If you are like me, you cannot wait to see ‘The Master’, Paul Thomas Anderson’s next chef d’oeuvre – I haven’t seen it yet, but believe me it’s gonna be good.
And if you can’t wait for its very limited release this weekend (only in New York and Los Angeles), you can already stream the soundtrack on Spotify, a series of powerful and impressive instrumentals composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, who had already scored Anderson’s previous movie ‘There Will Be Blood’. For what I can tell from a first listening, Greenwood’s score is strange and intriguing, violent and desolated, symphonic and lonely, shimmering, mysterious gorgeous, dramatic, moving and totally powerful.
With its waves of strings, the opening ‘Overtones’ sounds as deep as Ligeti’s requiem in Kubrick’s ‘2001 Space Odyssey’, but there is so much drama and mystery over the fifteen tracks, that this sure announces a film full of surprises and promise.
Beside Greenwood’s original material, there are also songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Madisen Beaty, Helen Forrest and ‘No Other Love’, a song taken from Chopin’s famous Etude and sung by Jo Stafford.
If you haven’t heard about the story yet, you must have not paid attention, but let’s just say that this is about a navy veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix (whom PTA has described as ‘very unpredictable’ during a recent press conference!) who become involved in a cult led by charismatic Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, during post World War II in America…But don’t be fooled, it’s not just about Scientology, it is much more than this.