What I've been watching: Movies

[akashiver]

The Master - aka Paul Thomas Anderson's film about the early days of Scientology, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a crazed veteran-turned cultist -- is pretty much everything you'd expect from the director of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. In other words, I'm still not sure what I watched. It was good, and Phoenix's performance was amazing. But the pacing of the movie was strange. It didn't hit the narrative beats I was expecting, or make them the focus of the scene when it did. I could talk about what I think the movie was about, but there's no point spoiling it.

I will say that at least one person walked out of the film screaming that it was disgusting, which was strange. This was made stranger by the fact that the "sex" scene that offended her wasn't even a real sex scene, but an odd masturbation scene, and the angry lady had sat through much weirder shit by that point. So this is a film that can really push people's buttons, apparently. Or, bore them to the point they fall asleep (the person in the aisle next to me.) So... yeah.

Cabin in the Woods was all it was rumored to be. I was charmed by it, and by the killer unicorn, and by the Japanese school girls with the happy frog. My only complain is re: the appearance of the Lovecraftian gods. THAT'S NOT WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE. The end.

A Separation -- the Iranian domestic drama that picked up the Oscar last year -- is definitely worth a watch if you like foreign films. It's an interesting slice-of-life in Iran. It's not a happy movie but it's not relentlessly tragic either.

That's it for now.

Comments

[moonandserpent.livejournal.com]

The Master was beautiful and the deep Scientology in jokes were funny, but yeah... I felt like it was to an extent a film that moved around all the narrative points one would expect. Like Not L Ron was the star of a different movie you're not seeing and Phoenix was an incidental character from there.

But - to keep things vague - I left feeling that The Master wasn't referring to the person called The Master in the film.

Still, saw this in 70mm and it was breathtakingly beautiful. Even the creepy masturbation scenes.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

It was gorgeous, wasn't it? I liked the score, too.

OK, so SPOILERS.

Who did you consider "the master"?

[moonandserpent.livejournal.com]

My emailer apparently ate my 1st response.

I think "the Master" was alcoholism to be frank. The rest of the film was a clever setting to house a very familiar tale of a man and his losing to the bottle.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Hrmmmmmm.

I can see alcoholism as *one* of the possible "masters" in the film, but does it really win out at the end? We don't see JP's character rolling around with a bottle after turning his back on "The Master" for the last time. (Mind you, maybe I missed something - people started crossing in front of me during the bar scene.) The final two scenes were arguably of JP exerting "mastery" over women -- the girl from the pub and then the mermaid figure from the beginning. But I took the mermaid ref to be part of Hoffman's speech about the ocean as a space in which one can escape from mastery altogether. The ocean as the utopian space of piracy, with the fadeout on JP's character still clutching that symbol of inhuman union between man and waves.

What say you?

[tooth-and-claw.livejournal.com]

And I interpreted women themselves as the "masters", despite what the boys and men in the movie may think. They are the ones that drive the motivations of the main characters in subtle and not so subtle ways, from Amy Adam's forceful and manipulative wife , to the barmaid and her sexuality (she was riding him, after all). The girl whose name I forget that he pined over. The older woman who paid for their yacht. Etc. The fake sand-woman was really the only one that JP got to master at all.

That being said, I think Anderson very specifically set out to make sure their was no one Master. Mastery over yourself or anyone else is pretty impossible.

[moonandserpent.livejournal.com]

This was also on my mind. Especially as Paul Thomas Anderson films have always had an ...interesting relationship with women.

[tooth-and-claw.livejournal.com]

It's a very long time since I've seen Magnolia, but they are largely absent from There Will be Blood. It's a funny absence, though. It isn't an emptiness-- more like women are something mysterious off-screen, an invisible power. You're aware of the hole they leave behind, because this bleak, comfortless landscape that makes up the movie is in part defined by the absence of anything motherly, feminine, or compassionate.

I think the Master advances that. Women are physically present but completely unexplored, and yet they move the world. Both films define their landscapes by women's influence; either the absence of it, or the power of it. And in both, women feel strangely inhuman. More like . . . goddesses. Fates. Something powerful but unknowable, and frightening . . . even though the characters might not feel that way, the director seems to.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

>> women feel strangely inhuman. More like . . . goddesses. Fates. Something powerful but unknowable, and frightening<<

YES! Thanks for saying that. I was trying to put my finger on how I felt re: the strange role of women in the film -- particularly the meaning of that odd sand sculpture -- and this does it nicely.

Did you notice the Pre-Raphaelite set-up in the church when JP (I can't remember the character's name) tells the teenage love interest she can't leave? He's kneeling in front of her in the same posture as the Courtly Lover in the stained glass window behind him. This makes me think that if women are goddesses, it's in the sense of a Pre-Raphaelite/Victorian idealization of women, not in the sense of them having much actual power over the men in their lives.

[tooth-and-claw.livejournal.com]

The Master's pacing drove me to distraction and killed my enjoyment of the film *and* the power of it's message. Good acting, certainly, but it was like listening to someone telling a story where they want you to understand that this thing is really, really important so they repeat it over, and over, and over. I felt like it would have benefited greatly from an editor who was willing to tell Anderson "Son, you don't need yet another lingering scene through a screen door."

[prosewitch.livejournal.com]

Ha. I enjoyed The Master, but made the mistake of seeing it on a date. Afterward, we joked that seeing a movie that requires aftercare perhaps was not the ideal situation.