![\"master\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/master.png\")
\n
\nThe Master (2012)
\n<\/b>Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
\n144 min.<\/p>\n
\n
\nThe Master (2012)
\n<\/b>Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
\n144 min.<\/p>\n
Warning: this review contains spoilers I guess.\u00a0 Nothing happens in this movie though, so you can\u2019t really be \u2018spoiled\u2019.<\/i><\/p>\n
The Master isn\u2019t a movie.\u00a0 It\u2019s a bunch of footage.\u00a0 I\u2019ll get to that, but first I need to walk you through how I feel about P.T. Anderson\u2019s filmography. Excluding Hard Eight.\u00a0 <\/i>Let\u2019s just pretend Hard Eight <\/i>doesn\u2019t exist. \u00a0That\u2019s not difficult, since nobody has seen it or even heard of it.\u00a0 So, starting with Boogie Nights:<\/p>\n
Boogie Nights <\/i>is about a guy, Dirk Diggler, that part is clear, but then, for no reason, there\u2019s a bunch of footage of other guys\u2014ancillary ones.\u00a0 This is because P.T. Anderson wanted to make a three-hour movie.\u00a0 Which is insulting.\u00a0 It\u2019s insulting because rather than try to make a good movie that people will like, he simply wanted to make a three-hour movie.\u00a0 And the way he attempted to do this (I say \u2018attempted\u2019 because the finished version is 155 minutes) was through loading it with superfluous side characters whose arcs don\u2019t matter.\u00a0 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. \u00a0Apparently the guy she married beats her for some reason.)
\n
\nMagnolia<\/i> is even more offensive because this time they actually allowed him to make a three-hour movie. \u00a0I assume, based of the success of Boogie Nights.<\/i><\/p>\n
Punch Drunk Love<\/i> is one of the best movies ever made because it\u2019s a singular story about an interesting relationship, told by a filmmaker who has a great understanding of filmic grammar.\u00a0 His visceral take on what makes a movie great is lovingly injected into every frame and his lack of a thousand peripheral characters that don\u2019t matter allows him to focus on and explore the motivations of Adam Sandler\u2019s character.<\/p>\n
The Master<\/i> doesn\u2019t really resemble any of these and is a very unwelcome departure (as was the case with There Will Be Blood.)<\/i>\u00a0 See, Boogie Nights <\/i>and Magnolia<\/i> are at least somewhat fun and have overdramatic things happening constantly.\u00a0 I say \u2018fun\u2019 because Anderson has a Scorsese-esque desire to create tone through composition, camera movement, editing and sound design.\u00a0 I like a director that isn\u2019t afraid of a dolly, and I\u2019m not talking about wimpy, drifting camera movements that slowly waft across some asshole\u2019s face while they emote some needlessly expository anecdote about growing up in a foster home or whatever, I\u2019m talking about shoving a camera in the actors face while something nuts is happening.\u00a0 Like that scene in Goodfellas<\/i>\u2014all of them.\u00a0 Even when a story isn\u2019t satisfying, that kind of stuff is at least fun to look at for a minute.<\/p>\n
The Master <\/i>gets lost on its own mission to be subtle.\u00a0 I suspect Anderson thought invisibility would better serve his \u2018story\u2019, although the problem is he forgot to write a story, and then forgot that invisibility is not his strong suit\u2014bombastic energy is.\u00a0 When I\u2019m watching P.T. Anderson I want to see his cum all over it.\u00a0 It\u2019s only fun if he\u2019s jacking off just behind the lens.<\/p>\n
This movie is about some pretty sinister stuff, and you\u2019d expect Anderson\u2014a fan of noir and \u2018golden age\u2019 cinema\u2014to milk that for all it\u2019s worth.\u00a0 If he walked the line correctly, he could have even gotten away with cartoonish-level sinister, a la the Indiana Jones trilogy\u2014I\u2019m talking splintered bars of light across evil, knowing grins; dutch angles; slow, deliberate zoom-ins.\u00a0 Given Anderson\u2019s track record and filmic prowess, you\u2019d expect a movie like this to be delightfully littered with this stuff.\u00a0 Instead we\u2019re given a bland, colorless nightmare where nothing happens and we have to watch it not happen.\u00a0 For two and a half hours.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s one specific scene in The Master<\/i> the old P.T. might have handled differently that perfectly exemplifies what I\u2019m getting at:\u00a0 Hoffman is seated between Phoenix and some other guy.\u00a0 Phoenix and said other guy are facing each other in profile.\u00a0 They are having a controlled staring contest, presided over by Hoffman.\u00a0 The scene has a built-in tension (well, it would if we cared about the story) because of the whole staring contest thing.\u00a0 The old P.T. would\u2019ve started relatively wide and then began slowly pushing in when Hoffman clicks the stopwatch to begin the game.\u00a0 Then, when somebody messes up in the game, he would\u2019ve continued the take but quickly pulled the camera back to the starting position.\u00a0 Rinse and repeat.\u00a0 By the third or fourth time the game is restarted, the camera would have made it all the way to the three actors faces.\u00a0 (Imagine how long that would take in a staring contest!)\u00a0 In a moment of quiet tension, we would hold on said close up of the actors faces, where we\u2019s see sweat dripping as they struggle to keep from blinking.\u00a0 Then, when the scene explodes into physical action, the camera could burst backward on the dolly track super fast.<\/p>\n
Instead, he just put the camera on a tripod and said action.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s all I have to say about The Master.\u00a0 The acting is good or something. \u00a0That\u2019s what people say anyway, because we all like Phoenix and Hoffman in other movies.<\/p>\n
0 out of 1 stars.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
The Master isn\u2019t a movie.\u00a0 It\u2019s a bunch of footage.\u00a0 I\u2019ll get to that, but first I need to walk you through how I feel about P.T. Anderson\u2019s filmography. Excluding Hard Eight.\u00a0 <\/i>Let\u2019s just pretend Hard Eight <\/i>doesn\u2019t exist. \u00a0That\u2019s not difficult, since nobody has seen it or even heard of it.\u00a0 So, starting with Boogie Nights:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,15],"tags":[61,65,37,62,63,60,45,104,185,59,374,375,376,372,373,377,378,64],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsreviews","tag-boogie-nights","tag-goodfellas","tag-greg-deliso","tag-hard-eight","tag-magnolia","tag-paul-thomas-anderson","tag-review","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-the-master","tag-the-master-bad-movie","tag-the-master-bad-movie-review","tag-the-master-bad-movie-reviews","tag-the-master-movie","tag-the-master-movie-review","tag-the-master-worst-movie","tag-the-master-worst-movie-ever","tag-there-will-be-blood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6331,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/6331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}