Tonight’s public screening of The Master began almost an entire friggin’ hour later than scheduled — just about 10 pm. Here are the tweets I managed to punch out as I walked back to the place. It damn well ought to be a lock for a Best Picture nomination but you never know about those 62 year-old Academy fuddy-duddies. Joaquin Phoenix is a guaranteed lock for Best Actor; ditto “Philly” Seymour Hoffman for Best Supporting Actor.
What a movie, what a meal, what a sumo wrestling match…it’s like being run over by a truck going 15 miles an hour! Favorite external tweet from Ben Kenigsberg: “Uh, yeah. Those rules about how movies are supposed to work? I think someone threw those out, did something new.”
Tweet #1: There can be NO ultimate, clean & final understanding of The Master…ever. But it is absolutely vivid, penetrating, world-class filmmaking.
Tweet #2: The Master is about wanting to break through, needing to break through, longing to break through…and finally saying “fuck it, I gotta be me.”
Tweet #3: The Master is about the proverbial search, yes, but you’d also better believe it’s based upon the early days of Scientology, Scientology and…uhm, oh, yes, FUCKING SCIENTOLOGY.
Tweet #4: Paul Thomas Anderson told Joaquin Phoenix, “I need you to be a serpent, an alien, a hee-hee-hee-hee creep, a wormy masturbator, intense, volatile, a primal reptile, odd, beastly. In short, never entirely or simply human. I need you to be “interesting” in the Stanley Kubrick sense of that term.
Tweet #5: The Master ensnares and penetrates… It gets you off if you can be gotten off by the magic of sheer, howling, balls-to-the-wall filmmaking. But NO ONE will ever be soothed or placated by it, and NO ONE will ever “understand” it or parse it or break it down into rhyming prose.
Tweet #6: The Master rips its shirt open and shouts at the audience, “I am a bear! We are ALL bears! And you will not tame me! Accept me as I am or go away and hide in your little hole.”
Tweet #7: The Master is not, repeat NOT, definitely fucking NOT a “date movie”…unless, you know, you’re going out with someone like Maya Rudolph.
