The Master (2012)

Did you people see the same film I saw?

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

PTA is a great writer and has an exceptional eye for cinema. Clearly, he knows how to choose his collaborators too, considering the great score (Greenwood), cinematography (Malaimare Jr.) and acting (brilliant Phoenix, Hoffman and Adams).

None of the acting is bad, but man, what a pointless story. One of those things where it is in fact so pointless that you figure it out before the end, but sit there like a dummy waiting for it 'just in case' there is some kind of closure.Pointless.

For over two and a quarter hours we are slowly walked through the relationship between a hopelessly war damaged drunk lost soul navy veteran and a charlatan who is the head of a cult. We surmise nothing much will come of this relationship for the drunk or the charlatan as it is easy to quickly ascertain (from the excellent acting) that neither of these leopards are about to change their spots. It has been alluded to that the movie's drifting non-narrative style is a metaphor for the drunk navy drifter. Get it? ... Or maybe it's supposed to be an indictment of Scientology or cults in general. For those of us not in need of edification on that front it seems pointless - over two hours of "Yeah. We KNOW." It kills me that so many movies which are held up as examples of cinematic artistic achievements have such awful sound. And I don't mean the soundtrack (which didn't seem to add to the film) but the dialog suffering from varying levels and is at times unintelligible. Why is dialog easier to understand from movies many decades older technologically? So that leaves us with some damn fine acting that for some may be worth the time.

Paul Thomas Anderson's typically lengthy movie 'The Master' tells the story of the association of a drifter and a cult guru, the latter clearly modelled on L. Ron Hubbard. As with his earlier 'There Will Be Blood', the story is both linear and not especially well-shaped, though Philip Seymour Hoffman is quite good as the pseudo-Hubbard. Indeed, that's the bigger problem here: Hubbard's story is quite interesting, and a good basis for fiction, but no light is shed by it that story through the eyes of a random acquaintance. What is presented here is just a story of two odd people, each of whom are hard to relate to. My favourite film of Anderson remains his first, 'Hard Eight'; interestingly, that was also his shortest.