Do you guys ever get the itch to see a movie you haven’t seen or thought about in years?
I was driving to work this morning, the clouds were gray and it was drizzling. Aimee Mann’s rendition of “One” came across my iPod and I thought to myself “I think I want to watch Magnolia when I get home from work today.”
I can’t describe the feeling accurately, but it felt like an itch in my brain stem. Magnolia was a movie that Cami and I had seen in the theater that left me dazzled. A few months later, the movie gathered this negative buzz for being pretentious and I kind of lost the will to settle in for an extended period and watch it again. When it came out on DVD, I bought it anyway because I’m a Paul Thomas Anderson fan and a completionist when it comes to my movie collection. Shamefully, I admit I’ve never watched it since purchasing it.
But now I have the itch and I think I really want to see it again. I might fast-forward through the Tom Cruise-as-sex-guru pieces because, frankly, I don’t want to take my sense of disbelief for that long of a walk. But the rest of the ensemble performances I thought were excellent and I kind of have this new found respect for John C. Reilly after Talladega Nights and his cameo performance as Sasquatch during the hallucination sequence from Tenacious D and The Pick of Destiny.
Of course, if this rain tapers off, I might slip out of the quasi-depressed mood required to make watching Magnolia a truly rich experience. So we’ll see…