Word: nearest
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Magnolia's faithfulness to the surreal irregularity and aimlessness of life is what distinguishes it from its nearest relative, Robert Altman's Short Cuts. Where that film found black social satire in forcing its inhabitants' to collide in a series of chance events, Magnolia opts for an intimate and studied portrait of each of its nine focal characters by allowing their suffering to be its own dramatic vehicle. Nonetheless, Anderson is a cinephile, and he is indebted here, as in all of his work, to other distinctive and established filmmakers, Altman especially. This film bears some obvious resemblance to Short...
...ancestral figures; but come New Year's Day, all is just eerie midsummer stillness again, the only sound the wind whistling in your ears. It may be that something tumultuous happened to your laptop, or that ATM down the road; but on an island 1,300 miles from the nearest inhabited landmass (Pitcairn, pop. 65), all such disturbances pass like a distant storm at sea. "The race is not to the swift," wrote D.H. Lawrence in the past millennium, "but to those that can stand still/ and let the waves go over them...