- Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck in I’m Still Here
I’m looking forward to revisiting The Master this coming week in the Music Box Theatre’s latest 70-millimeter film series. I haven’t seen the movie since it was released to DVD—as I argued last year, The Master‘s thematic content is tied so closely to its extralarge format that I feel it wouldn’t be the same film outside of a theater. At the same time, it’s a movie I’ve wanted to watch alongside quite a few others, as The Master is such a towering work that it seems to draw other movies into its orbit. I thought of it again just last week while watching Roy Del Ruth’s The Mind Reader (though I doubt that Paul Thomas Anderson had that minor pre-Code programmer on the brain when he was creating his magnum opus), as it also addresses the all-American convergence of show business, spiritual longing, and plain old scam artistry.
