January 28-31, 2002

Archived update from Cigarettes & Coffee, run by Greg Mariotti & CJ Wallis from 1999-2005

Emily Watson talked Project X4 to the weekly magazine, The Georgia Straight, about Project X4 while promoting Altman's Gosford Park (Thanks Owen!):

Watson did say yes to Paul Thomas Anderson, the Magnolia and Boogie Nights director, when he was looking for a lead female for his first comedy, Punch Drunk Knuckle Love. The film's male lead: none other than Adam Sandler.

"I had the best time," she says, "and Adam is amazing. Paul pulls down something very different from what he has done before and so does Adam, and I guess so do I. I'll admit we're a strange threesome, but it was a happy meeting."

Musician Nick Cave (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds) had this to say about Magnolia in a recent interview in the 2001 Winter issue of Mojo. (Thanks Ryan!)

He doesn't find that much to admire about recent movies - especially the Coen brothers - though he did like Michael Mann's Heat and The Informer, and thoroughly enjoyed Paul Anderson's Magnolia. "I love the way that it descends into misery," he says. "There's a section in the middle which goes on for ages, where everyone's just in agony, sitting there crying. You don't often get that from Hollywood: lengthy periods of sorrow just aren't welcome, you have a cry for two seconds and then everybody's happy again. And I liked the shower of frogs: to me it was like an apocalypse, God yawning at everyone's stupidity, and sending down a plague."

In case you missed it, the Boogie Nights DVD was listed among Entertainment Weekly's Essential DVDs of the Century. Here's their comments:

Boogie Nights (1997) (New Line, R, $29.95) Leave it to the leader of a ''funky bunch'' to star in a porn flick. Or rather, a flick about porn. But Mark Wahlberg proved to be the perfect choice to play Dirk Diggler, the well-endowed star of Paul Thomas Anderson's ode to the adult-film industry. And while size may indeed matter, it was Anderson's deft attention to detail that made ''Boogie Nights'' the defining cinematic look back at the glitzy, glamorous (and grimy) late '70s.

Here's an interesting article about the spirituality of Magnolia. You can read it here. (Thanks Nick!)