Review of Inherent Vice (2014) by Alberto A — 11 Jan 2015

I will try and explain Incoherent Vice with a shit ton of analogies, so bear with me. Paul Thomas Andersonâ??s new film is like having a conversation with that person we are all friends with that ALWAYS goes off on a tangent when telling a story, and then after an hour or two, they come back. Inherent Vice tells a story, and then it deviates to another story, that deviates to another story, that talks about a character, that then is also reminded of that other character, which reminds him another character, and so on. Lost are we? Well that, in the smallest explanation I could think of, is Inherent Vice.

I have no idea how faithful this is to the source material, I heard it was, but I donâ??t really care, because the book by Thomas Pynchon might be very good, and it might work perfectly for literature. However, film is NOT literature (really?), and I can not go and watch a movie and make a goddamn family tree to remember all the names and situations and how everything is connected to everything as if Iâ??m reading Anna Karenina. Iâ??m sure everything is connected and if I really try hard I would find the sense in all of this, but the way the movie was presented to me made me lose all interest in the story whatsoever. I didnâ??t care about Doc and his obsession with Shasta, I didnâ??t care about his drives as a character, I didnâ??t care about the situations in the movie. Sortilegeâ??s narration was just very confusing, it went off on a tangent once every 10 words and made everything confusing. Iâ??m sure thatâ??s probably how the book is, but when reading, you have time to analyze the meaning and the subtext of the composition, in a film there is no time unless the director allows you to. This is why I believe the movie failed and it sucks because I am a Paul Thomas Anderson fan, whose style can still be seen in Inherent Vice, but the film is just so convoluted on purpose that even if it is meant to be seen more times, I donâ??t really want to waste more time watching it because the story itself is not worth it. Although I do have to say that the cast is really good, Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin really nailed it.