point of the film. What else could be pre-determined? Is this very realist, brutally honest and unblinkered? Or is it deeply pessimistic?

I think 7/8 out of 10, at least.

Of course, any film really worth its salt that claims to be about pre-determinism would think it has to incorporate that into the actual life of the film. And here we have strange things falling from the sky (don't miss this, these are some of the most memorable and landmark moments in modern film), especially for the viewer to wonder how it happened. So, just how did it happen? I hope it's all "kosher"!!!

Very well shot, very well edited, very well acted, brilliantly put together, very well conceived. This is a landmark in film making that's only downfall is that I think it has, in sensing its own huge ambitiousness, put limits where they shouldn't have been. I don't know, maybe that's true, maybe not. I think the evidence of that is that the greatness of this film lies, eventually, after everything, in the excellent film making itself, rather than how the story itself impinges deeply upon your life (while, yet again, I think it will impinge deeply on my life, yet also that will not be true and it will annoy me, that equally as foreseen as the former by the makers, I think.)

I use the term landmark, the word great (in ways). I say it's an amazing achievement even for such an ambitious film, and I advise film buffs and anyone normally interested in film in a serious way not to miss this film. Those things I feel are all true of this film, however, it's not a film which coheres excellently in all relevant ways that you would desire of a film, and there are elements of shallowness. Pehaps that's to be expected, and could have been intended, with such a detatched concept about showing life in suggesting pre-determinism. But there's a lot about that subject itself which is tremendously brought out - and so it is more of an abstract concept realisation in film than a well cohering, well rounded film.

There was a time when making films that were going against all possible rules in the profession was a dear pastime of some film makers. This film is one of these. Everything is upside down.

First an irritating musical sound tracks behind and often over the dialogue. The absolutely absurd succession of short sequences of characters that have nothing in common at first sight and even at second sight. Some connections only become clear at the very end of the film. A lot of old people who have been forgotten on burial day though they are more ghostlike than just plain phantoms,, oops! Sorry, sorry senior citizens, all in the process of dying of all kinds of unnameable ailments, mostly cancer if I heard the words properly in the short silences of the music track.

All of them are abominable. Particularly the men, but at the same time the women are not better, subservient and only interested in the security they are and have been provided with. Some are vultures even, and openly so. The younger ones are not more presentable. A drug addict, a social climber, and a few others. We are in the deepest pit of a zoo and all the predators were put together down there like twenty spiders in a pot.

Among these one cop who is a fool who believes people can repent and even repair their mistakes and that his real function is to forgive them and by forgiving them lead them into reforming. Marvellous, divine, angelic, with a good dose of sugar on top and whip cream à la mode.

But for such an end to be reached you need a miracle and the miracle happens in the middle of the night after everyone has failed, flunked, fled away from their responsibilities, confessed their crimes. The worse oldie is that dying man who bluntly and flatly tells us that he was in love with his wife, his high school crush, sweetheart, but that he cheated on her for twenty-two or twenty-three years just because he wanted her to be a man since she was intelligent and could not be a woman. Closet homosexual who finally abandoned her in the hands of their son who was at the time under age to take care of a dying mother. Absolutely pathetic and that son finally arrives and cries on the bed of his dying father. This time burlesque.

And to make that miracle of reformation happen God will send a powerful sign in the middle of the night from the sky and that I won't reveal. But it really is Mark Twain revisited. The taller the tale, the more believable. Though it turns this story into a farce, a grotesque commedia dell arte prank. So what's left at the end?

This world is neurotic at least, psychotic in the middle and schizophrenic at most or at best. We don't live in our minds and in our gentility. We live in the surrounding noise of constant elevator music which at times sounds like a tornado in a culvert. We are blended, mashed, pureed by this constant continuous sound track and we start reacting like demented puppets suffering from Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, a condition that causes people to make repeated, nervous tic-like movements and utter innumerable swear words strung up like never-ending necklaces of excrement. This is a serious disease and the film seems to tell us it is the normal condition of everyday life for everybody starting as soon as the person can utter two words and they probably don't say mama or papa any more in Los Angeles, but rather kaka and some onomatopoeia for the backside hole that brings the soul to the fundament of the body, the backside exhaust pipe of the individual, the AAA-soul.

