The feedback from last night’s Chicago screening of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master says four things: (1) it’s a serious and formidable 70mm banquet of a movie, (2) it’s definitely a head-scratcher, (3) you probably need to see it twice in order to figure it out, and (4) it’s probably not worth flying to another West Coast city (i.e., an option that I learned about yesterday) to catch The Master before the Toronto Film Festival. I’m very much looking forward to it, but I can wait.

It would appear (emphasis on that word) at this juncture that The Master‘s Oscar potential is more in the realm of Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix), Best Supporting Actor (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a.k.a. “Philly”), Best Supporting Actress (Amy Adams) and Best Cinematography (Mihai Malaimare Jr.) rather than Best Picture or Best Director.

I’m sorry but it sounds (emphasis on that word) like your typical 62 year-old white-guy Academy member is going to go “huh?” or, at best, “Hmmm.”

To go by tweets from last night’s Chicago screening of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, everyone was deeply impressed by the 70mm cinematography but almost no one could explain what it means or amounts to. Tweeter after tweeter wrote (and I’m paraphrasing) “I think I have to sleep on it” or “Uhhm, I need to see it again” or “this is precisely the kind of movie that defies instant analysis” and so on.

A tweeter named B.G. Loony, a.k.a. “TheMentalDefect,” wrote, “If you need me, I’ll be at sea mulling over The Master for the rest of the year.”

It’s obviously significant that Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, a major critic, tweeted a joke instead of an attempted summary of some kind. He called The Master “the greatest pants movie of our time,” adding that “you really need 70mm to appreciate all the trouser textures and high waists.” In film critic-ese, a comment like that translates as “what the fuck was that about?” He added that “it was definitely a movie” — another comment that says “I can’t make heads or tails out of this thing.”

Tim Horsburgh wrote that “if you know what is going on the head of any of the characters in The Master, then you are a better Thetan than I.”

A guy called DrNeptune declared that The Master is “one awesome, crazy mess of a movie.”

Screen Daily‘s Patrick McGavin attended and has written a mini-review for Movieline. What does it say that McGavin’s first three graphs are neutrally descriptive and that the first enthusiastic opinion he shares is about the cinematography?

“Running 137 minutes (without final credits), The Master traffics in the director’s trademark themes. The first third of the story appears highly indebted to Orson Welles‘s great and potent 1946 noir The Lady From Shanghai. It’s another of Anderson’s brittle and audacious portraits of wounded masculinity and sexual panic.

“Set in 1950, the story details the complicated emotional interaction of Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix), a hollow-eyed World War II veteran who casually insinuates himself into the inner-workings of Lancaster (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a huckster proselytizing for a new self-help religion that has been likened to Scientology.

“Like Mark Wahlberg‘s debased porn actor in Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Freddie constructs an elaborate alternative family from Lancaster’s entourage that results in much unintended conflict when some members of the insular and tight-knit group –especially Amy Adams, who plays Lancaster’s wife — consider him too willful, naive and insufficiently faithful to be a worthy apostle.

“Visually, the movie is a marvel of precise and lyrical imagery. One sustained single-take tracking shot follows a young woman as she models a fur jacket. In another vivid, sexually hallucinatory moment, Freddie imagines all the women surrounding Lancaster during a musical number naked. The 70mm image, with its saturated colors and solidity, casts its own spell. In the first of several tense encounters between the two men that functions as Lancaster’s inquisition of the tremulous Freddie, Anderson unflinchingly keeps the camera tight on their faces. The scene plays out in one long, unbroken take, and the effect is hypnotic.

“As with There Will Be Blood, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood provides a percussive score that’s even more astringent.

“The second half is less audacious and more problematic. The crowd’s reaction was excited though also muted, possibly as a result of fatigue since the closing credits didn’t roll until just before 1 a.m.. Given its complex — and dark — subject matter, The Master is likely to be championed by critics and specialized audiences and largely ignored by the larger public. But last night in Chicago, it ruled.”

