2012 Movies -The Master, The Sessions, and Flight

2012 Movies -The Master, The Sessions, and Flight:

2012 The Master

Peggy Dodd: This is something you do for a billion years or not at all.  This isn't fashion.

Saturday afternoon my mom and I went to the Crest for a double-feature: The Master followed by The Sessions.  We were expecting to enjoy The Master, and not so much The Sessions, which we thought would be a bit vulgar.  We were very wrong.  The Master is a bizarre movie, from start to finish.  Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie, who served in WWII apparently, though we don't see any of this.  The movie starts with him goofing around on the beach for a while with some of the guys.  They have made a woman out of sand, and he, er, molests the poor sand woman, then finishes himself off in the ocean, all set to weird music.  Charming.  I knew I was in for a long, strange movie already.  He then becomes a photographer, but goes nuts and assaults one of his clients for no apparent reason.  He makes booze out of paint thinner and other gross stuff, drinks a lot, has some sexual relations with a co-worker in the backroom, which feels really unnecessary since her character plays no further part in the story.

Describing the window in an exercise.

Then he stows away on a ship and stumbles into The Cause, and its leader Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Dodd's wife Peggy, played by Amy Adams.  The Cause is supposed to be based on Scientology, and we get to watch some of their weird methods -for a long, long, long time.  For example, in a really dragged out montage, Freddie has to walk back and forth across a room with his eyes closed, touching the wall and the window alternately, then describing them over and over and getting increasingly crazy and agitated while everyone watches.  When it finally ends he is supposed to have accomplished something.  Not sure what.  There's also an exercise where he has to stare into Peggy Dodd's eyes and make her eyes a different color with his mind.  That's always useful.  Dodd's recently married daughter makes strange overtures to Freddie, which he doesn't reciprocate -strange since he is a horny pervert for most of the movie.  Freddie doesn't believe in Dodd's teachings, but if anyone else questions Dodd, Freddie goes nuts and beats the crap out of them.  Freddie is really, really crazy.  You know he's crazy when he makes the crazy Cause people seem almost sane by comparison.

Peggy telling Freddie to change her eye color with his mind.

There's another strange scene where they're having a Cause party, and all of a sudden all the women, young and old, are naked -going about their business but completely naked.  I think Freddie was imagining this, but I'm not sure.  The movie ends as inexplicably as it began.  Freddie leaves, sleeps with another random woman, and then thinks back to the time he was spooning with the sand woman.  Ah, the memories.  Don't waste your time on this movie.  The critics that liked it are obviously more artsy than me -or more something, anyway.  Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams are all nominated, and they are all talents, but I doubt any of them will win -though I must give kudos to Joaquin Phoenix for altering his appearance to transform himself into the thin, sickly Freddie, and for creating a wholly abhorrent character.

2012 The Sessions

Cheryl: Picture yourself as a six year old boy at the beach.  Can you do that?
Mark:  Yes, very easily.
Cheryl: Describe some of your feelings.
Mark: I feel very exhilarated, running next to the Atlantic Ocean, feeling the wind and the wet sand between my toes.
Cheryl: Do you really feel like him?
Mark: Yes, I really feel like him.
Cheryl: But can you really picture him?...From the outside, I mean, as an adult, as you are now, looking at him with his crew cut and his little face?
Mark: Yes.
Cheryl: And are you mad at him?  Do you blame him for getting polio?  Was it his fault?




The Sessions, based on a true story, was the movie I thought would be crude, considering it is about a disabled man's relationship with a sex surrogate, but though female nudity and sex are present, the scenes are far from crude.  In fact, while The Master had an icky feeling about it, the interactions in The Sessions somehow felt very pure and innocent.  John Hawkes is fantastic as Mark O'Brien, a man in his forties who contracted polio as a young child, and has spent most of his life unable to move his body below his neck and restricted to an iron lung for all but small chunks of time (he can use a portable breathing machine for 3-4 hours at a time to leave the house).  He has lived with a lot of guilt, feeling like he ruined the lives of his parents, and that his younger sister died because they were too busy caring for him.

Consulting Father Brendan.

