Magnolia is a very long movie, with some very good performances by the actors involved. But as you walk out the movie, the big question on your mind is "what’s with the rain of frogs?" It happens literally out of thin air, and seems utterly arbitrary. Most critics are so spooked by it, they won’t even mention it. Those that mention it in a "spoiler-free" mode say things like "It is completely unexpected and unprecedented."

The most foreshadowing anyone will admit to is that Exodus 8.2 ("Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt, and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt") is referenced a couple of times in the movie (it’s the sign that’s taken away from a woman in the studio audience of "What Do Kids Know?" for example). But there’s a few other signs.

One of the themes of the movie is the weather. The weather changes dramatically over the course of the day, and weather reports appear onscreen twice, keeping the audience updated to the humidity. And the young boy (Stanley Spector, played by Jeremy Blackman) is studying weather, and even asks someone at the television station if the station has its own meteorologist.

The books on Stanley’s desk that aren’t weather-related are also clues. He’s reading Charles Fort (who collected reports of rains of frogs, chickens, snails, and almost anything you can imagine) and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. A prime spot on the table has Ricky Jay’s indispensible Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, a collection of weird and anomalous people and things throughout history. Jay himself is the narrator for the first part of the movie, where he presents three allegedly coincidental events.

The first (a man living in Greenberry Hill is murdered by three men named Green, Berry, and Hill) almost word-for-word out of one of Charles Fort’s books. The second (a scuba diver is found in a tree after a fire) is a retelling of an old Urban Legend with a coincidence added – the pilot that scooped up the water had had a fight with the diver a couple days earlier. The third (man jumps from building, is shot by shotgun blast on the way down) is more interesting.

First, it’s another urban legend. The sort of person that recognizes that story and most of the books on Stanley’s desk won’t be that surprised at a rain of frogs. In fact, when the frogs start falling, Stanley just looks up and says "This does happen." It does, too, although the frogs are usually smaller.

Second, the key to the murder is provided by a young boy. This is mirrored by the young rapping kid who claims to know who killed the guy in that woman’s closet, and calls 9-1-1 to save, er, the woman who tried to commit suicide. You know, the woman who’s married to Earl Partridge.

Third, it involves married people who hate each other. Love doesn’t work out well in this movie.

But I was talking about the frogs. Another sub-theme of this movie is order and chaos. Most of the lines are read in an almost-obnoxiously Method style, with lots of stammering and uhs and ers. But there’s two characters who are on stage, and they’re going through scripts within the movie. Tom Cruise and the game show host both start out running their lines flawlessly, until they start to break down, and chaos creeps into their dialogue. Cruise flips over a table, and game show guy collapses.

Stanley’s reading shows a distinct interest in the weird and anomalous. One of the categories on the game show was "Chaos vs. Superstring". The opening segment made it clear that sometimes, strange things happen. Sometimes, frogs just rain out of the sky. So there!

Okay, now that *that’s* out of the way, I can talk about the movie. And I think that’s the problem. There’s nice performances and interesting directorial choices and all that, but this damn rain of frogs really dominates the whole movie.

But, for what it’s worth, here’s my opinions on everything else: it’s purposely annoying. It’s way longer than it needs to be, the song at the beginning ("One Is The Loneliest Number") is way too long and loud. Tom Cruise is purposely obscene and offensive (one of his slides says "Turn that friend into your sperm receptacle"). He’s also using a TV Evangelist voice for most of his performance, incidentally.

There’s several points where the audience is reminded it’s watching a movie. The male nurse says "There’s a scene in movies . . . this is that scene!" The TV screens in the the bar where William H. Macy goes to get drunk and try to win an Oscar are all non-frame-adjusted (television is 30 frames per second, but film is 24. Non-adjusted television has that weird flicker). When the cop is looking for his vanished gun, the movie camera lens is wet, and the flashlight gets all weird-looking.

One of the themes of the movie is order vs. chaos. Tom Cruise is "together" and "orderly" on stage until he finally breaks down. Likewise for the game show host. And the movie itself progresses fairly normally until there’s a big ol’ rain of frogs.

There’s some funny lines (Tom Cruise: "I am firing pearls at you here"), clever moments (The cop’s gun fell to earth in front of him! That’s synchronicity! Alert the Fortean Times!), and random Masonic references (Stanley’s also reading about the Freemasons, and the game show’s director says something about "We meet on the square and part on the level"). But it’s the frogs that everyone remembers.