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Inherent Vice (New Paul Thomas Anderson)

Started by Garam, September 02, 2014, 03:25:14 PM

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Garam



This is bound to have a trailer soon. It's premiere is at the NYFF in 4 weeks, and it still doesn't have a trailer or even poster out yet.


Adaptation of 2009 novel Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, about a pot-smoking Private Dick in 1970 LA investigating a missing musician. And about a billion other things cause it's Pynchon. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson and a billion other cameos in true Pynchon style, including Joanna Newsom and Omar from The Wire. Soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood. First reports are that it's REALLY weird, and shifts in tone hugely. 148 minutes. Limited release December 12th, Wide Release January 30th.


I've never been so excited for a film, I think. I've been following this casually since it was first announced in 2009, weeks after the book was published. It's the first Pynchon adaptation ever. The fact that a trailer hasn't even been released yet is killing me.

Quote"Wild movie. You know, it's the first [Thomas] Pynchon film adaptation, and it really catches his tone," New York Film Festival director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones says, discussing Inherent Vice. "It really catches the antic nature of him: the crazy names of characters, the nutty behavior, and then also the emotional undertone. It has the flavor of Pynchon. It has this Big Lebowski element to one side of it, but the emotional undertone, the desperation, the paranoia, and the yearning in the film... [Paul Thomas Anderson's] an absolutely amazing filmmaker and it's incredible to see him responding to someone else's creation and then building his own creation out of it. He sort of did that with There Will Be Blood, but not really. It's his own movie, inspired by the novel Oil!"
Along with sharing the photo below, featuring star Joaquin Phoenix, Jones went on to discuss his personal reaction to the film, saying, "I was born in 1960, but I certainly remember 1971 very well and I gotta say, from the minute the movie started to the minute it ended, I was back—way back—to the point where I was thinking "Gee, my son was born in the '90s." So it's a different kind of relationship that he would have. It's an amazing piece of work, and at this point Joaquin Phoenix and Paul have something so rare between them as an actor and director, and Sam Waterston's daughter, Katherine, is in it, and she's riveting every minute she's on screen. It's quite a film." It sounds like we're in for something truly special, and as we await the first trailer, one can see the new image below.

Peru

Equally excited - ridiculously so, in fact. I can't believe we've got a Pynchon movie coming from one of the best directors working at the moment. I don't feel like there's any risk it's going to end up being duff.

It seems fashionable to hate on the book, but I actually really liked it. It seems that some people just want every Pynchon novel to be an encyclopedic historical travelogue like GR, M&D or ATD. I think the book is a really powerfully melancholy piece of work, and of course extremely funny. The casting of Brolin is just beyond perfect, too.

falafel

Novel was great. I agree, it was a welcome surprise for him to have come up with something so compact. This film will be good, I'm sure, and probably incredible, but don't want to count my chickens.



But Christ, did you read that one that came out lasr year? Genuinely terrible.

Sam

I loved The Master to bits, top-notch film making. I think PTA is a very good director. A very good director indeed.

Johnny Textface

Still not seen The Master due to uninspiring word of mouth. Can you sell it? I love all PTAs films apart from Hard Eight which I thought was distinctly average. 

Sam

A couple of posts on this page with me banging on about it:

http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=31796.60

Short version: well directed, well written, well-acted, well framed, well lit, well edited, well scored, well designed...what's not to like?

Johnny Textface

No story or point is what I heard, and slightly meandering.
But will find out for myself this weekend.

ThickAndCreamy

Very, very excited about this. Paul Thomas Anderson is probably my favourite working director and I've yet to not obsessively love one of his films. It's rare to find a director who manages to make nearly every shot in every film he makes look so perfect and memorable.

Sam

Quote from: Johnny Textface on September 06, 2014, 08:10:09 AM
No story or point is what I heard, and slightly meandering.

Sounds good, and I'd be worried if was anything else.

Old Nehamkin

Quote from: Johnny Textface on September 06, 2014, 08:10:09 AM
No story or point is what I heard, and slightly meandering.

Well, there definitely is a story; It's hardly Inland Empire or anything, it follows a set of characters for the duration and events progress in chronological order. Whether it has a point or not is up to yooouuu to decide, but I thought it left me with quite a bit to think about. It looks really nice, Phoenix and Hoffman are both really compelling, it does get a bit meandering but I don't think that's always a bad thing.

On a sidenote, after watching The Master I read Lawrence Wright's recent book Going Clear, which chronicles L. Ron Hubbard's life, the origins of Scientology and its expansion in the following decades under him and then his successor David Miscavige. It's brilliant and works as a really good companion to the film; Hoffman's character had a lot more depth to me after reading about the many dimensions of Hubbard's insane personality, as did Phoenix's after learning about the methods by which the Scientologists indoctrinate and bind their recruits. Well worth reading, that book.

zomgmouse

PTA seems to be one of those directors who's too far up their own arse to do Pynchon properly. There's so much humanity and humour in Pynchon that I think PTA might just play it straight, and the thought of that annoys me. But I'll reserve judgment till I see it, which I will - not because I like PTA but because I like Pynchon.

