‘The Master’: A Tale of Two Addicts

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The Master (2012)
Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
144 min.

Fairly light on spoilers, but see the movie first.

This is a review I’ve been meaning to write ever since Greg’s scathing take. He’s completely wrong about the film, but wrong in a Greg way, which is to say, entirely consistent with how he views films, so s’all good—I expect nothing less from him, and love him for it. But, the thought of his take being the only take on the film on this site just isn’t right, because it’s a great goddamn film. And in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s passing, it’s certainly been on my mind, given its central theme of addiction—a theme that has, for some reason, eluded many critics.

The infatuation between Freddie Quell (Phoenix) and Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) is never outright, hammer-over-the-head explained in The Master, leaving many viewers—and even professional reviewers—to come to the most obvious and tittilating and childish of conclusions: that they are deeply closeted homosexuals in love. Undeniably, there’s a degree of homoeroticism to many of their interactions, but to chalk their bond off as mere ‘gayness’ is to ignore what these two men are truly struggling with, and what brought them together in the first place—alcohol.
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John D’Amico, Greg DeLiso, and Jenna Ipcar on Philip Seymour Hoffman

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John D’Amico: 63 roles in 23 years of acting. Where do you even begin? He absolutely hummed as Lancaster Dodd in The Master, as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. He has about a million solid movies you kinda forget about until you look at the long scroll of his filmography. How about State & Main? That was a very fun one, uplifted by his ability to be both campy and deeply believable at the same time. He elevated otherwise listless projects like Pirate Radio and Patch Adams—Jesus, he was even good in Patch fucking Adams! Watching Hoffman, even in a bad movie—hell, especially in a bad movie—you feel his talent almost as a physical presence in the room, a rush of light illuminating himself and everyone else.
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R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman

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Today we lost one of the absolute best. An actor who put his all in to every role, always giving you your money’s worth, never wasting a moment of your time. A virtuoso, with all the adoration one could ever want or need from their peers and from audiences. Just goes to show, you can have it all, and still throw it away.

Addiction is something I’ve never personally experienced, so I’m by no means an expert. But I do know what it looks like. It looks like the trading of soul gratification for momentary gratification. It looks like an invited wave, grabbing hold of your beach and eroding every castle you’ve ever built, telling you it’s all just sand anyway, so why bother having them. It is evil, and it lies, and it is the ultimate internal resistance. I hope he is finally at peace.

I’d say I ‘miss’ him, but I never knew his mortal self. I only ever knew his timeless self, which will be here as long as cinema—which is to say, forever. Everything good about this man is immortal. Everything bad, I never encountered, and will never encounter. My heart goes out to his family, who I’m sure have been struggling with his two selves for some time. I hope they are able to find peace as well.
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The Wolf of Wall Street: Fuck This Movie, Fuck Jordan Belfort, Fuck The Audience, And, I Guess, Fuck Me Too

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET


The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Screenplay by Terence Winter
180 min.

Spoilers ahead.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. No siree.

I’d gone to the theater that snowy midday to see Inside Llewyn Davis again. I just wanted to once more curl up in some good ol’ depressing Coen brothers greatness, goddammit. But it was sold out! And the only movie that wasn’t was ol’ Martin Scorsese’s newest– The Wolf of Wall Street. I’d had mixed feelings about seeing it to begin with, but my boredom outweighed my uncertainty and I figured ‘ah, what the hell.’

Ah, I left the theater fuming with anger. I don’t just mean annoyed—I mean actually fuming mad and ranting about it in public. My anger seemed to stem from my inability to understand if this movie was brilliantly orchestrated as a relentless and morally superior lecture, or if was just a passive and amoral romp, letting the viewer decide what’s right and wrong. What I did know was that I resented the hell out of it—and I needed yell so from the top deck of my million dollar yacht in front of a thousand of my closest friends.
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On Documentaries: How and Why They Work, When They Work

matBeyond the Mat (1999), one of the greatest documentaries of all time.

Documentaries have always been fascinating to me.  They were born out of newsreels, short news segments that used to play before features in the theaters way back when.   From the newsreels came smaller, more intimate human interest stories (Kubrick even made a few in his early days).  An early example of this sort of thing, Nanook of the North, is often cited as one of the first documentaries—although, if you ask me, it’s nothing more than a piece of history. The production is stagey, and, as to be expected given the time period it came out, it’s dreadfully boring.

Around the 1960s, when cinema finally started to open up, a few people started to realize that vérité filmmaking could be used to create a documentary—the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman was an important landmark. It was distant yet intimate, objective yet close, and endlessly revealing.  Although dated now, their early filmography marks the first departure into interesting and effective documentary filmmaking.
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