I would like to officially go on the record as saying that there is nothing that is entertaining for three hours (and doesn't chafe).

After seeing Magnolia and The Green Mile (not to mention The Postman and Waterworld), I vow never to see a movie longer than ninety minutes again. If this limits me to Fox Animation Features, so be it.

Magnolia is long. Some would say too long. Let me just say that I have never been so bored in a single scene that I was tempted to give a foot massage to the person sitting next to me.

The movie begins with the unfortunate tales of a few unfortunate souls who die in almost Douglas Adams-esque displays of improbability. Enjoy that part while it lasts. It's the most interesting part of the film and it never pays off later.

From there we enter a montage where we meet about seventy-five characters who are all talking to each other under a surpassingly loud musical track that obscures all of it. Now I'm no art film genius, so maybe I missed the big picture here, but to me it had the same effect as trying to watch a video while my GOD DAMMED NEIGHBOR keeps playing her Celine Dion CD OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN, until I just want to knock on her door and shove a table leg through her EVIL BLACK HEART...

But I digress...

It has been pointed out to me that the theme song at the beginning of a movie sets the scale for the film, like the "1 inch = 100 miles" legend on the bottom of a map. The theme to Inspector Gadget is a minute and a half long, the film is seventy-eight minutes long.

The song during Magnolia's opening credits was at least twenty minutes long.

It wasn't far into the movie before I was reminded of a nugget of wisdom from the Tiny Toon Adventures movie: "Feature length movies should not have eighteen different plots."

As a sidebar, if a movie does have eighteen different plots, they should all meet up somehow in a way that is rewarding, like in Pulp Fiction or even in Go! The different plot lines in Magnolia never come together in any coherent way.

On top of that, Magnolia was really boring.

More ranting below in the Spoiler Lounge.

So after all of that build-up with the guys who got hanged, and the diver, and the shotgun suicide, didn't you expect the movie to end with the narrator coming back and saying how the events of every character on the frog night directly affected another character all the way around? I sure did!

"...Since the game show host's wife was pissed at him, she went to see her daughter. Since her mother was there, she stopped snorting coke for five freakin' seconds, which caused her to realize that her overworked speakers were blown, causing her to go to the electronics store where Donnie Smith, Quiz Kid, is being hit in the face with a frog which caused the cop to... etc. etc..."

But no such luck. I've played games of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon that connected more coherently than the plot lines in this movie.

And what about the things that are never tied up at all? It's like the writer himself finally just got so bored of the movie that he was just like, "Aw screw it let's just end it already."

What about Stanley? He neither reconciles with nor escapes from his father.

The game show host doesn't kill himself, and neither reconciles with nor escapes from his family.

Julianne Moore neither reconciles with or escapes this mortal coil.

I never reconciled with, but I did escape the movie.