(Though I'm not surprised Inherent Vice is the one film that's being adapted; it's perhaps the most accessible of what I've read of Pynchon so far.)

Garam

Totally disagree with that, his films are full of comedy and humanity. Even There Will Be Blood has its laughs. Don't think he's up his own arse either, he always comes across pretty well in interviews. I think PTA and Pynchon are totally compatible. Even Pynchon himself is elated that it's him that's making the first adaptation.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

I am hoping it will be more like classic amazing one of the best films ever made of any era, stone cold belter There Will Be Blood.

I am hoping it will be less like threadless assortment of individually meritorious scenes resulting in thunderously unresolved muddle The Master.

Queneau

Quote from: Garam on September 10, 2014, 03:56:14 PM
Totally disagree with that, his films are full of comedy

Likewise. Although, I'm going mostly by his earlier work as I haven't seen any of the more recent efforts.

As we can see from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbanWHx5AFQ

And here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2FCCZ50VU

Particularly like the second one.

Paisley

Cigarettes & Red Vines is probably the best place for updates on this. We're inching closer to a trailer:

http://cigsandredvines.blogspot.co.uk/



Sam

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on September 10, 2014, 10:13:39 PM
I am hoping it will be less like threadless assortment of individually meritorious scenes resulting in thunderously unresolved muddle The Master.

Tsk. When those narrative stabilisers come off you'll be able to ride the bike of non-linearity like a big boy!

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Im just talking about the faults in this specific film The Master where a more linear narrative and resolution wouldve improved it, in my view.

I enjoy plenty of films without a linear narrative. Try discussing films without being a patronising twat please.

Sam

Well, I was being exaggeratedly condescending for humorous effect.

I think the Master is pretty much perfect, and that it's only non-linear in a superficial sense; in reality the way the film progresses and gets tied up is in perfect accordance with its subject matter and themes. In other words, 'content dictates form' - about as traditional as you can get.


Queneau


Funcrusher

#19
Another thread where Sam argues that anyone who doesn't like a film he likes just doesn't get it because their tiny mind is being blown by a vaguely non linear narrative (which is hardly anything new), and because they're not dead brainy like what he is.

I'm with Shoulders, 'The Master' is an underwhelming mixed bag of a film. I'm not so wild about 'There Will Be Blood' either.

At the time of 'Magnolia' and 'Punch Drunk Love' it wasn't that controversial to argue that PTA was a director of distinctly uneven films - full of good moments, but some not so effective ones as well, that failed to cohere into a satisfying whole. The feeling I got leaving both TWBB and The Master is that I'd just seen a powerful and effective ending, that looked like the culmination of a film which had been skillfully building towards a thematic and narrative climax, but that the film that preceded it was not that film. He's still making uneven films for me, and not wholly in control of his material, but he's putting the best bit at the end and sending the viewer out feeling they've seen a masterpiece. It's fine to  work deliberately in some intuitive, more free form, improvisational, non linear manner, but that doesn't give you a defense against any and all criticism that the finished film doesn't work.

I remember enjoying Gravitys Rainbow and Crying of Lot 43, but I read Vineland recently and just hated it, so recentish Pynchon doesn't seem to be for me. Its problem for me, apart from humour that wasn't that funny, was endless amounts of kooky inventiveness in terms of character's indiosyncracies, wacky backstories, conspiracy gubbins etc, which in and of itself don't make interesting fiction for me, and then being expected to care about characters and situations that were just endless whimsical riffing and showing off. It's the sort of material that would bring out the worst of PTA for me, but I'll give it a look I guess, unless the reviews are really dire.

undeliberated

As a mini-aside, in terms of 'recentish Pynchon', I'd have to stick up for Mason & Dixon - I think it's his best novel; his most coherent take on history and possibility, his best set of characters, his most consistently beautiful prose, his lowest proportion of mere Wackiness.  Joshua Ferris starts to get at just how good it is in his little piece here - http://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2014/sep/12/booker-prize-american-novels-that-should-have-won

Still, precisely because the best Pynchon novels are the ones that emphasise things you can only do in prose (GR's world-hopping sentences, M&D's history-hopping simultaneously-multi-era-referential prose, both of which feed into the novels' wider interest in past historical possibility's viable presence in the present), I'm really not too bothered about the Inherent Vice film apart from being pleased that it'll get a lot of people interested in Pynchon (and then they'll start with this fine-but-not-mindblowing novel and wonder what all the fuss is about and never get around to bothering with the great two). 