I was somewhere between faintly bored and nodding out as I read various N.Y. Times articles answering the question “How Can Women Gain Influence in Hollywood?” Okay, Martha Coolidge wrote a pretty good one (called “Our Entire Belief System Must Change“) but the only piece I really liked was by recently-appointed San Francisco Film Festival honcho Ted Hope, called “Get With The Times.” Here’s a portion:

“The film business should redesign itself to process the abundance of and access to hugely varied content, much of it made by women.

“Leadership is required to recognize that When Harry Met Sally, Bridesmaids and Lost in Translation are not outliers, but clear indicators of vast communities of underserved audiences. Unfortunately, the movie industry is designed to follow the competitor, creating perpetually redundant stories, creators and executives. The entire film business remains predicated on antiquated concepts of scarcity of content and control thereof. It should instead get ambitious and start to redesign itself for today’s reality of super-abundance of — and total access to — hugely varied content.

“I am hopeful that the excess of leisure options will dictate that we all reduce our impulse buys and move toward informed choice of what we actually desire. This should presumably lead to a vast change in infrastructure and leadership. As we shift our entertainment economy away from the mass market to niche communities, we should finally see that we need producers and executives who deeply understand those who have long been neglected. Often these artists — many of them women — remain incredibly passionate about intelligent stories that sing with emotional truth.

“When Hollywood’s business side finally and consistently matches women’s storytelling prowess with a recognition of and commitment to the evolving communities that engage around their story worlds, women will rise everywhere as a result.”

That Stanley Kubrick exhibit that I attended at the Paris Cinematheque Francaise in May 2011 is coming to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 7th. This will be the first U.S. hosting of the Kubrick “show.” In other words, New York has so far been bypassed. The exhibit was developed betwen the Kubrick Estate and Frankfurt’s Deutsches Filmmuseum. Production designer Patti Podesta will design the LACMA show.

Scratch the three big New York Film Festival debuts — Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi, David Chase‘s Not Fade Away and Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight — and a lot of what’s left are films that first screened at last May’s Cannes Film Festival and/or will show at the Toronto Film Festival.

Among the Cannes hand-me-downs are Michael Haneke‘s Amour, Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond The Hills, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani‘s Ceasar Must Die, Leo Carax‘s Holy Motors, Pablo Larrain‘s No and Abbas Kiarostami‘s Like Someone In Love. The Toronto-first titles include Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa, Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson and Brian De Palma‘s Passion.

This is just a slapdash reaction. I haven’t really sunk into the slate. For those who didn’t attend Cannes or who won’t be in Toronto, it’s a very strong roster. But for me, the only NYFF films I’m really cranked about are Not Fade Away, Flight and Olivier Assayas‘s Something In The Air, which will debut at the 2012 Venice Film Fesitval.

The 50th annual New York Film Festival runs from 9.28 through Sunday, 10.14.

As usual, there will be somewhere between 35 and 40 films at the Toronto Film Festival that sound like (or are at least being described as) either must-sees or highly intriguing. This will probably be my most productive TIFF yet as it ‘ll be my first without nightly libations, but even sober I’ll still wind up seeing maybe 26 or 27 of them, if that. Nine days, three or sometimes four per day but more often three…that’s it.

There’s always a chance I might luck into one of those impromptu wildcat screenings of The Master that Paul Thomas Anderson is staging around the country, but if I don’t here are the Toronto films that I’m planning on for sure, and more or less in this order of importance. I’ll be most grateful to hear anything from HE readers that persuades me to eliminate one of these or add a title that I’ve omitted, or which persuades me to move a title sitting in the top 20 down to a lower slot or vice versa.

(1) Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master.

(2) Ben Affleck‘s Argo.

(3) Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder.

(4) Lana and Andy Wachowki & Tom Tykwer‘s Cloud Atlas.

(5) Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina.

(6) David O. Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook.

(7) Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible.

(8) David Ayers‘ End of Watch.

(9) Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson.

(10) Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines.

