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

There's really not so much going on in Barry Lyndon? We have different idears about that. xp

That's sort of what I meant ... it's rare to find a film not easy to accept or reject on first viewing, to any fair degree. I want to see this again, and I want to see this again a few years later.

xpost Oh, don't get me wrong: Barry is rich as hell. I just mean it's still a pretty straightforward story. Novelistic, if you will.

I'm not even sure how to describe "The Master." I've mentioned it to people, and they respond, "oh, the movie about Scientology." And I respond back, "not really, but yes, sort of, but no, it's about more than that, but I'm not sure what."

you're being generous, 'surreal' doesn't need rescuing, it was never all that profound to begin with. xxxxp

anyway i agree with imago. when it comes to daddy issues i think spielberg offers a lot more to think on

xpost about the manly love between 2 drunk dudes

I didn't sense the man-love in this one.

the master is basically about a lost father, right? it seems v sad about this but isn't actually self-aware about it whereas spielberg has seen his share of therapy, i'd rather listen to that guy on the subject, plus he has the good sense to make his movies about something tangentially exciting.

i don't think one can really say it's "about" a lost father any more than it's about ptsd or about being frustrated by a lack of romantic/sexual satisfaction etc

at least PTA's sound and fury signifies something, albeit something narrow. grasping at straws here but at least he isn't christopher nolan

though def part of my problem with the last 1/3rd is i don't think he really went anywhere with father issues and love/sex issues that he hadn't already hit with magnolia

fair point though i think the latter is very much related to the former. on that note i'm forgetting that i like how the master ends at least. xxp the final scene makes some progress i think? (don't remember how much was covered in magnolia).

last scene does kind of tie the two themes, where you see how the damaged apprentice stars to employ the devices of the master - "Boys become lovers who fuck like their fathers, so fathers be good to your sons too"

Having only seen excerpts of this on YouTube etc, but also having just read Going Clear, seems like Hoffman and Phoenix might be playing two sides of the same coin: Hubbard's the hazy, yarnspinning charmer and the secret, increasingly desperate seeker, esp coming out of WWII, with all sorts of alleged ailments. Eventually claimed to have eventually cured himself via cosmic insights---the basis of his science and gospel--though there's no evidence of such ailments in his actual military medical records, as presented by GC author Lawrence Wright. Evidence of crazy initially comes more from his journals, but later plently of eyewitness testimony to the way he went go back and forth from urbane blaggermoth to screaming tyrant, during the years at sea (talking about when he was the Commodore of his Sea Org, but come to think of it, he was also in the US Navy during the War, so maybe a return to and amplification of associated enturbulation, to use the Church term). Phoenix also seems kinda like LRH's successor, David M, and that whole "secret" side of Church practices.

hmm i do think there's something particular about the way the scenes unfold in the master that is hard to dispense with because the movie isn't profound enough or w/e. i like the apocalypse now comparison.

xxp i saw the last scene as a bit more ambigious/potentially joyful than that, like he's using some of the devices but to mixed ends that aren't all about self-destruction.

yeah i didn't mean to say it wasn't ambiguous

wonder how the film would have felt if they cast someone closer to 30, or even 20, rather than 40 in the quell role. esp with his obsession over a teenage love. how old was he supposed to be when running off to sea?

I didn't really sense the homoerotic aspect, or the father-figure stuff, beyond the most surface and obvious. Quall is far more damaged/insane/confused/troubled than a search for a father would aid. He seems like one of cinema's few truly directionless souls. You can spin him and point him, but he's always going to end up where he started. He's primal and feral and would probably be happiest hanging with the apes at the beginning of "2001." If anything, Quall is there to show the limitations of Hoffman's metaphysical quack therapy.

I don't really think it's so much homoeroticism as platonic love between men

the first 30 minutes are so strong, it's like a highlight reel. the beach babe, the PTSD, the masturbating, the interview with the military officer, macy's, the weird fight with the guy he's taking a picture of (love that), sharecropping, escaping, onto the boat.

It's a watchable movie that never becomes great imo. Its power is mostly in the first 45 minutes.

agree. the Scientology plot/themes in this "film on the origins of Scientology (sort of)" seem either muddled or hackneyed. like PTA sat down thinking boy do I have some BIG things to say about MANKIND here, when really he shoulda just had Joaquin get in more fights at dept stores and spared me the quasi intellectualism.

Huh, I didn't think this was trying to be particularly intellectual, either! I thought all the theological stuff was gibberish, with Quall the uncrackable nut. Surprised this movie didn't end with Quall beating Hoffman to death at a bowling alley, because it very well could have.

This guy thinks HE'S the Master...but his wife just ordered him around while yankin his crank, so who's REALLY the Master, bam.

The mastur

oh yeah, EL Ron also had a badass wife, Mary Sue (whoo-hoo)

although she def got her comeuppance

I find the PTA of "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights" fun but facile, showcasing an effective technician whose formidable talent sort of outreaches his emotional grasp. But then, he was a lot younger then.

Couldn't disagree more, at least with regards to Boogie Nights. (Not with the idea that PTA was younger then. This is true.) I'll forgo the standard white elephant vs. termite comparison (even though I think The Master/Boogie Nights illustrates the point perfectly), and instead borrow something Sarris once wrote about George Stevens: the PTA of Boogie Nights is a minor director with major virtues, now he's a major director with minor virtues.

boogie nights is totally white elephant.

nor it is really that sprawling or exuberant--it's sort of enervating.

