![]() ![]() One moment the hammerhead’s beating Doc senseless or kicking in his door and trashing his stash, the next, they’re at a comfy roadside dinner and Bigfoot is ordering pancakes. detective who has an estranged bro-mance with Doc. He’s a flat-top, GOP voting, hippie-hating, counter-culture squashing L.A. If you could fuse Jack Webb from Dragnet with Nick Nolte and stir in a dash of Ted Cruz, you’d have Bigfoot. Then there’s Josh Brolin as Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. The most bizarre scene features Martin Short as a coke-propelled dentist who acts out his sudden sexual urges with a comely aide. Inherent Vice‘s plot isn’t as far out as most of its characters, and there may be more breaks into sudden feverish sex than doobies get fired up. Thing is, Shasta then goes missing herself and another trippy lass, Hope (Jenna Malone), enlists Doc to locate Hope’s husband (Owen Wilson), a jazz musician who may or may not moonlight as a police informant, CIA operative, or UFO abductee. Shasta wants to figure out why her current boyfriend’s wife (Serena Scott Thomas) is scheming to have her hubby (Eric Roberts) placed in a sanatorium and take all his money. ![]() The PI’s ex, a nubile hippie chick by the name of Shasta (Katherine Waterson in a breakout role) hires Doc. Like Chinatown, land rights and family plots lie at the film’s MacGuffin-driven core. Throughout, the scruffy sleuth, remarkably and gainfully employed, maintains a steadfast commitment to the task at hand and remains nonplused even as goons come crashing through his door or a naked ex-girlfriend drops in and explains how she was a sex slave to a notorious real-estate mogul. For most, this would be a professional liability, especially as Doc’s a private eye. He smokes so much weed he’s in a continual, near catatonic state and stutters and muddles his way through matters with disheveled nonchalance. Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) might just be the apogee of the antihero archetype. Both built around a contemptuous antihero ensnared in an enigma that pulls a rich potpourri of persona down into a vortex of serpentining madness. The latter takes place well before Vice, but in plot - a pulpy mystery built around a contemptuous antihero - Vice and Chinatown couldn’t be more alike. Its true core aptly lies akin to Robert Altman’s elegiac The Long Goodbye and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. ![]() But besides some droll tongue-in-cheek reefer moments and the copious amount of weed burned, Vice shares little with these films. ![]() One could argue that Inherent Vice is a stoner movie of sorts that could live in the company of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Big Lebowski. The stalwart indie director -who proved his ability to handle the opus works of literary lions by spinning Upton Sinclair’s Oil! into There Will be Blood - delves deep into Thomas Pychon’s far-roaming 2009 novel with baroque gusto. In texture it’s an ode to the psychedelic ‘70s of free love and rampant recreational drug use.Īnderson’s always been a contemplative filmmaker with a keen sense of perverse quirk, and those qualities really come to the fore in Inherent Vice, a gumshoe noir on LSD if ever there was one. Anderson’s latest, Inherent Vice, is no exception. Ron Hubbard-like charlatan in the wake WWII while There Will be Blood negotiated the nasty, avaricious early roots of the American oil grab. Boogie Nights welcomed in the rise of the porn industry during the flared-pant, disco-fueled ‘70s the more nuanced The Master took up the arc of an L. Clearly Paul Thomas Anderson has a thing for the storied eras of America’s past. ![]()
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