Box has light shelf wear with a minor ink lift (dime size) spot on the back near the barcode where a sticker was. On the front is a small endentation on the right edge just below the flower. Cassettes are very nice and clean, look new. Pre-viewed for quality and there was a couple of split second jitters and snow flashes at the very begining. This epic played great otherwise. Amazing 188 min. double tape set.

A long, frantic, and surreal look into a 24-hour series of interlocking stories involving nine principal characters, as an off-screen narrator relates three "strange but true" stories of extreme coincidence and fate--with a fine ensemble cast.

Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is a millionaire in the final stages of cancer. Earl's trophy wife Linda (Julianne Moore) is having a breakdown, overwhelmed with guilt and extreme drug abuse, is finding herself unprepared to cope with Earl's imminent demise.

But, he's being cared for by kind-hearted nurse Phil (Philip Seymour Thomas), who will go to any length to fulfill his charge's deathbed request--which is to locate his estranged son, Frank T.J. MacKey (Tom Cruise)--a charismatic misogynist now famous for his "Seduce and Destroy" female dominance program--which he offers in both seminar and home study format.

And then there's a popular quiz game show "What Do Kids Know?" hosted by Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall). He, too, suffers from terminal cancer and is attempting to reach out to his offspring--but his daughter, Claudia Wilson Gator (Melora Walters), escaping memories of incestuous abuse in a solitary life of drugs and prostitution, will have nothing to do with him.

One of Gator's brightest child stars, "Quiz Kid Donnie Smith" (William H. Macy), is now middle-aged and embittered--he's also desperate for expensive, unnecessary corrective dental surgery which he hopes will impress the object of his infatuation, a young bartender named Brad.

The new quiz kid in town (Jeremy Blackburn), is under intense pressure from his father to make a killing on Gator's show. And a lonely patrolman, Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), has just discovered the body of a murder victim while responding to a call of a noise complaint.

In the meantime, we are also introduced to such supporting characters as Smith's soon to be ex-employer (Alfred Molina), Melinda Dillon as Rose Gator--wife to Jimmy and mother to Claudia, Luis Guzman as an adult game-show contestant named for the actor himself, television journalist Gwenovier (April Grace)-- to whom MacKey has consented to grant an interview during the intermission of one of his seminars, and Henry Gibson as a delightfully curmudgeonly competitor for Brad the bartender's affections--named Thurston Howell!

Some of the ways in which these characters are connected are obvious; others reveal themselves more gradually, but as the initially divergant elements become one, each and every player, regardless of any mask he or she may show to the world, is made to face his or her cold, clear reality.

And in the film's most notorious touch (not revealed here as a spoiler for new viewers), these revelations are punctuated by a phenomenon that seems unnatural to the point that it belongs in a differant type of film altogether--but which has been known to happen (and not just in the Bible).