What the Hell Are You Watching?!: Magnolia with Neil Fennell
HE’S BACK! Pal and contributor Neil Fennell returns to the podcast to discuss one of his favorite movies, Magnolia. What do the frogs mean?! Why do they all sing the Amiee Mann song?! Did you ever notice the camera work in the three acts? Or the score changes? We talk about all of it in this fantastic discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film.
Check out Neil’s film work at Neil-Fennell.com and he mentions a few You Tube clips in the episode. Here are those links:
Apologies for poor quality! Gotta investigate for next time.
I’m basically the opposite of Neil in terms of PTA, as I enjoyed Inherent Vice & Phantom Thread (and also Hard Eight, which they didn’t mention) a lot more than Boogie Nights, Magnolia & Punch-Drunk Love. I don’t identify with any of the characters in Magnolia (or the other films), but I don’t expect to identify with characters in movies and wouldn’t watch a movie which resembled my own life.
Also, Back to the Future 2 gets time-travel wrong, but the original is also an emblematic example of how to get it wrong. And Biff is partly based on Trump, but he’s also an f-you for his namesake, Ned Tanen, who denounced Zemeckis & Gale’s script for “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” as anti-semitic.