I was reminded of Infinite Jest1 the entire time I watched 2012’s The Master2. Both works are way too long and pretentious. This Paul Thomas Anderson3 film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman4 and Joaquin Phoenix5.
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Watched on blu-ray
1 You know, the 1996 David Foster Wallace novel, roughly a third of which is in the endnotesi.
i Yep, I actually read the goddamn thing. I found more of interest in it than I did, say, Ulysses, though I can’t imagine anything would make me read it a second time.
2 Goddamnit, I thought this was going to be a movie about the leader of the cult in Manos. Nope, this is all a veiled history of the early days of L. Ron Hubbard’s founding of Scientologyi.
i There are all kinds of weird regarding the movie’s faux religion, The Causea. What stuck with me is our Hubbard surrogate giving a wedding toast about lassoing a dragon. Did he get that from Valley of Gwangi, and just substituted a dragon for a dinosaur?b
a Like what is going on with a blackboard with words like “coitus” and “douche” on it as a woman in front of the blackboard supposedly relates experiences from before her birth?
b I may be an atheist, but I am willing to consider a Harryhausen-based religion.
3 A character in this stomps a jailhouse toilet to pieces. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the scene in Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love where Sandler destroys a restaurant bathroom. This would be a strange recurring theme to have through one’s film careeri ii.
i At least that recurring theme isn’t one of the first images in this picture. We see a group of bored sailors on a Pacific island in WWII, and one way they find to pass the time is to make a sand woman to simulate (?) sex witha.
a So I wasn’t surprised when the next stop after the war is a mental hospital, where our protagonist sees explicit sexual imagery in every card in a Rorschach test†.
† Actually, the first one looked like Batman to me. How couldn’t it look like that to the future Joker?
ii Didn’t Anderson direct a movie of Infinite Jest?a
a You’re thinking of Inherent Vice, which was written by Thomas Pynchon, so kind of the same thing while not being the same thing at all.
§ “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” What a weird-ass song. And kudos for finding the hidden footnote!
4 So weird he’s dead, isn’t it? I keep forgetting that until I see yet another movie he was in.
5 For a change, I didn’t believe Phoenix’s character was a real person herei. Every second felt like I was watching a performanceii. Unnatural.
i Talking out of only the left side of his mouth while squinting his right eye. Is he secretly supposed to be Popeye?
ii Phoenix is supposedly a method actora, which has me even more weirded out by the scene where he may be boning a sand-womanb
a So did he actually drink ship fuel, which is apparently something sailors desperate to get drunk have actually done?
b Then there’s the scene where we see him jerking off into the ocean. Thank all the gods that was shot from behind.