But if that is the depth of our lot then God is right to send some severe punishment down onto us to make us recapture some dignity. By the way, you will probably see that Tom Cruise could do better than he does in many of his films. He must have been inspired by this story of AAA-souls lost in the mud of senior-citizenship and midlife crisis.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I read a lot - at least by most people's standards. And I watch quite a few films. And the vast majority of what I read/watch leaves me feeling just so-so. Take it or leave it. Though now and then I'll think something is good. Maybe very good. Five-stars-out-of-five good.

And then - very, very occasionally - you come across something which is another-order-of-magnitude good. Something which just takes your breath away and doesn't give it back until you turn the last page or watch the closing credits roll up in front of you. And you realise that what it's all been for. That's why you've ploughed through all those novels or sat through all those movies. To get to here.

Last year I got there with Victor Pelevin's The Clay Machine Gun. Last night I found myself there again when I watched a film I knew nothing about but had popped on my Lovefilm list after seeing an interesting review. Magnolia. Where was I in 1999 when this was released? What was I doing? How could it possibly have come to a point where, nine years later, I'd never even heard of this film?

I won't even try to describe it to you - beyond saying that it follows the interlocking lives of a series of characters in Los Angeles - but it was absolutely captivating. Several minutes into the opening montage I had that feeling of absolute 'rightness'. That sense that there was absolutely nothing in the world I'd rather be doing at this moment than sitting here, laptop propped up on my knees, watching what was unfolding in front of me. And three hours later (yes, it's long, but then, hell, so is War and Peace) I was still captivated. And open-mouthed. Literally. Towards the end my jaw actually dropped, I was so astounded and moved and transfixed by what was happening on the screen.

This is a work of consummate genius, at once puzzling and heart-rending and wise and funny and tragic and uplifting. The acting is astonishing. I've never been a particular fan of Tom Cruise but in Magnolia he proves he's more than than just a pretty face with one of the most powerful performances I have ever seen. The musical score is hypnotic, and the frog scene is probably the most dramatic use of special effects in cinema history.

If only everything in life were this good.

Magnolia is one of those films that demands your time and concentration, it is not easy viewing. The characters are all damaged by neglect, disappointment or abuse. One of my favourite things about this movie was the haunting soundtrack by Aimee Mann. At one pont in the film many of the characters softly sing the same song to themselves, a ploy that could have been horribly cheesy but just works here. Many reviews have cited Tom Cruises's remarkable performance, in this film he gives a manic, angry performance which suits his almost wolfish features. The rest of the cast also give absolutely breathtaking performances. I particulary liked Melora Walters who plays Claudia an emotionlly wrecked drug addict. There is some comedy in her scenes and she arranges a date with a sweet policeman after quickly flushing her stash down the toilet. Much of the story centres around two dying men who have well and truly wrecked their children's chances of happiness with their selfishness. One of these men hosts a gameshow where gifted children pit their wits against adult contenstants. Jeremy Blackman who plays Stanley, one of the young contestents, is excellent. It is quite heartbreaking to see him not be allowed to go to the toilet because he would disrupt filming. His abusive father thinks it is Ok to treat his son badly as long as he ends every sentence with "I love you". The end of the film is rather strange and has a biblical ring to it. This is a fairly complicated film and, almost certainly, one that you will watch more than once.

With its ensemble cast and multiple storylines, it's inevitable that this movie is a lengthy watch, but it's worthwhile in lots of ways. Everyone will have favourite perfomances, for example - for me, Tom Cruise as the pumped up, arrogant Frank Mackey, the male sex life coach who speaks like an evangelistic preacher, is most memorable. The lovely songs of Aimee Mann are also striking, as is the movie's ending which I won't spoil. And that's fine, but when I looked for the reason why the movie's called Magnolia I discovered significant things about the influence of early twentieth century American writer Charles Fort on the movie, all of which helped me to make a whole lot more sense of it all. So, if I hadn't been curious about the title I'd have missed much of the point of the movie.

Even though it cranks up the melodrama at times, it always feels authentic, and even though it's story-telling sweep is broad, it still feels intimate. Flawless acting, believable dialogue, impressive cinematography and a great score is all spot on, and quickly draws the viewer into the various lives and events being depicted. The editing is also outstanding, and elegantly manages to thread together the complexities of various intersecting lives within one single day. It could easily have been a mess in less assured hands. Basically another great, ambitious movie from a great director/writer.

Went down a treat at my religious film group - although maybe a few too many C bombs for the priest.