<p>And I didn’t like it.</p>
<p>Why didn’t you like “The Master,” CSIHSIS?</p>
<p>Well, where to begin.</p>
<p>Joaquin Phoenix. The first 20 minutes of the movie reminded me of all the scenes with Sean Penn in The Tree of Life. Which basically means I wanted to slit my throat to alleviate the pain. Then for the rest of the movie he’s an idiot drunk who doesn’t change or think his own thoughts, except for DORIS OH GOD DORIS. Who is not important in the movie.</p>
<p>The plot, or lack thereof. Making up the religion as he goes along, okay. The second book coming out with a completely new theme and people being confused by it. Good. The message seems applicable to every religion, which is that it is stupid. But just like The Tree of Life, there are so many scenes that serve no purpose but to annoy people. Like “pick a place and drive towards it very fast” and the wall and the window (which takes up like 1/4 of the movie) or the jail scene or pretty much any scene in which Phoenix is the main part.</p>
<p>Hmm, well I didn’t think Tree of Life was that bad, and “The Master” is getting good reviews, so I still want to see it.</p>
<p>Saw Celeste and Jesse Forever two weeks ago and it was wonderful. Of course here was maybe 5 people in the theater but used to that. A sweet love story, well written, and had beautiful cinematography. It made my heart hurt.</p>
<p>I like Phoenix. did you ever see him in Walk the Line?
I guess I haven’t seen the latest movies.
The last ones I saw were The Avengers & Marigold hotel, but they are still in the theatre so that’s not too bad.
;)</p>
<p>We saw Robot & Frank last weekend and enjoyed it a lot. Sweet little buddy caper, but with hints of a serious side - what do we do about our aging parents?</p>
<p>[Cloud</a> Atlas Extended Trailer #1 (2012) - Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Wachowski Movie HD - YouTube](<a href=“Cloud Atlas Extended Trailer #1 (2012) - Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Wachowski Movie HD - YouTube”>Cloud Atlas Extended Trailer #1 (2012) - Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Wachowski Movie HD - YouTube)</p>
<p>This trailer makes me cry because it’s so beautiful.</p>
<p>Marigold hotel is now out on DVD and available to rent. We are going to watch it tonite, rented from our cable service.</p>
<p>Anybody see the Anna Paquin movie ‘Margaret’? Filmed in 2005 but released only last year, and for about 5 minutes. </p>
<p>A controversial, but in my mind brilliant film. NYT calls it a ‘thwarted masterpiece.’ I’d love to hear CC parents talk about it, because a teenager’s emotional free-for-all and a mother/daughter relationship is at the core of it.</p>
<p>Here’s a NYT article about it
<a href=“Kenneth Lonergan’s Thwarted Masterpiece - The New York Times”>Kenneth Lonergan’s Thwarted Masterpiece - The New York Times;
<p>Katliamom, I saw the extended cut of “Margaret” (the extended cut is available on DVD and the theatrical cut is available on Blu-ray – our library had the two-disc package) recently and found it very impressive.</p>
<p>It’s difficult for me to comment on the film’s mother/daughter relationship from a personal point of view because I have two sons. People have told me that I simply cannot imagine how volatile teenage girls can be. The girl in the movie, who is going through a personal crisis, certainly is!</p>
<p>There are some truly stunning scenes in the movie that seem to embody universal emotional truths.</p>
<p>“Margaret” is mentioned above in posts #129 and #192 of this thread.</p>
<p>I rented Margaret a few weeks ago. I was somewhat disappointed, actually, because I thought I was renting the new “director’s cut” version released this summer, but what I got was only the two-hour theatrical version.</p>
<p>Anyway, my wife and I thought the film was about half brilliant. The acting was superb, especially Anna Paquin as the central character and J Smith-Cameron, Lonergan’s real-life spouse, as her mother. (The central character, by the way, is Lisa Cohen, a bratty Manhattan teen with divorced, artistic parents. “Margaret” is a reference to the famous Gerard Manly Hopkins poem about the loss of innocence, that gets read in full in the middle of the movie by Lisa’s English teacher.) The first two-thirds of the movie was really excellent and thought-provoking, full of lots of telling detail and texture. But the last third was a total mess (although a mess with some great scenes), trying to wrap up all the plotlines. The film has a hopeful ending, but that sort of comes out of nowhere – for the most part it’s very dark and disturbing.</p>
<p>The basic plot is that Lisa witnesses, and to a large extent causes, a horrible traffic accident in which a woman is hit by a bus running a red light, and dies in Lisa’s arms. She is increasingly guilt-ridden by her failure to tell the full truth to the police on the scene, which would have exposed her own culpability and the bus driver’s gross negligence. At first she deals with her issues (or avoids dealing with them) using some time-honored teen-aged methods – sex, alcohol, manipulating parents, and effectively stalking the deceased woman. Finally, she tries to do the right thing and discovers that the world is a much less simple place than she thought, and that there may not always be a right thing to do. In the process, she makes life pretty awful for a number of people, starting but hardly ending with her mother.</p>
<p>There are a number of A-list supporting actors in the movie – Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, Mark Ruffalo, Alison Janney, Jeannie Berlin, Jean Reno, Kieran Culkin. Some of them are true cameos, but others have significant roles (although – see below – that’s not always a good thing).</p>
<p>I understand why the producers fought with Lonergan over this version. The fact is, to get the film under two hours he should have pruned some of the plotlines entirely – and doing that would have made it a better film, I think – instead of reducing them to a couple of confusing, decontextualized scenes. A three-hour version would probably be better . . . but not necessarily better than the two-hour version he could have made by editing himself more effectively.</p>
