Hacker Cinema
The Master
2012 · Film · 137 min
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Freddie, a volatile, heavy-drinking veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, finds some semblance of a family when he stumbles onto the ship of Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic leader of a new "religion" he forms after World War II.
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Paul Thomas Anderson's films oft set within extreme and/or marginal cultures. The porn industry in Boogie Nights. The Master was a thinly veiled alter ego of Scientology founder L.Ron Hubbard. One Battle after another looks at radical leftists. PTA likes to take characters that are hard to empathize with and humanize them. Also OBATA is a comedy, everybody but the daughter is a caricature.
Depicted in the 2012 Paul Thomas Anderson movie “The Master” - a movie I love for reasons I don’t understand.
It's not really the idea of it being dramatic, but how the story was developed and written.
I found The Master and Inherent Vice truly disappointing. I actually liked Phantom Thread, but it's not a movie I will ever watch again.
I feel his writing has gotten worse over the years, probably because he is considered a genius and left to do whatever he wishes. This is all my subjective opinion of course and I still haven't seen Licorice Pizza.
You don’t find a character poisoning her husband (maybe to kill him at first) dramatic?
That said, I agree they are different, but I love _The Master_ more dearly than most all films. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the source novel for _Inherent Vice_ so not super into that film. Loved _Phantom Thread_.
It's gerting harder to be less of a snob. Years ago I decided to stop turning my nose up at "dumb" movies and just enjoy them but it feels almost as if the industry saw it as a challenge to make people like me scoff. The fandom and fauning is just endless and inescapable to the point tbat it is very hard to ignore.
It was also easier when we were getting big budget art pieces like "No Country" and "The Master" but those seem to have all but disappeared.
The Aviator - I don't know why I was so obsessed with this guy eg. Howard Hughes his tragic/surreal life having so much money and descent into madness. The passage of time makes me sad as well, you see the peak/height of the day...
The Master - this is emotional the churning water scenes in particular with the music great sound track
Her - mostly I enjoy the intro, I don't know maybe it's a part of being alone a lot up to where he meets the OS for the first time, something like this is interesting
Lost in Translation - somehow I found this movie and the social aspect is nice
Iron Man movies - for motivation
Blade Runner - I was obsessed with this movie in high school 10 years ago quoting it ha "I've seen things..."
2001 Space Odyssey - probably my most favorite humbling scene the bone becoming a space craft [1] it's just so emotional "exiting the system". It felt freeing briefly to think you can leave everything that exists and go to nothing, it was an idea of escape for me at the time. It makes me want to strive for that, but it's not a 1-man job and it takes a while eg. probably not in our life time... the whole 4 years to nearest star at light speed thing. And what is there anyway.
Jobs - probably get hate for this but there was something profound the idea of the chips becoming state/data on a screen.
Social Network - sorry to be basic but I used to watch that to get pumped trying to come up with something big(lol). It's funny when I first watched that movie I was not into software/web dev and later on I understood more and more of the basic stuff he was doing to make the girl comparison app and also mentioning Apache to host the initial The Facebook like "Ooh I know what that is".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZoSYsNADtY
I’ve watched 4k digital films at two exceptional digitally equipped theaters:
https://cinerama.com/Technology.aspx
https://www.geekwire.com/2015/photos-inside-one-of-the-worlds-most-advanced-imax-movie-theaters/
And I swear each time I’ve seen noticeable digital artifacts (usually where text or some long swoopy line is involved). The digital projection has never given me a “holy crap” hair standing on end visual response.
Not so with 70mm or 70mm IMAX (RIP Seattle’s equipment). I saw Interstellar in 70mm IMAX, and the space scenes really were stunning. Like, clearly amazing.
When we saw 2001 in 70mm at the Cinerama a few years back, several people in our group all remarked how the initial sunrise almost made you feel heat.
Yes, that could be my imagination. But I’ll add that I didn’t even know that I was watching The Master in 70mm a few years ago. I’d watched it with a friend, and I distinctly remember coming home and remarking to my wife how amazing the visual detail was.
I’m firmly in the “digital has yet to wow me visually the same as 70mm” camp. And I say this as someone who thinks CD was the most profound improvement in audio quality that I can remember in my life. So, I don’t think I’m just being nostalgic.
I agree. You used to be able to sort all movies by how much they think you will like it. What a concept! A little over a year ago I actually wrote a script that used their API to get me just that. Less than a month later they shut down the API... I honestly don't know what use case they are addressing. If I know what I am there to watch I just need a search field. If I don't know then there interface is a disaster. It keeps recommending movies they predict I will give a low rating. At the same time I found that they had "The Master" which I loved in the cinema after browsing the page for at least 10 minutes in order to find something. Most of the 10 minutes were spent looking over different lists that mainly contained the same movies I'd already watched or Netflix agrees I won't like.
I also find their rating system to be the worst. I always check at imdb first. Some movies that have 4/10 or fewer starts have 4/5 or even 4.5/5 stars on Netflix.
I can only assume that watching certain movies might be more beneficial to Netflix than others.
I used to pay for netflix in the US and access it with a VPN when I was living in China (a country where most content is only available through pirating). I did this both for convenience and because I wanted to pay for the content I was consuming.
But eventually I got tired of having to jump through hoops because of region locking and other inane rules decided by the MPAA and equivalent. I'm now in France, Netflix has a rather poor catalogue (I joined this month to check it out), The Master for example is not available (and I don't know any easy way to stream it).
So, instead of bothering to jump through hoops, I just download it on Bittorrent. It's quick, it's easy and it saves me time. It's also more confortable using Mplayer or Plex to play a video than any of the streaming website players.
