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

the mannerisms & the way he stands in that awkward hunched way with his hands on his hips - he reminded me of a jack in the box on the verge of being sprung

otm. His face is usually shot in a very angular manner too.

I love when they go to the party (the one where the skeptic gives PSH what for), and Phoenix is standing in the hallway pretending to be relaxed but not at all pulling it off with this look on his face like BOOZEWHERE'STHEBOOZEWHERE'STHEBOOZEWHERE'STHEBOOZE

That's the thing--this seems to be more about alcoholism and maybe PTSD than Scientology.

I had no idea there was booze in torpedoes

also drinking the photo development chemicals O_O + lols

and the torpedo booze is/was an actual thing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_juice

"The standard recipe for torpedo juice is two parts ethyl alcohol and three parts pineapple juice."

good to know!

mmm

Just saw this for the first time and was sort of quietly blown away. It's been a very long time since any movie left me wondering what to make of it, or whether I would even recommend it, or what it all means, or even whether it is good or bad. A lot more challenging than something like "Tree of Life," which I loved but was shocked to see was such a controversial, divisive ("I want two hours of my life back!") movie. "The Master" is really all so remarkably unstable, yet rigidly and thoughtfully constructed. I, too, kept thinking of "Hard Eight" (and Marlon Brando), but this is like a "Hard Eight" paternal face off blown up to epic, even imposing scale. It's the rare major work that I can't imagine influencing a single filmmaker.

yeah I was thinking about Brando watching this. The tiniest mannerism choices just made all the difference to the way Quell came over as tragic/comedic character yet wasn't ever really a caricature, he felt like a real person

if only I had a grasp of written grammar uggggh

eh i didn't think this was great. PTA seems v much about intensity, focus, performance and synthesising grand metanarratives out of material i might charitably describe as 'thin'

there's very little sense of an outside, a relationship with different realities. it's highly controlled and precise, surgical almost. it wears after a while, no matter how great individual scenes are (scenes are a PTA speciality - notable talk upthread of a 'highlights reel') - the whole is decidedly less than the SOP. he can't put together something that exhibits an evolution of perspective - he's the master, if you will, of the portentous vignette

processing scenes were really good fun, but the fact an entire segment's dramatic import is based around the word "pigFUCK" is indicative of what i'd call a paucity of imagination - there MUST be a scene where PSH's cultist tyranny is challenged by a 'rational' type and he shows cracks in his exterior mienne - the film MUST seek to show that There Will Be Cracks - the cracks are the point, perhaps, but curiously they only tend to reveal themselves in dramatically hidebound ways - where's the poetry? oh wait, there's a sand woman with breasts. phoenix is lonely and finds it hard to relate to other people. but now look, he is a trained dog that won't quite domesticate! perhaps domestication of humans is wrong!

pynchon comparisons make me shudder

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

would agree with that

there's def a facileness to pta that makes it hard to say his shit achieves the epic brilliance it tries to come off as. but then thirty-odd years ago people were saying the same about scorsese and coppola, and i can't think of anyone else in hollywood going for these affects better. in a way it kind of reminds me of apocalypse now, where it may not be The Great American Movie, but it achieves surreal, intense vibe of its own all the same that i can't see just shrugging off. but then i've never read pynchon.

you surely do the word 'surreal' a disservice, but fair enough

i retract "surreal" with apologies, and offer "feverish" in its stead

I dunno, 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. I think "Blood" and this one benefitted from him getting older, since now he's thinking of ideas outside/beyond himself a little bit, and in particular finding interesting ways to tell these stories. I think a description of what his earlier films are about is pretty easy. I think the last two are a lot harder to encapsulate, which perhaps explains why "Punch Drunk Love" had to be made, as a sort of transitional exercise.

I mean, I don't know if "The Master" is a great film, but I do think it is a "great" film in a hard to pin down general sense, the same way I think about some of Kubrick's flicks, like "Barry Lyndon." There's really not so much going on there, yet you still need to see it to "get" it. I'd love to know how PTA arrived at this film's elliptical approach, since as a story it could have been told several different ways. It's intriguing to me how his first few films arrived on DVD with extensive commentaries, but that starting with "Magnolia" he's been slightly less forthcoming about their creation.

I'm overcome with enamor for The Master maybe purely because aside from maybe Django I haven't gotten this much *enjoyment* out of many other recent films I've seen. I think Alfred's v otm. It's not actually great...but it feels great for a while.

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.