Eventually, about an hour in, you learn to go with the flow. Bigfoot hams it up 100% as he deep-throats frozen chocolate bananas, eats a platter full of weed, kicks down doors, and screams his orders for Japanese pancakes. That should speak miles to his work here. Brolin is the standout performance in spite of being in a movie with Joaquin Phoenix. This dentist runs a heroin syndicate called “The Golden Fang”.īest of these adventures is Doc’s encounters with hippy hating SAG actor, Lieutenant Detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). This is also while having an affair with the Deputy District Attorney (Reece Witherspoon), and snorting cocaine with a dentist (Martin Short). He subsequently decides to just follow him around looking for a saxophonist who faked his own death (Owen Wilson). Anderson does inquire about Wolfmann’s whereabouts and looks into Shasta’s disappearance. After Doc and Shasta’s meeting, she isn’t seen again for hours and the plot isn’t either. I certainly dug it on the first watch, but like all great cult movies, Inherent Vice demands a second watch. To write in Sportello’s vernacular ya either dig it, or ya don’t. It just floats around, leaving you to follow on its coat tails. And that’s basically the way Inherent Vice does business. Shaking his head in frustration, he chucks the paper away. There’s even a scene where Doc is reading a sheet of paper with crucial expositional information. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character in film have such a distaste for plot and exposition. Just like Doc himself, the film seems constantly stoned out of it’s skull. Thinking comes later.” He’s exactly right. Within the first five to ten minutes of the film, Doc utters the words “Don’t worry. Her current lover, a rich real-estate tycoon Mickey Wolfmann, had a wife possibly plotting to commit him to a mental hospital. One day, Shasta Fay, a former lover, arrived out of the blue to ask for his help. He film (barely) follows private detective Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), as sort of half-assed mutton chopped Philip Marlowe, an odd fellow and lovable stoner. While Anderson kept the same trippy feeling in the book, he clearly was more interested in love and loss rather than Pynchon’s fascination with the culture of the late sixties and early seventies. Pynchon could be considered the king of incomprehensible and dense literature. Anderson adapted the film from Thomas Pynchon’s book by the same name. I think the difference with Inherent Vice is that it absolutely detested having a plot. Neither was it as energetic or wildly entertaining as an energy fueled film like Boogie Nights. Inherent Vice lacked the concise and intense character study of Anderson’s previous films such as The Master and There Will Be Blood. However, there was divisiveness, confusion, and disappointment from most movie-goers. Inherent Vice, arguably Paul Thomas Anderson’s least popular and most underrated film, was released in 2014 to positive raves from critics. While being these things, the movie actually behaves a little differently. I’m talking about a movie trailer that completely falsifies the entire tone of the movie and makes it look like a fun 70s romp comedy mystery. Has there ever been such a poorly marketed movie? I’m not talking about trailers making movies look fantastic when they end up looking like dogshit. The following review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice will be much like the movie A dizzying melange of scrambled thoughts and points that wrap up quite nicely depending on whom you ask.
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