<p>In its pacing, breadth of ideas, wealth of detail, and domestic focus, this movie reminded me a lot of Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi . . . albeit crossed with Crime and Punishment (or maybe just Crimes and Misdemeanors). But Yi-Yi is a stone masterpiece, nearly a perfect movie, while this one is really interesting but ultimately pretty badly flawed.</p>
<p>For a well crafted thriller The Bourne Legacy is surprisingly entertaining. DH and I saw it recently when we had an unexpected afternoon with nothing much to do and the film showing across the street from our hotel. </p>
<p>Believe it has the actor from Full Metal Jacket and he makes an appealing protagonist.</p>
<p>^Hurt Locker, Sewhappy, not Full Metal Jacket. Matthew Modine and Jeremy Renner are pretty different guys. :)</p>
<p>ahhh . . . senility begins</p>
<p>Saw The Master in 70mm, brand new print, and the best thing about it was the 70mm, brand new print, which was so clear you could feel the fabrics. Philip Seymour Hoffman was very good channeling the ghost of Orson Welles. Joaquin Phoenix was, to me, all method acting surfaces without the method conveying of an inner life. I think that may have been intentional; the character is so random he reminds me of Boudu - of the great Renoir picture Boudu Saved from Drowning. Of the others, I think Amy Adams does a good job of conveying a sense of niceness that hides a viper underneath but I preferred her work in The Fighter to this more controlled part.</p>
<p>The movie was very well shot and is fine to watch but you’ll get restless toward the end when you realize it will never come together in a satisfying way. </p>
<p>My take is that Dodd sees this random guy as his project - like in Boudu - and he’ll master him, become his master or show him how to become his own master (whichever you’d like) but he can’t be mastered and can’t master himself. You can take that as a comment on religion if you want. </p>
<p>I’ve seen reviews which compare this to There Will Be Blood, but I don’t see it because I don’t see this as a father-son movie and the visual style is not the same. There are some obvious Welles homages. The most obvious is the Kane-like singing and dancing sequence. But I think the most direct antecedent is Boudu. If you look up the movie, Boudu is a tramp saved from drowning himself and turned into a proper gentleman, settled and tamed until he reverts to his true nature and takes off, much as entered the film. He can’t be tamed. He has no master, not even himself. Lots of people get that wrong: they think of Boudu as being his own master but the more accurate statement is he has no master at all, that he isn’t in control of himself or his life. That is French philosophy turned into film and reflecting the deep shock WWI inflicted on the sense of order in the universe and our place and role in the universe and indeed in our own lives. It finds further expression in Sartre and Camus. I suppose it shows up today as the serial killer meme: the killer driven by forces he can’t control, which somehow may trace back to his past but then maybe it’s just random and he’s random and his victims are random and so on.</p>
<p>Not a great movie but worth seeing for Hoffman’s performance and the terrific pictures, direction and editing.</p>
<p>Interesting insights Lergnom, thanks. Very curious about this movie. I love CC film/book comments because its readers use references like ‘Boudu’</p>
<p>JHS, I also got the theatrical release through Netflix, and agree with your impression that the ending felt rushed, and that the various story threads came together far from perfectly. Though I honestly don’t know what I would have cut. I was blown away by Jeannie Berlin. Where has she been all these years? She was f-a-b-u-l-o-u-s. Someone, quick, give her a plum part in a big movie, please. </p>
<p>BTW, Yi Yi is now on my Netflix queue</p>
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<p>Yes. I saw The Master last night. Thought the first two-thirds were interesting but that last 45 minutes or so became incredibly tedious and somewhat incomprehensible. It is fun to read the New York Times review and the comments that follow. Reviewer thinks it’s a work of genius and most of the commentors thought it was awful.</p>
<p>I hated all of The Master equally. Well, the beginning more equally than the rest.</p>
<p>There Will Be Blood is galaxies better.</p>
<p>katliamon – Without giving away too much of the movie, I would have cut the whole Matt Damon subplot from the latter half of the movie (and maybe his entire character). That added nothing, was not as realistic as most of the rest of the movie, and was a complete distraction. My wife and I spent 20 minutes trying to decide if Lisa was telling the truth or not in her last scene with him and the other teacher. I was also very confused about her relationship with the Jeannie Berlin character. (And, yes, Berlin was fabulous, and where has she been all these years?) They could have ended that part of the plot with their big fight, and Lisa could have read about the outcome of the case in the newspaper or something. Finally, the fight between the mother and her boyfriend (and the scene precipitating it) was interesting and very provocative, but didn’t add much to the story or mean much, except a further example that the world is never perfect and it’s always an issue when you accommodate and when you stand on principle. And that point got made plenty.</p>
<p>I hope you enjoy Yi-Yi. It’s one of my very favorite movies ever. Unfortunately, the filmmaker, Edward Yang – who was a very active writer and professor in Taiwan – died while he was making his next film. The five or six other films he directed aren’t even available on DVD in the US, at least not legally. He won several awards at international film festivals, including Best Director at Cannes for Yi-Yi.</p>