I don't think so at all, not if you go back and look at Farber's original formulation of the difference.

"Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the just half of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite- tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." -- Boogie Nights

"The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity." -- The Master

Sometimes I prefer white elephants. Not in this instance.

well we'll have to respectfully disagree but that's definition of white elephant lines up pretty well with how I regard boogie nights (a movie I like but find very callow). It could be a holdover from my teenaged self venerating it as a masterpiece and revisiting it later and finding it woefully below that bar. Not its fault necessarily.

But I think at minimum BN is definitely a movie with a big cohesive ambition to that doesn't fit the quality of "isn't anywhere or for anything." If anything the movie pretty much draws its continuities with the same overtness as magnolia does, just with arguably a lighter touch and scorceseisms.

I love "Boogie Nights," but it is so beholden to the sum of its influences in an almost distractingly overt way, from its biographical inspiration (Holmes, et al.) to its stylistic affections (Scorsese, I am Cuba, etc.). Lots of fun, everything's great, but still a young guy showing off across the board.

BTW, saw "magnolia" again perhaps for the first time since having a family of my own, and my response was very different from what I felt the first time I saw it. It was pretty devastating. Still had more than its share of show-offy bits and indulgences, but I love its go-for-broke ambitiousness. Again, that's why I think he needed to do "Punch Drunk Love." He had to force himself in a different direction, because the melodrama and filmmaking of "Magnolia" was about as far in that direction as he could go.

I should say that I don't pretend to understand everything Farber says there--he could be pretty cryptic. The central idea, yes, but I'm not holding The Master's frieze of continuities against it, primarily because I haven't a clue what that means.

I've never gone back to Boogie Nights and not loved everything I first loved about it. Certain moments will come back to me in the middle of the day--"Those are great names!"--and I'll smile. I would have been 36 when it came out...I understand what you mean, though; the teenaged me venerated many films that fell woefully short later (e.g., Manhattan).

I've been all over the place with Magnolia: knocked out initially, found it oppressive within two or three more viewings, went back to it last year and, exactly, loved its go-for-broke ambitiousness.

i think the concept of 'termite art,' as least the way farber defines it there, excludes almost anyone who had any self-conscious artistic ambitions for their work. actual '70s porn films would probably qualify before 'boogie nights' would.

but i've gotta admit i've never quite understood what farber was talking about in that essay -- like, the concepts of 'white elephant art' and 'termite art' make perfect sense until you go back and read farber and he hits you with like four impossible concepts per sentence. like what exactly does it mean to 'treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity'? do any films actually do that?

it's like the "metaphysics of filmic presence" or something--not really a concept that withstands scrutiny.

i was super into this, a lot of it kind of felt like a horror movie to me in that i was waiting for some crazy sick thing to happen out of these long lingering situations.

i think my only objection is the lingering "lol bitches" misogyny that PTA trucks in (amy adams as the fanatic enforcer, laura dern as the textually alert dupe -- both of whom were flat out great tho). idk i might be overreading that, but it was def one of the things (among many) that me me hate punch drunk love

btw if you get this on disc definitely watch the deleted scenes! a bunch of fairly useful info is in them.

i dug it, although as per usual with PTA theres sort of a weird pacing resulting in a kind of lifeless last 30 minutes imo

I liked their relationship, just two guys who want to have adventures surrounded by a band of joyless pedants.

i really couldn't get this out of my head either, lol

so, dodd through force of his hucksterism had built this entire structure around himself, but it turns out, it's kind of lame and constricting. if you are going to make yourself a leader of a crowd you end up with duties to that crowd, you end up at their mercy still. quell comes to mean something untameable, untreatable and yeah, fun

for quell, what was the implication? he was this screwed-up dude who fell into this cult's orbit for a while but was too dumb and sick and drunk for it to really take (being fake). turns out he just wanted to get laid.

def looked beautiful tho

kind of a minor point but i appreciated PTA's use of the specifics of ethnic america (the filipino farmhands, the scandinavian family) overall the periodicity was terrific (the recording equipment, the cigarettes, the hair, the typefaces)

the repeated shot of the ocean churning behind the ship was gorgeous

jjj did you watch the huston doc that's attached?

that ocean shot made me almost gasp in 70mm. that's the main reason I'm afraid to watch it again--that feeling seemed so basic for the movie.

i was blown away and I watched it on boring old dvd, so I think the cinematography def holds up :)

but I know what you mean

ah crap i forgot about the huston doc and dropped it in the redbox this morning. lame.

this movie in bluray is intense fyi

I think I'm gonna buy it

I've never gone back to Boogie Nights and not loved everything I first loved about it. Certain moments will come back to me in the middle of the day--"Those are great names!"--and I'll smile.

Talking about restaurants often calls to mind "Good? It's not good. It's probably the best place to eat in Los Angeles. It's excellent."

I drop the YP/MP industry jargon bit now and then, and no one ever gets it.

I can imagine a script like Boogie Nights spilling out of him. Then I imagine Magnolia taking more refinement. Then PDL I could imagine being about excising tons of stuff until a movie appears. The last two I imagine took a hell of a lot of discipline.

i still think about the motorcycle escape scene all the time

I drop the YP/MP industry jargon bit now and then, and no one ever gets it.

Okay, now you're talking above my head.