urban75 forums
I was surprised to see there wasn't a dedicated thread on this film (although there's an old one about the book here) and debated just putting this in the "what DVD?" thread, but I've just finished watching PTA's Inherent Vice for the third time; I was having an argument with a friend arguing that it was a much better film about hippy-era Hollywood than Tarantino's bloated mess of Once Upon a Time... (something I've expressed my disdain for here before) and to cut a boring story short I ended up re-watching it. I think it's become one of those films I was borderline ambivalent to to begin with but I've come to like it more and more with each viewing. Maybe even to love it.
For those who haven't seen it, I guess I'd call it a black comedy spoof noir, as if Chinatown and The Big Lebowski joined a cult together and made a murder/suicide pact, aided by a cast of about nine trillion uniformly excellent cameos and bit parts (an unexpected highlight of which was Martin Short's coke-addled, sex-crazed dentist). I haven't read the book, but I have read Pynchon before and I thought the sprawling, freewheeling, digressive and wholly anti-cinematic structure of the film captured Pynchon's style very well.
I'm aware it was seemingly well-liked by critics but didn't do well at the box office (like most of Anderson's films to be honest) but I was wondering what Urban thought about it. A common threads seems to be that the plot is complicated to the point of incoherence - something that I figured was completely intentional. The whole thing is a ram-raid on a red-herring repository with many false (?) leads most of which lead nowhere but I can see how it would have put a lot of people off if they were expecting a more conventional noir mystery. Similarly, the tone and pacing is all over the place, but again I think a stylistic choice that reminded me of the drug-induced fug from the classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's probably not as funny as it needs to be in places where it thinks it's trying to be funny, but that's about the worst I can find to say about it.
As an aside, Phoenix has done some real corkers in the last decade. This and the also excellent You Were Never Really Here (along with Inherent Vice, also scored by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood apparently) are real powerhouse performances.
For those who haven't seen it, I guess I'd call it a black comedy spoof noir, as if Chinatown and The Big Lebowski joined a cult together and made a murder/suicide pact, aided by a cast of about nine trillion uniformly excellent cameos and bit parts (an unexpected highlight of which was Martin Short's coke-addled, sex-crazed dentist). I haven't read the book, but I have read Pynchon before and I thought the sprawling, freewheeling, digressive and wholly anti-cinematic structure of the film captured Pynchon's style very well.
I'm aware it was seemingly well-liked by critics but didn't do well at the box office (like most of Anderson's films to be honest) but I was wondering what Urban thought about it. A common threads seems to be that the plot is complicated to the point of incoherence - something that I figured was completely intentional. The whole thing is a ram-raid on a red-herring repository with many false (?) leads most of which lead nowhere but I can see how it would have put a lot of people off if they were expecting a more conventional noir mystery. Similarly, the tone and pacing is all over the place, but again I think a stylistic choice that reminded me of the drug-induced fug from the classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's probably not as funny as it needs to be in places where it thinks it's trying to be funny, but that's about the worst I can find to say about it.
As an aside, Phoenix has done some real corkers in the last decade. This and the also excellent You Were Never Really Here (along with Inherent Vice, also scored by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood apparently) are real powerhouse performances.