How ’bout a brief respite from tragedy, shall we? The Weinstein Company just released a full-length trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams in a story said to chronicle a fictionalized version of the origins of Scientology. Our handsome older brother site WWTDD points out that the Scientology questionnaire is about as close as they could get to the questionnaire in the film without just taking it verbatim. Scientology or not, I’m just excited to see Joaquin Phoenix do that creepy serial killer face where it looks like he wants to kill me and have sex with me at the same time for a whole movie.
Even knowing nothing about Scientology, I think the name alone would always have been an insurmountable obstacle for me. It sounds like one of those depression drugs with the dumb, ridiculous transparent names like “Abilify.” Come on, man, I’m not an idiot. You clearly just stuck some other words together.
Additional trivia: I imagine there are plenty of you who already knew this, but I just learned the other day that Paul Thomas Anderson’s dad was Ernie Anderson, an actor and voice-over artist best known as the voice of ABC in the 70s and 80s: