RIFLE RANGE BOY: This is something that happens!

Magnolia (1999)

Written & Directed: Paul Thomas Anderson

https://letterboxd.com/film/magnolia/

This is another bizarre and busy movie with multiple storylines unfolding simultaneously. One becomes breathless just keeping up with the flow. So many characters are embroiled in so many life issues and are caught in wrong life decisions that make one wonder how all the loose threads will be tied up. True enough, everything makes sense at the end. Like the instance that is mentioned in the opening scene, bizarre things sometimes happen.

In the opening scene, a man jumps down from the top of a 20-storey apartment building. During his fall, he passes by the apartment that he occupies with his parents. His parents are forever fighting. The mother often threatens the father with an unloaded gun. On that fateful day, however, the gun was loaded and it went off, missing the father by inches but hitting the son who happened by the apartment at that very instant when the weapon was discharged. It killed the son instantaneously, who would have saved him, as there were hoardings on the sixth floor which would have broken his fall. The parents were charged and convicted of murder. The son had earlier loaded the gun as he was fed up with the parents' frequent combative showdowns. Yes, these things sometimes can happen in the greater scheme of things.

The Complicated Plot
By Vagary at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6395902

On a random day in California, a policeman investigates an apartment for disturbing public peace to find a body. He goes to another apartment when neighbours complain about the noise.

A child prodigy takes part in a quiz (What Kids Do Know) show with an overbearing father breathing down his neck. The host of the show is a very sick man. He is having cancer, and his estranged daughter wants to have nothing to do with him as he may have abused her sexually.

One of the early winners of the show, an ex-boy genius, is running around like a headless chicken, as he does not know what to do with his life.

The producer of the show is another dying man who is longing to patch up with his son, a fast-talking motivational guru. The producer's nurse tries to contact the estranged son to reunite them.

The event that essentially concludes all conflict is when it rained frogs. Yes, it not only rains cats and dogs, but sometimes it rains frogs too. It is a known phenomenon when small aquatic creatures like fish and frogs are swept up in storms, travel miles, and fall from the sky through rain clouds. Many places in Britain, Hungary, Serbia, Japan and Uruguay have experienced this. This phenomenon may have Biblical significance, as mentioned in the Old Testament. God's wrath upon the Egyptians for enslaving the Israelites caused Him to infest the Nile with immeasurable numbers that they stank till the high heavens.

An interesting movie about growing pains, disappointments, family disputes, headaches, wandering of the mind, reconciliation and restitution.