Despite this, he lives with a mostly upbeat and hopeful attitude, an amazing sense of humor, strong faith (he is a Catholic and religiously attends church and confession, befriending and confiding in the church priest, played with wonderful kindness and humor by William H. Macy), kindness, and determination.  He has earned a college degree, and earns a living as a writer.  It is when he is asked to write an article about sex for disabled people that he begins to consider his own lack of experience.  Though he has fallen in love before, he has never found a woman willing to take on the challenges of dating a severely disabled man like himself, and has begun to regret the fact that he may die without ever having a sexual experience.

Enter professional sex surrogate Cheryl, played by Helen Hunt.  After a consultation with his priest, Mark gets the go-ahead ("In my heart, I feel He'll give you a free pass on this one.  Go for it.") to have 6 sessions (the maximum she allows) with Cheryl, who will help him discover his sexuality so that he can potentially go forward and have a relationship in the future:
Cheryl (On the phone to Mark): We'll be talking for a while to begin with.  Then, if you agree, we can also start doing some body awareness exercises in your first session.
Mark (Looking at a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall later that night while in his iron lung): Holy Mother of God, what are “body awareness exercises"?

Their relationship blossoms into something special, but realizing that she is getting too close to him, Cheryl ends the relationship after 4 sessions.  In that time, however, she helps Mark in many ways, and both of them have a hard time saying goodbye.  The supporting characters are deep and interesting (his caretakers and friends are nuanced and well developed), and the movie is sweet, funny, and meaningful.  I was very pleasantly surprised.  Helen Hunt was nominated, and she did a terrific job.  I think John Hawkes deserved a nomination as well -I preferred his performance over Denzel's in The Flight (see below).  Definitely worth watching IF you are not squeamish about sexual themes and about seeing Helen Hunt do the full monty.

2012 Flight

"The FAA and the NTSB took ten pilots, placed them in simulators, recreated the events that led to this plane falling out of the sky.  Do you know how many were safely able to land the planes?  Not one.  Evey pilot crashed the aircraft.  Killed everybody on board.  You were the only one who could do it."

"Hey, don't tell me how to lie about my drinking, okay?  I know how to lie about my drinking.  I've been lying about my drinking my whole life."

Flight was overall pretty disappointing.  It has an interesting plot: A pilot named Whip Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington, captains a commercial airliner while drunk and having done cocaine.  The plane suffers a mechanical failure and is going down (completely unrelated to Whip's condition -he is, in fact, asleep when the failure occurs, with his co-pilot keeping an eye on things).  Miraculously, Whip manages to stay calm, and using remarkable intuition and skill is able to pull the plane out of the dive and set it down in a field, saving the lives of 96 of 102 people on the plane.  The plane failure and crash made for a nail-biting, harrowing sequence, and the effects were great.  At one point the plane is even inverted:


Whip: When I say, I want you to retract the flaps, retract the gear, trim us nose-down, okay?  But everything's gonna be opposite, so make sure you trim us nose-down.
Evans (Co-pilot): Trim down?  What are you gonna do?
Whip: Margaret, when I tell you, I want you to push these forward, full throttle, can you do that?
Margaret (Flight attendant assisting from the jump seat): Okay.
Evans: What do you mean, sir?  What are we doing?  Why would I trim down?
Whip:We're gonna roll it.
Evans: Whoa!  What do you mean, "roll it"?
Whip: Got to do something to stop this dive.
 
This scene, however, was probably the best the movie had to offer.  The investigation into the cause of the crash makes up the rest of the movie, and Whip is being investigated because of evidence of his inebriated state while flying.  At first you feel sorry for him, because he did, after all, save all those people, and his condition did not cause the crash -oddly, it seemed to help, because he was able to stay completely cool under the pressure.  His behavior after the crash, however, is so horrible, with him guilting people into lying about his drinking and going on drunken, drugged binges in which he yells and swears at those trying to help him.  It makes you really not care whether he is found guilty or not.  And let's face it, hero or not, a pilot should not be flying a plane drunk and coked up.  It's mostly a movie about alcohol and drug addiction, which I am not especially interested in (see my The Lost Weekend review: http://kaleenasmith.blogspot.com/2012/10/1945-lost-weekend.html).  There's also a subplot with a drug addict woman that he begins a relationship with, which felt superfluous, and John Goodman appears briefly as a sleazy coke dealer, another character I could have done without.  Denzel Washington was nominated for Best Actor, and he did a pretty good job, but I wouldn't give him the award.  I say if you can get this movie for free from Netflix, then watch the plane crash, because it's a pretty gripping scene, but don't bother with the rest of the movie.