For the most part, I've been satisfied with the broad applicability of the statement seen above, but now that I've read Scott's most famous work, I'm glad that I hedged my bets somewhat with the statement about "exceptions. For most of the novel, Scott arranges events that lead the reader to expect a major fight-scene at the novel's climax, between the title character and the principal villain, the Templar Knight Bois-Guilbert.
Share via Email Paul Thomas Anderson: Matt Carr The Master rolls in midway through the Venice film festival.
It comes billed as thunderstorm, a controversy, its arrival trailed by rumbles of dissent. This, we are told, is the Scientology film, a veiled biopic of the demagogic L Ron Hubbard ; the movie that freaked Tom Cruise.
In the event it turns out to be all that and more.
So much more, in fact, that the delegates stumbling out from the screening appear momentarily nonplussed. Written and directed by Paul Thomas AndersonThe Master charts the fortunes of lowly Freddie Quell, a volatile drifter who falls under the spell of charismatic Lancaster Dodd.
Shuffling through the postwar west, Dodd plies his trade in town halls and parlours, spinning tales of reincarnation and space aliens and cooking up a new religion as his "gift to homosapiens".
What follows, though, is not so much a display of tabloid fireworks as a sweeping epic about hope, loss and the scars of war; a celebration of the American knack for self-renewal and a criticism of it too.
The Master contains multitudes. I meet the director in an upstairs ballroom of a Venice hotel, where sunlight bounces off the marble and the windows are thrown open to show the sea.
Anderson turned 42 last June. He has flecks of grey on his temples and three children at home with the actor Maya Rudolph.
Yet the setting seems to galvanise him, stoking embers of the precocious young upstart who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia and then ushered Daniel Day-Lewis towards the best actor Oscar in There Will Be Blood.
Anderson is jumpy, excited, ready for battle. The Master has been dogged by so many rumours and so much misinformation that it is a relief to finally have it exposed. It is time he set the record straight.
Yes, he concedes, the plot of his film parallels the life of Hubbard, a puckish free-thinker who founded Scientology in the s. Anderson conceived the film as an adventure yarn and toyed with it for a decade. The Hubbard figure only showed up later. Lancaster Dodd brought shape and focus — plus, of course, a whole new set of problems.
Anderson agrees that the casting was key. Because he scares me. I asked him to be in There Will Be Blood.Sep 01, · The Master. Year: Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Studio: It’s not a stretch to say that Saturday evening’s world premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master at the Venice Film Festival is the year’s most avidly anticipated movie event.
TIME’s Complete Coverage of the Venice Film Festival).
In The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson tells a big American story about two men who can't see past each other Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. that he has screened the film for Tom Cruise; and so on. Everyone is not wrong. But Scientology is one of those subjects the mere mention of which interrupts the flow of thought and .
A scathing critique of inhumanity in the name of religion -- in this case, Jehovah’s Witnesses -- made all the more chilling by its drab colorlessness and mute suffocation. Paul Thomas Anderson's untitled next film starts shooting soon, and the trickle of casting announcements is making it sound like a fantastic movie.
T he Master rolls in midway through the Venice film festival. It comes billed as thunderstorm, a controversy, its arrival trailed by rumbles of dissent. It comes billed as thunderstorm, a controversy, its arrival trailed by rumbles of dissent. NUM-INOUS COMICS PT. 2. This essay is a very belated response to a " part 1 " published in February The gist of that essay was a response to a corre.