1990s American Films

"Tobey Maguire - The Hitchhiker"

"Benicio del Toro - Dr. Gonzo"

"Johnny Depp - Raoul Duke"

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."

"Four Days, Three nights, Two Convertibles, One City."

"As your attorney, I advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit."

"Hey honkies. You folks wanna buy some heroin ? Goddamnit, I'm serious. All I'm trying to sell you is some pure fucking smack! This is the real stuff! You won't get hooked. I just got back from Vietnam."

"And when it comes to that fantastic note... when the rabbit bites his own head off, I want you to throw that fucking radio into the tub with me."

"It's ok, he's just admiring the shape of your skull!"

"1965. The great San Francisco acid wave. I recall one night in a place called the Matrix. There I was. [does a double take, seeing the real Hunter S. Thompson sitting nearby (doppelganger)] Mother of God, there I am! Holy fuck! Uh...clearly I was a victim of the drug explosion - a natural street freak, just eating whatever came by."

"[points skyward] Oh, you evil bastard! This your work. You better take care of me, Lord, 'cause if you don't you'll have me on your hands!"

"With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know."

"Ah, devil ether. It makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel. Total loss of all basic motor function. Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue. The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it."

"Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow."

"[yelling at a crowd in a parking lot] You people voted for Hubert Humphrey! And you killed Jesus!"

"Everything was automatic. I could sit in the red-leather driver's seat and make every inch of the car jump, by touching the proper buttons. It was a wonderful machine: Ten grand worth of gimmicks and big-priced Special Effects. The rear-windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond. The white canvas top ran up and down like a roller-coaster. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights & dials & meters that I would never understand — but there was no doubt in my mind I was in a superior machine."

"There was only one road back to L.A., U.S. interstate 15. Just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker, and Barstow, and Berdoo. Then on to the Hollywood freeway straight into frantic oblivion. Safety... obscurity... just another freak in the freak kingdom. We'd gone in search of the American dream, it had been a lame fuck around. A waste of time. There was no point in looking back. Fuck no, not today, thank you kindly. My heart was filled with joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger, a man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident. The bolded lines are from the film version."

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a main era... The kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something, maybe not, in the long run. But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world. Whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

"I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody was giving booze to these god damn things! It wont be long now, before they tear us to shreds."

"How long could we maintain? I wondered. How long until one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family; will he make that grim connection when my attorney starts screaming about bats and huge manta rays coming down on the car? If so, well, we'll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere, 'cause it goes without saying that we can't turn him loose. He'd report us at once to some kind of outback Nazi law enforcement agency and they'll run us down like dogs. Jesus, did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me?"

"A drug person can learn to cope with things like seeing their dead grandmother crawling up their leg with a knife in her teeth, but nobody should be asked to handle this trip. Bazooko's Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing every Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This was the Sixth Reich."

"FINISH THE FUCKING STORY!"

"[Responding to Waitress] Madame, sir, baby, child, whatever..."

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

"There was no sense in blowing everything away for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met."

"Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander in a casino any time in the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla."

"My attorney had never caught on to the notion espoused by some former drug users that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I, for that matter."

"Don't go near that elevator - that's just what they want us to do... trap us in a steel box and take us down to the basement."

"Jesus! Bad waves of paranoia, madness, fear and loathing, intolerable vibrations in this place. Get out! The weasels were closing in. I could smell the ugly brutes."

"[Yelling to Dr. Gonzo] PLEASE, TELL ME ABOUT THE FUCKING GOLF SHOES!"

"Philip Seymour Hoffman - Phil Parma"

"Philip Baker Hall - Jimmy Gator"

"John C. Reilly - Jim Kurring"

"Ricky Jay - Burt Ramsey/Narrator"

"Melora Walters - Claudia Gator"

"I can't let this go. I can't let you go. Now, you... you listen to me now. You're a good person. You're a good and beautiful person and I won't let you walk out on me. And I won't let you say those things, those things about how stupid you are and this and that. I won't stand for that. You want to be with me... then you be with me. You see?"

"Jeremy Blackman - Stanley Spector"

"William H. Macy - Quiz Kid Donnie Smith"

"Mark Flannagan - Joseph Green"

"Genevieve Zweig - Mrs. Godfrey"

"Julianne Moore - Linda Partridge"

"Pat Healy - Sir Edmund William Godfrey/Young Pharmacy Kid"

"Tom Cruise - Frank T.J. Mackey"

"Things fall down. People look up. And when it rains, it pours."

