Part of our CINEMA IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS series. Saturday, July 11, 2020 @ 8p, Netflix Streaming Service: THE MASTER (2012, The Weinstein Company, dir by Paul Thomas Anderson, streaming, 137 mns)
HOW TO: While we all work to be socially responsible during the age of coronavirus, Secret Movie Club is experimenting with news ways we can all come together as a community and watch great movies.
We want to keep this very reasonable since folks have to have Netflix to start with. So donate whatever works for you. $1 is fine with us.
Just make sure you download NETFLIX PARTY on a Chrome Browser. You'll see the initials NP in the upper right hand corner of browser after a succesful download.
Secret Movie Club will email the link for the Netflix Party at 30 minutes before showtime using the email you provide here. Click that link then click the NP in upper right hand corner. This will synch you to our screening. We will start the movie at exactly 5 minutes after the hour.
There will be a chat function that allows everyone to comment as we go.
The Secret Movie Club team will be offering trivia, history, insights, articles, deep dives throughout the movie(s). We're going to work to make this as rich a feast as possible utilizing the technology at hand.
Then we'll want your feedback immediately on how we can improve/make it better! This also will allow Secret Movie Clubbers from all over the world to join in on a virtual screening!
This week, we’ll be looking at three movies from the 2010’s that turned out to be more complex and mysterious than they at first appeared and have since gained quite huge cult followings.
Our final movie of this series is Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. While receiving pretty near universal critical acclaim when it came out, it nevertheless proved to be a more mysterious and elusive follow up than many expected to Anderson’s previous cinema-ground shaking movie There Will Be Blood.
Ahead of the movie’s release, many folks just knew it was going to be a fictionalization of sorts of L.Ron Hubbard and the growth of his Scientology religion from the 1940’s. And while that storyline CLEARLY forms part of the spine of this movie, no one was quite prepared for the strange love story that would be at the true center of the movie between Joaquin Phoenix’s uncontrollable Freddie Quell and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s complex con artist Lancaster Dodd. Caught between them is Dodd’s very clear eyed realistic wife Peggy Dodd played with a brilliantly controlled counterpoint precision by Amy Adams.
Like Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, The Master was also touted as being shot on 70mm. And while the movie is undeniably visually arresting and striking to the extreme, it also (like Tarantino’s movie) tends to lean more into intimate two or three person scenes versus epic vistas of thousands of extras.
And even here, the movie becomes more mysterious. Anderson seems to be getting at something even deeper than a love story between two men here. Something about our psyches and if human nature can ever really be controlled or tamed or shaped by any philosophy or system that purports to self-improvement.
So join us for our screening of The Master and let us know your thoughts!