THE MASTER (2012) P.T. Anderson's film on the origions of Scientology (sort of), Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, and Laura Dern

this is p obvious but there's a big beau travail vibe in that trailer

i'm generally not a PTA fan but the trailer and subject are intersting

I still like Hard Eight best although there's lots to like in every film except Magnolia and PDL.

(a few xposts) Yeah--there's so much money at stake now, and every film by every name director is such an event, that I can't imagine Anderson having the freedom or resources to fall on his face with an Images or Quintet. (Not a comment on the films themselves, neither of which I've seen--got about 20 minutes into Quintet, once.) My guess is that PDL is about the limit of how small and oddball he'll ever get. He does seem to take his time and be comfortable working on big canvasses.

For the sake of comparison, within the span of time P.T. Anderson will have made six movies (16 years), Robert Altman made everything from M*A*S*H through Fool For Love (20 theatrical films from '70-'85).

this is p obvious but there's a big beau travail vibe in that trailer

good catch! it may be obvious, but i didn't make the connection.

soderbergh seems to crank 'em out

xp well it is just dudes on a beach

he was Altman's "backup" director on A Prarie Home Companion

Yeah, I know! I always wonder if he contributed at all to the final product.

as long as we're keeping inventory: liked magnolia but think it's a little stupid, really liked boogie nights, hate PDL intensely, never seen hard eight, got about halfway through TWBB and turned it off (late), never went back to it.

I used to admire Soderbergh's ethos but I watched Haywire tonight and it was so perfunctory he should probably stick to one film a year at best.

I guess he splits the difference between the Altman/Allen and Kubrick/Malick ends of the productivity spectrum.

I read somewhere that they test-marketed Just Dudes on a Beach as the original title for The Master and it just didn't fly.

TWBB is one of the most recent MUST WATCH ON A BIG SCREEN movies I done did scope out

clemenza, Images is great. It's one of Altman's most underrated films (along with, like, The Company). Quintet is one of two Altman films I never got all the way through (the other being O.C. & Stiggs).

my model for prolific "global" filmmaker is Assayas.

i think PTA would be more prolific if his movies didnt take so long to finance.

not a 100 percent fan of anything he's done but im still glad hes out there doing his thing.

ya same

i watched that trailer 3 times today. now i will pour myself a torpedo juice.

this is p obvious but there's a big beau travail vibe in that trailer

i'm generally not a PTA fan but the trailer and subject are intersting

― goole, Monday, May 21, 2012 9:24 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this

i actively dislike his films. i don't begrudge other people liking them, of course, and a lot of people i love and respect do. i just find them inflated and faux-visionary and irritating. sound and thunder signifying nothing, etc. to each his own, etc.

sound and fury

thunder and the sound of thunder signifying redundancy

soundbolts and thunder, very very redunder

!!

whoops for malapropism

you get the idea

challop swaggering aside i do more or less agree with am, i have always felt a vague void around this dude, he's like one of those bands that pulls the right retro moves and genre exercises at the right time to keep the brand seeming very sophisticated and unpredictable but damned if i know what ideas or even what personality is being put across

yeah i don't mean to be challopsy, like i said lots of folks whose taste i seriously respect think this dude is the bee's knees. it's ok if people have different tastes though!

i can kind of enjoy his movies at the level of individual directorial choices, sometimes. and i guess i admire his audacity even if i'm not too thrilled at what it's in service of.

all of his movies have major daddy issues (except I guess PDL which has sister issues)

my students really like TWWB. however they didn't really like FWWM. FWIW.

i mean TWBB

oops

I'll never get people haveing trouble w/ JG's TWBB score.

didn't care for greenwood's score as an element of the film. it's perhaps interesting as a thing in itself, but i found it distracting.

agree with some dude about the absence of ideas and personality.

Yeah, if anything, I overlooked the score the first time I saw it.

Boogie Nights is certainly his most virtuoso movie, but it's anchored too much in homage (to other filmmakers, to real life events) for me to think of it as his best. It's like a young ambitious filmmaker explosion of ideas (compiled masterfully). "There Will Be Blood," on the other hand, I feel says something amazing and unique about America in a way that's never really been done before, least of all by Anderson. It feels like a really good novel, whereas "Boogie Nights" feels like a really good Rolling Stone article.

I did watch "Magnolia" for the first time in ages, and perhaps because I am now firmly in the realm of adulthood found it remarkably moving.

"There Will Be Blood," on the other hand, I feel says something amazing and unique about America in a way that's never really been done before

Au contraire:
http://cache.heraldinteractive.com/blogs/entertainment/love_that_tv/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/lhagman_l.jpg

(Only about half joking there.)

because oil

all I can say is I'm way more excited about this than the other anderson's new one \Oo/

I think i did that emoticon wrong

Depends on how misshapen your fingers are, I guess.

oh no s1ocki!! no no no no no.

"There Will Be Blood," on the other hand, I feel says something amazing and unique about America in a way that's never really been done before

like such as?

yeah, was wondering abt that myself

o yes yes yes

Depicting capitalism as both the birth and destruction of modern America, a deal with the Devil orchestrated by the Devil himself?

At the least, I think it's the best tale of pure evil as progress - and vice versa - since Chinatown.

I mean, in seriousness, I was all up in some Dallas when TWWB came out, so the parallels between J.R. Ewing and Daniel Plainview were super striking. Not to trivialize TWWB at all, but it kinda felt, in some respects, like a less soapy Dallas plotline transported back several decades. So, yeah, it didn't strike me as particularly groundbreaking from a narrative standpoint. Don't get me wrong, though: I love them both, if for quite different reasons.

(It's actually high praise, in a way, since I consider J.R. Ewing to be one of the 20th Century's greatest fictional characters.)

But Dallas didn't have a broader symbolic scope beyond JR and his greed, did it? I think TWWB is pointed and specific as a anti-capitalist screed, as befits its source material.

xpost

except that the characters of TWBB have (for me anyway) almost no recognizable psychology and the "historical context" is sketchy at best, by the end almost completely abstracted. obviously it has Big Themes on its mind but to the extent that those came through (and since anderson changes the tone and his characters' motivations every few scenes it's difficult for any themes other than the directors self-glorification to come through clearly) they were basically among the least interesting statements of a very very familiar notion.

to me the film basically throws out these signifiers of allegorical meaning without really backing them up with anything--and in fact just kind of going in its own idiosyncratic direction which kind of makes hash of any coherent allegory beyond the must thunderously obvious ("capitalism is evil, capitalists are psychopaths"). that's what i mean by anderson's "visionary airs"--there's this kind of bombastic put-on that seems to promise Important Things but it just kind of peters out into a series of quasi-disconnected, selfconsciously weird scenes.

i mean his films are so literally "off beat"--they seem to anticipate where you'd expect them to go and go somewhere else. except that this comes to feel, for me anyway, extremely programmatic and basically precludes the films having almost anything else on their minds.

this, coupled with his tendency to place these big, strident climaxes every 15 minutes or so (admittedly TWBB is more restrained than his other films in this regard) makes me kind of allergic to them.

i've written more about this in the TWBB thread i think.

is he making a boob out of sand?

This question has been ignored for far too long.