When you say that 25-30k people torrent the movie, I'm sure there's a lot of people in my case. And excluding the foreign language versions won't help because a lot of people in Europe download the original version.
But people torrent things anyway, even when they are instantly available. I mentioned to someone the other day that The Master (a film that did rather poorly at the box office in 2012 but has maintained a good level of audience interest over the longer term, like many art films) has been available on Netflix streaming since July and is also available on other services like Amazon Instant Video, but you can see 25-30k people torrenting it on popular trackers.
To make your point about rewarding creators, it's necessary for you to demonstrate that these correspond to lost sales, and you haven't done that.
You do realize that collecting is a goal in itself for a lot of people, right? The guys I hung out with in college made it their sole purpose in life to "own" every piece of software ever written for the Apple II. But that doesn't mean that their actions cost Dan Bricklin, Richard Garriott, and Paul Lutus very much. Probably 95% of the products they pirated, they never even ran.
It's unlikely that the 30,000 people torrenting The Master are devoted but penurious fans of P. T. Anderson. You need to look for alternative explanations.
Also, as others have pointed out, Netflix isn't available in many places outside the US. There is absolutely no one to blame for that but Hollywood. Now that we've seen the intellectual and ethical caliber of the people running the studios, a lot of seemingly-paradoxical things are starting to make sense.
While it’s incredible that a lawyer like Fabrizio would be so bold (and foolish) to use such language in discoverable emails, what he is proposing is even more incredible. A deliberate attempt to circumvent the DMCA. Ironic, right?
It's not incredible at all. He has an alternative legal theory that he thinks might stand up in court and lead to issuance of a court order. That's exactly the job a lawyer is paid to do - come up with legal strategy that advance the interests of clients, including employers.
I don't know whether this legal theory would prevail and I hope it doesn't, but going to court and asking for what they want is the appropriate way to go about things.
the MPAA should be finding ways to reduce piracy by enabling access to content via methods that reward creators.
But people torrent things anyway, even when they are instantly available. I mentioned to someone the other day that The Master (a film that did rather poorly at the box office in 2012 but has maintained a good level of audience interest over the longer term, like many art films) has been available on Netflix streaming since July and is also available on other services like Amazon Instant Video, but you can see 25-30k people torrenting it on popular trackers. You can always invent another excuse for why it's more convenient to Torrent something than pay the paltry $8 or $10/month for Netflix, ie the cost of a few cups of coffee or about an hour's wages in a low-paying job. This method rewards creators and is clearly affordable.
Without endorsing the MPAA, how much more should they be doing in this case? Imagine that I worked for them and you were about to torrent this film, exactly what is it you would want me to do for you that would change your mind?
Well, in that spirit look at the popularity on torrent trackers of the Master and Inherent Vice, both directed by PT Anderson, and compare with their box office performance at boxofficemojo.com (plus the wikipedia entries on the films have some additional information about budgets).
I don't feel comfortable discussing how that played out from the producers' standpoint (I'm not one of the producers, so I'll limit myself to saying it has lost money overall), but I hope you can see the incongruity of a highly acclaimed director making serious artistic work seeing ever-widening box office losses while simultaneously enjoying enormous-but-unpaid popularity via file-sharing. The Master has been available on Netflix streaming for months (at least in the US) and yet there are, um, over 9000 seeders for just the most popular torrent on oldpiratebay.org, closer to 35,000 if you add up all the active torrents for different formats, foreign language versions and so on, plus 35-40,000 leechers.
Regardless of how ones feels about it aesthetically, I think it's fair to say that the film is quite popular (measured against a random basket of 2012 films with better box office performance). But because it didn't do well in its initial release window, the longer-term popularity isn't reflected by its financial performance. Piracy is a real problem for films that depend on long-tail revenue, which is one reason you see so many franchise films and aesthetically conservative genre pics - they're an easier sell even though they don't necessarily age well.
American Reunion is good fan service if you grew up with the series.
The Hobbit is a technical marvel in HFR (everyone who says otherwise is wrong).
Life Of Pi is another technical marvel—possibly the best visuals I have ever seen.
Side by Side is an informative documentary about the rise of digital filmmaking and its cultural and technical effects (positive and negative), with polarizing opinions from tons of Hollywood folks big and small.
To Rome With Love was this year's Woody Allen entry, if that's your thing.
The Master is a shallow and empty script, but has two great performances and looks great projected in 70mm.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a downright pleasant movie that no one saw, wherein Ewan McGregor shows that he can do a convincing Scottish accent.
Lockout was a no-holds-barred "dumb action flick" that was surprisingly fun, mostly because of Guy Pearce's performance.
> A single person taking the role of director/editor/screenwriter is pretty much unheard of in the industry.
Wrong.
Let's take a very recent example (and note well, this is not at all uncommon outside of Hollywood, for instance Teshigahara's famous collaborations with author Kobo Abe) Paul Thomas Anderson, directed, wrote, and produced/edited (both the 65mm and digital transfer, in tandem) The Master. It is not at all uncommon for a director to at least collaborate with a screenwriter if not write the screenplay themselves. And most directors would like (although this is sometimes prohibited by the studios, e.g. in the case of Orson Welles) to have creative power if not direct control over the production and editing process.
However, even at this level of involvement we are a far cry from the claim that a single person is responsible for the film as a creative work.
For instance, you're missing a critical piece of the equation: acting. You could easily make the argument the job of an actor is as important as any role a director might have and ultimately it is the centerpiece of so much film as well as the final artist presentation. Even the most controlling directors have limited ability to hold de facto control over this aspect of the film.
Considering all the multitude of complexities of the process, the myth of this superhuman director here is a lot less interesting than the actual process of filmmaking, if you ask me.