Inherent Vice (2014)

[yourstruly]

Is there already a forum for this movie? I checked and couldn't find anything. If there is, my apologies for starting a duplicate and please merge or delete this one.

 

I saw this one last night and it was...interesting, as I assumed it would be. First off, it just looks great. The first shot is a dissolve from Joanna Newsom's face to Katherine Waterston's and it's so dreamlike that I just want to see it again. Just that shot alone.

 

The whole movie definitely felt "Pynchon-esque" which is an achievement in itself. Just with the strange character names, the overarching paranoia, the weird coincidences, etc. I have only read Crying of Lot 49 and that was years ago, but I still remember how "woozy" it felt and this movie felt the same way. It felt addled.

 

As good as the movie looked, I thought the sound was murky, although I don't know if that was intentional or a problem in my theater. There were a couple of times when I simply could not make out what some characters were saying.

 

After watching it, I realized that I have seen all of Paul Thomas Anderson's movies (save Hard Eight) in the theater. I think this one feels like a fusion of Boogie Nights and maybe The Master. A sprawling cast with nothing but great actors in every single role (even with porn stars mixed in with the regular actors), his typical Southern California setting, but really discursive and tangential like his recent stuff. I haven't been the hugest fan of his most recent stuff because it has been (IMO) sort of hermetically sealed and humorless, and this is getting back to the stuff I liked about him in the beginning but not throwing away where he has been going recently.

 

All the acting is good, especially Waterston and Jena Malone. Which is another thing-there are women in this one with prominent parts, which is another thing that has been missing from his work for a while. And Waterston's nude scene had been discussed, but after seeing it, I don't see what the big deal was. I've seen more gratuitous nudity.

 

Not his greatest, but I think I liked it the most of his most recent work. But it's very strange.