Fiction-publishing currently seems to operate on the assumption that the best-case-scenario for a book is to be so good that someone makes a film of it.  This downplays the idea that film and prose fiction as media conduce to doing different things well, to investigating different questions.  This then minimises the market (or at least the marketing budget) for books whose compositional interest is in anything other than the elements (plot, description, setting) that are easily portable to film.  It's doubly an issue when people make films of books that Are prose-specific in their interest (see any adaptation of post-Turn-of-the-Screw Henry James, where the hyper-precise prose of attention-and-deliberation psychology gets reduced to costume, setting, posh accents and an occasional slow zoom on someone's face looking pensive).  Inherent Vice (like all post-M&D Pynchon) isn't too reliant on the prose to do what's interesting about it, so I can imagine it making a pretty cool film without huge losses.  But precisely on that basis it's hard to get any more excited about than, say, the adaptation of Gone Girl. 

And then the basic question arises of why not spend the limited amount of studio time, money, and effort on a project that was conceived start-to-finish for film?  The fascination with and interest in book->film adaptations has always been baffling to me, but we now have a fiction-publishing industry that is completely premised on them. I don't think it's much good for literature or for cinema.

Sam

Quote from: Funcrusher on September 13, 2014, 12:06:24 PM
Another thread where Sam argues that anyone who doesn't like a film he likes just doesn't get it because their tiny mind is being blown by a vaguely non linear narrative (which is hardly anything new), and because they're not dead brainy like what he is.

Even though my post to Shoulders was a joke; my previous post said it's a simple film that doesn't need clever analysis to like; the links I posted had long recommendations to include rather than exclude people; I praised the cinematography, design, acting and themes far more than the narrative; and I also admitted to being primed and biased towards liking it.

In those old posts I was complaining about the anti-intellectualism of a shoddy journalist who said 'you're not getting an enjoyable film, you're getting a masterpiece' as if the two are mutually exclusive.

I don't recall picking on anyone in these threads for not liking it (aside from the ribbing for Shoulders above, not to be taken at face-value). In fact if you look back at what I've said about the film I've got nothing but joy and positivity for it (whilst also repeatedly acknowledging that it just happens to fit my sensibility and be up my street, which is why I like it).

It's post like yours which are more annoying, surely, sniping and sucking the positivity out of everything with personal attacks.

Funcrusher

Quote from: Sam on September 13, 2014, 07:46:00 PM
Even though my post to Shoulders was a joke; my previous post said it's a simple film that doesn't need clever analysis to like; the links I posted had long recommendations to include rather than exclude people; I praised the cinematography, design, acting and themes far more than the narrative; and I also admitted to being primed and biased towards liking it.

In those old posts I was complaining about the anti-intellectualism of a shoddy journalist who said 'you're not getting an enjoyable film, you're getting a masterpiece' as if the two are mutually exclusive.

I don't recall picking on anyone in these threads for not liking it (aside from the ribbing for Shoulders above, not to be taken at face-value). In fact if you look back at what I've said about the film I've got nothing but joy and positivity for it (whilst also repeatedly acknowledging that it just happens to fit my sensibility and be up my street, which is why I like it).

It's post like yours which are more annoying, surely, sniping and sucking the positivity out of everything with personal attacks.

Shoulders called you a patronising twat, that's as bad as what I said! I was just being a bit sarky really. You're an interesting poster who has plenty to add to discussions. I guess we've all been guilty of using 'you don't get it' as a counter argument over the years, but it's nae good. I'm not that wild about PTA as I said above, but I watch plenty of films which are unconventional and well outside hollywood norms.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Sorry to take what seemed a fairly unambiguous insult as such, no grudge kept or felt.

Garam


Paisley

First interview with Anderson is up on the NY Times. In it he's coy about a Pynchon cameo, talks about the influence of Airplane and Police Squad on the movie, and it's revealed that the film's narrated by Joanna Newsom:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/movies/paul-thomas-anderson-films-inherent-vice.html?ref=movies

The most exciting thing I took away from the article is the news that Anderson "wrote an outrageous new ending for the film that deviates significantly from the novel." I remember when The Master came out celebrity panhandler Boyd Hilton (filling in for Kermode on 5live) tried to dismiss Anderson by claiming he didn't know how to end his movies. But I've always loved how he wraps up his films; Magnolia and There Will Be Blood[nb]The New Yorker review of There Will Be Blood argues that the ending is Anderson's attempt to resist canonisation. There's probably some truth to this. I'm sure it would have won even more awards had he given it a more conventional ending.[/nb]especially. Even The Master, which kind of trickles to a conclusion, ends (off the top of my head) with Freddie Quell giggling 'cos his dick slipped out of that girl's vagina.

Edit: Garam beat me too it.


phantom_power

That looks awesome. The flailing thing that Phoenix does when he gets hit in the head near the end is one of the funniest bits of physical comedy I have seen in ages

Garam


mobias

Are there any fan edits of Magnolia out there that cut away about a quarter of the film? There's such a great movie in there if it wasn't so utterly bloated and self indulgent. I've read that PTA himself thinks its overly long. I've often wondered if he'd ever do a directors cut of it that trimmed it up a bit and made it a bit shorter.