'Magnolia'

I watched this years ago when it was released on video, but I found it much better now than then.

I would not have figured that such a long film (three hours) with such a hodgepodge cast that makes a whole lot more sense now then it did then (most of those actors/actresses weren't nearly as popular then as they are now).

I don't know why I like it. I think Tom Cruise is really good playing himself, or the man that would be himself, T.J. Mackey. John C. Reilly steals the show and proves that it's kinda tragic that he's not doing any real drama any more. Philip Baker Hall proves himself one of the great character actors -- I mean, he was the librarian police on "Seinfeld" -- of our time.

The film is about irony, or coincidence, or chance or happenstance or all of that. How these selfish lives we're leading are a whole lot more connected than we think. We snarl and leer at people around us as if they're aliens or monsters. We abhor human contact and interrelations because we either assume they don't want to talk to us or we don't want to talk to them.

Instead, we never quite learn that it rains frogs at equal rate on one person as it does everyone else. Maybe it didn't need to rain frogs. But no one is forgetting that scene from the movie. Most will forget what the film is kind of about.