Oh-you want to know what the movie is about? Dig this: "Vice" is not the kind of movie whose plot you can flow-chart, or that will benefit terribly much from the inevitable click-baiting "explainer" pieces that are sure to be written about it in the coming months. But that's all part of it, you know? Because we're all too obsessed with results, with solving for "X," with explaining things and answering things. Yeah, fine, it doesn't often seem to yield visible results. The closeups of his detective's notepad reveal such phrases as "Paranoia alert" and "Something Spanish." It's a method, a process it's his way, man. He's the kind of guy who might preface an important fact with "dig this," and who can say "right on" in response to any statement, varying the inflection so it always seems an acceptable answer. He solves cases intuitively, reading life as others might read tea leaves. He blurts out sentences that are non-sequiturs to everyone but him, and makes high-pitched strangled sounds, a la Ben Braddock in " The Graduate," when he's frustrated. He's a shaggy-haired, mutton-chopped man-child, a little bit piggish in the way that a lot of hippie guys were then, but basically decent he wouldn't hurt a fly unless he thought the fly was bogarting his joint, maybe not even then. The film's hero, the pothead private investigator Larry 'Doc' Sportello ( Joaquin Phoenix), is standing on the beach waiting for the tide to return. Thompson referred to the Summer of Love in 1967 as, in retrospect, the point where the great wave of the counterculture "broke and finally rolled back." In his gonzo epic " Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Hunter S. (Exhales smoke rings.) It's set in Los Angeles circa 1970, after Tet and Altamont and Manson so many other time-and-place names that viewers of a certain age will recognize as markers of the point where '60s Utopianism morphed into '70s numbness. The phrase "Inherent Vice" refers to "the tendency in physical objects to deteriorate because of the fundamental instability of the components of which they are made, as opposed to deterioration caused by external forces"-a mouthful that refers simultaneously to the characters, their city, their nation, and the particular historical period that has defined all of it, and that is already passing into memory when "Inherent Vice" begins. As such, it's a great people-watching film, showcasing a diverse cast whose performances are the acting equivalent of self-caricatures rendered under the influence: the line goes where it goes. Mostly it's a long, shaggy, knockabout comedy about eccentrics who pursue their own appetites and manias and indulge their private demons while remaining oblivious to their effect on others. As adapted and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it's a historical and political picture about The American Soul, though not too strenuously so. films such as " The Long Goodbye" and " Cisco Pike," but it never makes too big a deal of that lineage. It owes a great deal to laid-back, character-and-atmosphere driven 1970s L.A. But " Vice" is a richer, deeper, sweeter, equally funny movie. This is just one small part of what makes it distinctive.Īdapted from Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel, the movie has been compared by many to the Coen brothers' " The Big Lebowski," a drug-fueled LA comedy with a similarly labyrinthian mystery (or "mystery") and some shared themes. With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, LAPD Detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists… Part surf noir, part psychedelic romp – all Thomas Pynchon."Inherent Vice" is a film about a stoner which itself seems stoned. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic `60s and paranoia is running the day and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” that’s being way too overused – except this one usually leads to trouble. When private eye Doc Sportello’s ex-old lady suddenly out of nowhere shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a looney bin…well, easy for her to say. “Inherent Vice” is the seventh feature from Paul Thomas Anderson and the first ever film adaption of a Thomas Pynchon novel. Here’s the official synopsis for Inherent Vice:
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