"Anderson's meandering multi-story megasoap with a message is over-ambitious, self-conscious, self-indulgent, self-important and clumsy into the bargain. But it's also one of the most enthralling and exhilarating American movies in ages. … Insofar as the film is about "story", little happens save that Anderson initially conceals information, and then slowly scatters snippets so that we can piece the jigsaw together. For all the humour, it's a dark portrait of loss, lovelessness and fear of failure in contemporary America, and not a film that trades in understatement."

"Easily one of the best films in recent memory, the severely underrated Magnolia won top prizes at the Berlin Film Festival and the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards but was virtually ignored by the Academy (it scored three nominations without a win among them). Detractors missed its simple but affecting beauty. Writer/director P.T. Anderson assembles a riveting melodrama, or rather several riveting melodramas that can barely contain their energy and outpouring emotions. The individual vignettes, each brought to vivid life by a veteran cast at their best, are tied together by a theme as basic and yet crucial as forgiveness — a point driven home by Anderson’s use of biblical references (a certain amphibian in particular). There’s nothing subtle about either Anderson’s ideas or his tendency to pay homage to Altman and Scorsese. And there’s no denying how lively and entertaining the whole experience is."

"There is no film... EVER... that has made me think and made me feel and made me question like Magnolia. It made me laugh and cry and squirm and giggle with nervous laughter. Yet, I can't deny that five years later my life is changed because I've seen Magnolia. I sit here at my computer getting goosebumps at the tenderness of Philip Seymour Hoffman."

"In one beautiful sequence, Anderson cuts between most of the major characters all simultaneously singing Aimee Mann's "It's Not Going to Stop." A directorial flourish? You know what? I think it's a coincidence. Unlike many other "hypertext movies" with interlinking plots, Magnolia seems to be using the device in a deeper, more philosophical way. Anderson sees these people joined at a level below any possible knowledge, down where fate and destiny lie. They have been joined by their actions and their choices. And all leads to the remarkable, famous, sequence near the film's end when it rains frogs. Yes. Countless frogs, still alive, all over Los Angeles, falling from the sky. That this device has sometimes been joked about puzzles me. I find it a way to elevate the whole story into a larger realm of inexplicable but real behavior. We need something beyond the human to add another dimension. Frogs have rained from the sky eight times this century, but never mind the facts. Attend instead to Exodus 8:2, which is cited on a placard in the film: "And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite your whole territory with frogs." Let who go? In this case, I believe, it refers not to people, but to fears, shames, sins. Magnolia is one of those rare films that works in two entirely different ways. In one sense, it tells absorbing stories, filled with detail, told with precision and not a little humor. On another sense, it is a parable. The message of the parable, as with all good parables, is expressed not in words but in emotions. After we have felt the pain of these people, and felt the love of the policeman and the nurse, we have been taught something intangible, but necessary to know."

"Magnolia is a film of sadness and loss, of lifelong bitterness, of children harmed and adults destroying themselves. As the narrator tells us near the end, "We may be through with the past, but the past is never through with us." In this wreckage of lifetimes, there are two figures, a policeman and a nurse, who do what they can to offer help, hope and love. … The central theme is cruelty to children, and its lasting effect. This is closely linked to a loathing or fear of behaving as we are told, or think, that we should. … As an act of filmmaking, it draws us in and doesn't let go. It begins deceptively, with a little documentary about amazing coincidences (including the scuba diver scooped by a fire-fighting plane and dumped on a forest fire) … coincidences and strange events do happen, and they are as real as everything else. If you could stand back far enough, in fact, everything would be revealed as a coincidence. What we call "coincidences" are limited to the ones we happen to notice."

"Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film. … The movie is an interlocking series of episodes that take place during one day in Los Angeles, sometimes even at the same moment. Its characters are linked by blood, coincidence and by the way their lives seem parallel. Themes emerge: the deaths of fathers, the resentments of children, the failure of early promise, the way all plans and ambitions can be undermined by sudden and astonishing events. … All of these threads converge, in one way or another, upon an event there is no way for the audience to anticipate. This event is not "cheating," as some critics have argued, because the prologue fully prepares the way for it, as do some subtle references to Exodus. It works like the hand of God, reminding us of the absurdity of daring to plan. And yet plan we must, because we are human, and because sometimes our plans work out. Magnolia is the kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy. At three hours it is even operatic in length, as its themes unfold, its characters strive against the dying of the light, and the great wheel of chance rolls on toward them."