(11) Pablo Larrain‘s No.

(12) Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha.

(13) Martin McDonagh‘s Seven Psychopaths.

(14) Rian Johnson‘s Looper.

(15) Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car.

(16) Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep.

(17) Stephen Chobosky‘s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower.

(18) Susanne Bier‘s Love is All You Need.

(19) Brian De Palma‘s Passion.

(20) Peter Webber‘s Emperor.

(21) Neil Jordan‘s Byzantium.

(22) Dustin Hoffman‘s Quartet.

(23) Sally Potter‘s Ginger And Rosa

(24) Laurent Cantet‘s Foxfire

(25) Paul Andrew Williams‘ Song for Marion.

(26) Spike Lee‘s Bad 25.

(27) Francois Ozon‘s In The House.

(28) Costa-Gavras‘ Capital.

(29) Ziad Doueiri‘s The Attack.

(30) Shola Lynch‘s Free Angela And All Political Prisoners.

(30) Mike Newell‘s Great Expectations (Dickens),

(31) Sergio Castellitto‘s Twice Born

(32) Mira Nair‘s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

(33) Robert Puccini and Shari Spring Berman‘s Imogene.

(34) Joss Whedon‘s Much Ado About Nothing.

(35) Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers.

(36) Josh Boone‘s Writers.

(37) Chen Kaige‘s Caught In The Web.

(38) Marco Bellochhio‘s Dormant Beauty

(39) Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg‘s Kon-Tiki.

(40) Nick Cassavettes‘ Yellow.

(41) Scott McGehee‘s What Maisie Knew.

It’s seemed obvious that Mitt Romney was stoking racial animus among the Republican base (i.e., resentful bubbas) when he said that President Obama should “take [his] campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.” (Hint, hint — where Rev. Jeremiah Wright lives.) Today Toure, the co-host of MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” said Romney is “trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man.

“This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us. I know it’s a heavy thing, I don’t say it lightly, but this is niggerization. You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”

Toure’s conservative co-host S.E. Cupp flipped out and said “certainly you were implying that Mitt Romney and the base will respond to this dog-whistle, racially-charged coding, and hate Obama, the angry black man?” “Absolutely,” Toure replied. “This is not a revolutionary comment. This is a constituency all-white party that rejects the black vote. [Romney is] using the playbook Republicans have been using for decades now.”

[Quotes lifted from a summary piece by Medialite‘s Andrew Kirell.]

Disney has confirmed that sometime in late April 2015, or roughly five to ten days before May 1, 2015, I will attend a screening of Joss Whedon‘s The Avengers 2 and just sit there and die of pique, the boredom plateauing and my soul dtopping out of me and seeping onto the carpet. I actually might not die if Whedon shoots it in 48 frames per second, but will he and Disney have the balls to grab the steer by the horns and man up and do the technological thing that needs to be done?

If I was half-mad and possessed of unlimited funds, I’d be on my way right now to LAX and a flight to Chicago for a special 70mm screening of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master at the Music Box Theater. If I know Roger Ebert, Michael Phillips, Mark Caro, Ray Pride, Michael Wilmington and Jonathan Rosenbaum, they’ll all be there. The gate will go to The Film Foundation, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture history.”

Nobody and I mean nobody in the history of film criticism has mentioned what I’m about to bring up. It’s about a hidden aspect of Spartacus, which I just saw again a couple of nights ago. It’s a question for Howard Fast, who wrote the original 1951 “Spartacus” novel, but he’s gone so let’s just face it. It’s about sex and territoriality and rage that would have been unstoppable.

The issue would have been about the animal anger and resentment that Kirk Douglas‘s Spartacus would have felt over the fact that Jean Simmons‘ Varinia, the love of his life, had been forced to have relations with several of his fellow gladiators, as was the custom during captivity in Lentulus Batiatus‘s gladiator school in Capua. The result would have been heavily strained friendships between Spartacus and his slave-revolt comrades after they’d broken out and become free men.

