Blazed Movie Review: ‘The Master’

K. Thor Jensen Contributing Writer, Entertainment

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The Weinstein Company

I can’t smoke pot at home anymore because I have kids. So I do it at the movies. This week: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Scientology allegory The Master.

This isn’t typically the kind of movie I see high. Usually I pick something pretty dumb for this column so I can screw off and make jokes through it. I probably could have done the new Resident Evil movie and had a really good time. But I really wanted to see The Master. There Will Be Blood is one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. So I got blazed just a little bit, drank a bunch of water, and went to the theater.

Right up front: this movie is great. I was glued to the screen the whole time. Like scary glued to the screen, where I was hunched forward a little and I could feel my face getting really dry and gross. The acting in this movie is so good. I’m so happy that Joaquin Phoenix is done being a crazy beardo douchebag and is back to actually being an actor because he is freaking riveting in this movie. He should win a bunch of awards and Philip Seymour Hoffman should win a bunch of awards and Amy Adams should win a bunch of awards. All the awards.

You probably know the basics already (watch the trailer if you haven’t), but it’s about a drifter after the end of World War II who winds up the left-hand man of a charismatic thinker who is establishing a group – not quite a religion per se, but a spiritual society – out of weird stuff he’s basically just pulling out of his butt. It’s not that similar to the life story of L. Ron Hubbard, the jolly pedophile who amassed a private navy and brainwashed half of Hollywood, but it’s close.

There’s not a ton of “plot” to this movie. Phoenix’s drifter character gets pulled into the orbit of Hoffman’s self-improvement cult and the two guys bounce off each other, causing battle damage along the way. There Will Be Blood was about a dude against the world. The Master is about a dude against another dude. You need to see it.