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]

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.