Directed by:
Paul Thomas AndersonScreenplay:
Paul Thomas AndersonCinematography:
Robert ElswitComposer:
Jonny GreenwoodCast:
Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Benicio Del Toro, Reese Witherspoon, Jena Malone, Jordan Christian Hearn, Martin Short (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
From Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon, it's the tail end of the psychedelic, '60s and paranoia is running the day from the desert to the sea of sunny Southern California. With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, the FBI, LAPD detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, a group of Beverly Hills dentists and a mysterious entity called The Golden Fang, everything's gone from "groovy" to "where you at, man?" in what seems like a matter of moments. So when private eye Doc Sportello's ex-old lady Shasta Fay shows up at his door with a story about her current billionaire land-developer boyfriend and his wife and her boyfriend... well it all starts to get a little peculiar after that. Maybe you'll just want to see the movie? (Roadshow Entertainment)
(more)Videos (2)
Reviews (6)
The obviously stoned Paul Thomas Anderson let his imagination run wild and made a self-absorbed retro hippie crime parody where nothing makes sense. I think we already had David Lynch for the WTF stuff, and it’s gone out of fashion. Unwatchable 150 minutes.
()
Already after watching the trailer I thought that Inherent Vice was a pretty weird and crazy movie. However, everything made it seem like the number of famous actors, who I personally often look for in the movies, couldn’t disappoint me. But they did. Joaquin Phoenix again played an extremist, but in this case, he had his heart in a better place than usual and he was also a rebel. Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro or Josh Brolin complemented him perfectly. It’s a pity they were all so deadly serious. Even Joaquin, but you were not able to perceive him as such under any circumstances, so his character had the completely opposite effect. Nevertheless, the characters are the only interesting thing about this movie. The length of it makes you want to kill yourself, the story is really confusing and several times I had a feeling I was watching a movie that just goes on and on but nothing is happening at all. I cannot get rid of the feeling that Inherent Vice seemed weird already from the trailer, and even after watching it I still consider it weird and I am surprised that these actors need to experiment like this. I accept that Paul Thomas Anderson as a director is quite renowned in Hollywood, but this whole mix of everything, the atmosphere from the thirties and the noir crime story was really not my cup of tea.
()
Inherent Vice(2014)
In a traditional detective narrative, the central mystery gradually becomes clear, the individual pieces of the puzzle fit together and the protagonist inches toward catching the perpetrator by uncovering and connecting new information. In Inherent Vice, a stoned noir flick for sober viewers, you will be more confused at the end than you were at the beginning. ___ Anderson continues in the mission of his mentor, Robert Altman, and further confronts America with its true face. As he did in Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and The Master, he attempts to capture the mood and express the essence of a particular moment in American history. He uses the tail end of the flower-child era, saturated with conspiracy theories, to point out the interconnectedness of the individual parts of a system that is so complicated that it’s impossible to actually recognise or understand it. Inherent Vice is told accordingly. ___ The film is set in 1970, when the utopian ideals of the unbridled sixties are being displaced by paranoia, fear, greed and strict adherence to rules. It is the start of an age of cruel sobriety after coming down from the high of the previous decade. The sudden inhibition, fatigue and numbness is personified by private detective Doc Sportello. His blank expression, slack jaw and constant running into obstacles (literally and figuratively) illustrate a loss of contact with the changing world in which he doesn’t know what to do. Dialogue scenes are often constructed to make us unsure whether they are taking place in the same room as the people who are talking. The marijuana haze enveloping the whole film makes it impossible to distinguish between what is really happening and what is merely Doc’s hallucination. ___ There is often a lack of establishing shots and we see only the character who is speaking in semi-close-ups, never the one who is supposed to be listening. The incomplete picture of reality corresponds to Doc’s fragmented perception of reality and his inability to put facts into context. Partly due to the influence of light drugs, a lot of information escapes Doc and we similarly have limited access to knowledge due to the adherence to the protagonist’s perspective. The commentary, which is rather more of a mockery of genre conventions than a useful orientation aid, is not provided by the protagonist, but by a woman who describes what we are seeing without the cynical detached humor and fatalistic urgency of courageous noir narrators. ___ The chaos, disorder and unpredictability of the era, which is heading in an unknown direction, are reflected in several interconnected cases and the effort to solve them. In fact, each new clue leads to a dead end and only adds another layer of ambiguity (in the manner of the layering of shots with which the film begins). The investigation goes nowhere, as does the movement of the actually rather dynamic camera, which generally approaches the characters very slowly during the long dialogue scenes, hinting at a major revelation, which of course doesn’t happen at the end of any scene or of the film itself. Even more than in the genre classic The Big Sleep, in whose plot twists director Howard Hawks allegedly got lost, the plot is complicated to the point of opacity. But in this case, that is deliberate. ___ The goal is not to get from point A to point B, but to use the two and a half hours of wandering to capture the feeling that comes with loss of direction. The absence of a point is the point and Doc is another one of Anderson’s aimless protagonists trapped in a cycle of events that lead nowhere. The investigation does not serve primarily to obtain new evidence, but to portray America’s confusion as the country enters the 1970s. ___ Inherent Vice is an unfocused, dramatically aimless and, like its protagonist, slowed-down reminder of a time of fundamental social change and the end of an era (including, among other things, New Hollywood, to which Anderson often refers in his work). Despite the narrative nonchalance, stylistic unobtrusiveness (there is no gratuitous approximation of ’70s style) and the improvisational feel of many of its scenes, the film undeniable has solid directing and a creative concept that is far clearer than anything Doc learns on the basis of his pseudo-detective work. 75%
()
(less)
(more)
Paul Thomas Anderson clearly enjoys playing and experimenting. He tries out the length of scenes, shots, camera distance, angle, various forms of humor, and absurd situations. And then he creates a film that features an incredible number of peculiar characters, where you hardly care about any of them. The whole thing is two and a half hours long, but you still find it intriguing and somewhat enjoyable at times.
()
A conversation comedy polished to the final detail, which is too long, while it couldn’t be any shorter. Pynchon is a master of language, he is quite generous with refined words, but even so his dialogs are natural, full of cutting humor and hidden insinuations. Anderson honors this and attempts at maximum faithfulness to the original. His directing talent is supported by quality acting performances, superb production design and again the mass of details that take care of much of the comedy in this otherwise multi-genre detective movie. Strongly not recommended for regular movie consumers. What's Up, Doc?
()
Ads