review – Page 3 – Smug Film (1/7/13

master

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

Warning: this review contains spoilers I guess. Nothing happens in this movie though, so you can’t really be ‘spoiled’.

The Master isn’t a movie. It’s a bunch of footage. I’ll get to that, but first I need to walk you through how I feel about P.T. Anderson’s filmography. Excluding Hard Eight. Let’s just pretend Hard Eight doesn’t exist. That’s not difficult, since nobody has seen it or even heard of it. So, starting with Boogie Nights:

Boogie Nights is about a guy, Dirk Diggler, that part is clear, but then, for no reason, there’s a bunch of footage of other guys—ancillary ones. This is because P.T. Anderson wanted to make a three-hour movie. Which is insulting. It’s insulting because rather than try to make a good movie that people will like, he simply wanted to make a three-hour movie. And the way he attempted to do this (I say ‘attempted’ because the finished version is 155 minutes) was through loading it with superfluous side characters whose arcs don’t matter. They matter so little that their conclusions are either mind-blowingly lazy (the shot of Rollergirl sitting in a high school classroom shoved into a montage at the end) or completely nonexistent (we must visit the deleted scenes on the DVD to see what happens to the black porn actress. Apparently the guy she married beats her for some reason.)
Continue reading The Master: P.T. Anderson’s Bunch of Footage That Got Released Somehow

meeks The second most interesting thing that happens in Meek’s Cutoff.

Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Written by Jonathan Raymond
104 min.

Warning: Mild spoilers ahead.

One review I read of Meek’s Cutoff called it an “anti-Western”, and that title is apt. Director Kelly Reichardt does approach the genre from a unique perspective. She shows the earliest journeys made by settlers to the American far West as they really were: really fucking tedious most of the time.

There’s a wagon train of eight people lost and thirsty in the Oregon desert. They think their guide—the asshole racist Stephen Meek—is responsible, either from negligence or malice. A lone Native American shows up and Meek captures him. They think the Native American might know how to find water, so they take him along. They get into an argument when one of their wagons crashes. Then they see a living tree. I guess that means they find water, but I don’t know because the movie ends before anything else happens. That’s not a synopsis, that’s literally every significant plot point in the whole thing.
Continue reading Meek’s Cutoff is a Tedious Nightmare