PTA's latest... The Master

I'm thinking Paul Thomas Anderson and Tom Cruise won't be making any more movies together after this...Looks great.
 
Every time they release a new video of this, I get more and more excited. I'm not even that big of a PTA fan (though I think Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love are excellent) but this just looks bloody brilliant. The cinematography looks amazing and I'm going to go ahead and predict Joaquin will easily get an Oscar nomination.
 
NO! A few minutes earlier and I would have had tickets to the 70mm screening in Austin on the 10th. I literally sprinted for my credit card as the page was loading, then BAM! Sold out. My chest was throbbing. Damnit. Ugh. Blast! No!
 
I caught the screening in Austin last night, it's a real stunner and looks absolutely incredibly in 70mm. I'm not sure if I would say it's his best (although I think all of his movies other than Hard Eight are masterpieces) but it's easily his most abstract and thematically complex movie to date. If I didn't know the director or the actors and someone had told me this was a lost Kubrik film, I probably would have believed them.
 
Saw it, sadly not in 70mm. But I want to say, what a perfect example of moving portraitrue. For sure there will be some little golden men thrown in the that direction.
 
Impeccably crafted and performed. In the end I didn't feel the film added up to enough, not even a fully rounded character portrait, but it was always fascinating to watch.
 
KyleProhaska said:
Is it impeccably crafted then? Not causing trouble the statement just confuses me. It's hard to see something as crafted well if it didn't amount to much as a whole.
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I meant the directing, cinematography, editing, acting, music, all the physical craft involved was impeccable. Even the writing of scenes on an individual basis was well crafted, but the whole of the story didn't add up to enough for me. With There Will Be Blood, another character piece, I felt like we came away with a complete understanding of Daniel Plainview, and that PTA made a strong point about the sociopathic personality and how it can run amok and prosper in a purely capitalistic system. The Master felt less focused. I never got far enough into either of the two lead characters to understand them that deeply. And I felt the ultimate point of it was muddled. Like a cake that never fully rose. But it was a beautiful cake.
 
Batutta said:
I meant the directing, cinematography, editing, acting, music, all the physical craft involved was impeccable. Even the writing of scenes on an individual basis was well crafted, but the whole of the story didn't add up to enough for me. With There Will Be Blood, another character piece, I felt like we came away with a complete understanding of Daniel Plainview, and that PTA made a strong point about the sociopathic personality and how it can run amok and prosper in a purely capitalistic system. The Master felt less focused. I never got far enough into either of the two lead characters to understand them that deeply. And I felt the ultimate point of it was muddled. Like a cake that never fully rose. But it was a beautiful cake.
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Saw this on DVD a week ago. I felt like we weren't supposed to have a complete understanding of Phoenix's character. The ambiguity of his... "lostness" is what makes him so interesting. He's so at conflict with himself, I think it's more like a Malick film, where the beauty is in the moment more than in the story as a whole.

I really don't understand how Joaquin didn't walk away with the gold for this role. Forget everything else, his performance in his first "session" with PSH was nothing short of brilliance.

-EMB
 
Eric Boellner said:
Saw this on DVD a week ago. I felt like we weren't supposed to have a complete understanding of Phoenix's character. The ambiguity of his... "lostness" is what makes him so interesting. He's so at conflict with himself, I think it's more like a Malick film, where the beauty is in the moment more than in the story as a whole.
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Malick uses voice-overs so we understand the characters thoughts, which brings us closer to them, and his films tend to cast a wider philosophical net. I think PTA was trying to make a point about religion and cults of personality and the type of people they attract through Freddy, but Freddy just kind of bumbled his way into the cult. He wasn't drawn to it. I think PTA should have focused more on Lancaster Dodd. What kind of a man decides to start a religion and mostly pulls it off? That's a fascinating, rich character to explore and I feel like he barely scratched the surface there.
 
This might just be my interpretation (and I fully understand what you're saying), but I felt like the cult wasn't the focus of the film at all. I feel like the cult was just a draw for him, an external force for him to interact with, with Dodd representing a sort of metaphysical challenge to his pathological lies and his denial. I think this, in turn, spoke a great deal about the kinds of people that cults attract -- people who struggle to define themselves externally and are easily subjected by someone who poses a dominating force -- but for all the hype about this movie as an essay on cults, I think it's more of a personal exploration of the inner conflict that causes some people to deny themselves every good thing life tries to offer them.

Again, I've only seen it once, and I wouldn't be surprised if PTA himself intended it to be a master take on cult and sensationalism, but even from the trailers I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman wasn't going to be the focus, and that feels right. His character is that of a mirror, and you can't put a mirror in the lead role.

-EMB
 
I finally saw this on DVD. Had very mixed feelings about it.

Aesthetically, it was beautiful. I'm not sure anyone has ever nailed the "look" of that time period as well as this movie does. All the details were there, you really felt sucked into it without it being a cliched portrait that we often get.

The acting was by far the highlight of the film. Amy Adams was good, Hoffman was great as always, but Phoenix was just downright brilliant. In fact, I would have given him every single acting award possible JUST for the first "processing" scene (the scene on the boat).

Let me not just skip past that statement. That first processing scene, without a doubt, was the highlight of the movie. In fact, I would say without a doubt it was the highlight of cinema in 2012. The rest of the movie is decent, sometimes bordering on great, and yet this single scene makes the rest of the film look like amateur drivel comparatively. It's been a long time since a single scene stood out to me so strongly, since a scene brought me instantly to the edge of my seat, goosebumps taking over my whole body. I wouldn't call it anything less than genius, and perhaps the greatest single scene of PTA's career. Phoenix's performance in that one scene is one of the best acting performances i've perhaps ever seen. Something about his acting in that scene just instantly cut deep, past any BS wall I had put up throughout my day, and really hit me.

The shame is that the rest of the movie, though it tried very hard, couldn't even come close to living up to that scene. The ending in particular I felt was very weak. The last 30 minutes of the film just felt completely lost, as if the director disappeared and the movie didn't know what to do, so it just kind of went until it didn't anymore.

Because of the ending, I would say overall the film was disappointing for me, but that one scene in particular was worth the 2 1/2 hours.
 
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