If Spartacus was anything like Detective James McLeod, whom Douglas portrayed in Detective Story, he would have been an intensely jealous guy and no day at the beach. No matter how he intellectually rationalized what had happened — all slave women at Capua were ordered to have weekly sex with gladiators at the direction of Charles McGraw‘s Marcellus, the sadistic gladiator boss — he still wouldn’t be able to handle it in his gut. Any ex-gladiator who had “known” her would be on Spartacus’ shit list, and he would have given them dirty looks and subliminal attitude and maybe even put them into forward skirmishes with Romans in the hope that they’d get killed.

Matrimonial relations between Spartacus and Varinia wouldn’t have been very pleasant either. Every time Spartacus looked at her he would see Heironymous Bosch fantasies that would torture him. He would see John Ireland‘s Crixus or Nick Dennis‘s Dionysus or Harold J. Stone‘s David thrusting themselves inside her, sweating and groaning like lions. Remember when Warren Beatty‘s Ben Siegel said to Annette Bening‘s Virginia Hill, “I was just wondering if there was somebody you haven’t fucked?” That’s how it would be almost all the time between Spartacus and Varinia.

Don’t give me the movie version with Spartacus and Varinia consumed by perfect love and rolling around the grass — that was put in for the box-office. Everybody knows how guys get when they’re jealous. They just can’t get the sight of their wives or girlfriends orally pleasuring other men.

Notice that Spartacus’s best friend was Tony Curtis‘s Antoninus, the one guy in his inner circle who hadn’t been at Capua and therefore had never, ever “had” Varinia.

David Chase‘s Not Fade Away, a period drama about the travails of a New Jersey band in the mid ’60s, will debut at the 50th New York Film Festival on Saturday, 10.6, as the Centerpiece Gala. Pic costars John Magaro, Jack Huston, Will Brill, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini, Brad Garrett and Christopher McDonald. The soundtrack is produced by longtime Bruce Springsteen E Street band member and Sopranos cotar Steven Van Zandt. Paramount Vantage will open Not Fade Away on 12.21.12. Chase knows what he’s doing, but this sounds smallish, funky, good-timey.

Chase can romanticize Italian-American New Jersey culture all he wants, but I lived in New Jersey for a while and I know what those guys were like. They were very gang-ish, very unto themselves. And they were bullies. They would give you hostile looks (“Wanna start somethin’?”) in school hallways. One time three or four of them were sitting on a park bench, and as I walked by one shouted in my direction, “Hey, man…you a guinea?” No, I said. “Then what good are ya?” And they weren’t that hip at the end of the day. So fuck them, okay? Not now but if I could go back in a time machine I would take a baseball bat and tell them to go fuck themselves if they looked at me cross-eyed.

In a piece about audience reactions to Craig Zobel‘s Compliance, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn notes that “walkouts have become a regular occurrence.

“At last night’s New York City premiere at the IFC Center, one woman loudly announced her disapproval to the room around the halfway mark. ‘Gimme a break!’ she spouted before storming out, not realizing she was subjecting herself to a post-screening workshop.

“At the end of the movie, a panel moderated by Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano elaborated on the movie’s conceits. Along with Zobel and costar Ann Dowd, Marano was joined by practicing psychologists Nando Pelusi and Stanton Peele.

“When Peele asked the audience if they would behave similarly, the outbursts erupted with a consistency that lasted until the theater manager had to clear the room. Among the guests that night was longtime 60 Minutes host Bob Simon, who took the high road. ‘I would’ve known that wasn’t a cop within a few minutes,’ he insisted. A younger viewer said ‘I’m highly educated and wouldn’t have known.’

“The key reaction came from a woman at the back of the room. ‘It’s difficult for intelligent people to watch such unintelligent behavior,’ she said.

“That made it official: Compliance digs out a universal superiority complex and forces it into battle mode. It’s a movie that feeds on collective emotions — anger, denial and, most of all, fear — but also triggers explosives along the faultlines of class.”