movies

[33anda3rd]

As a Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice leaves so much missing from the book, and I'm not talking plot points, like dropping the [expletive] Eaters Special after the first bit on that, or Doc's parents coming to visit or abbreviating the Club Asiatique scene, or only showing Aunt Reet once, etc. That stuff clearly has to come out so it's not The Spoils of Babylon. I'm talking the stuff that makes a Pynchon story a Pynchon story. The background soundtrack of made-up pop songs, the extreme scatalogical humor, the cartoonishness and the fixation on cartoon and other pop culture characters, the sexual kink, entropy. That stuff is typically wall-to-wall in Pynchon books and are signatures of his work. They're mostly missing in the film. The depth of relationships Pynchon nails a lot better than PTA as well. Anderson is good with relationships where either there's a power struggle or it's clear that one party is the dominating party in the relationship. Pynchon is better with the deeper ones, like Doc and Shasta in this book, and especially Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake in GR. The Doc/Shasta thing feels mild in the movie compared to the book. For me, "Paul Thomas Anderson adapts Thomas Pynchon to the screen" is about as big a turn on as "Hi, I'm Kate Upton. Wanna [expletive]?" It was a letdown in that regard. I feel like PTA left too much of Pynchon's personality out, focusing on one big concern of Pynchon--"does this all mean anything, or is life one big interconnected conspiracy"--and running with just that. I'd rather have seen the movie go at Road Runner speed with all that Pynchon cartoonishness on top of the central theme.

As a film on it's own merits, it's ok. Probably Anderson's worst. It's funny. It's well-acted. Brolin's pretty funny. It's well-shot. It's like a C. It's nothing special.

[Jocephus]

i repeat, wolfcop, anybody?

[JL21]

Sorry, Jefe. I haven't seen or even heard of it.

[Jocephus]

worst movie review site ever

[cardinalkarp]

just finished The Interview and...............sorry haters but it was great.

Not much mention of it in this thread (that I found), but watched it yesterday and found myself laughing more than I thought I would. It's not gonna be one of the classic go to comedies (by any stretch), or probably have the following to become a cult type classic....but that said it's definitely worth the $5.99 to rent it on Amazon or VOD to check it out.

Definitely better than what I was expecting, although I had pretty low expectations.

[The Third Man]

And more importantly, my biggest pet peeve- never compare the book to the movie or vice versa. Because: 1. You go in with a pre-concieved unfair notion of what the film HAS to be, which isn't fair to the film, and 2. They're different art forms, meant to be taken as they are and on their own merits.

I agree. I'm just making the comparison, cuz, well, it's Pynchon, I worship at the guy's feet.

33 - I agree that ideally Inherent Vice would've moved at a much more frenetic, off-the-wall pace.

[IMADreamer]

We watched Get On Up last night. Guess who is jamming to James Brown today?

Good movie, I enjoyed it, and it reminded me just how much I love me some of that James Brown funk.

We watched that in this tiny little theater in Elsberry, Missouri. Probably the coolest theater I've een in because it's still pretty much 1950 there. It was great. We really enjoyed the movie too.

Love Tower of Power and Rocco Prestia is a god.

[slide_into_first]

Are 3rd Man and 33 1/3 related?

[33anda3rd]

And more importantly, my biggest pet peeve- never compare the book to the movie or vice versa. Because: 1. You go in with a pre-concieved unfair notion of what the film HAS to be, which isn't fair to the film, and 2. They're different art forms, meant to be taken as they are and on their own merits.

I agree. I'm just making the comparison, cuz, well, it's Pynchon, I worship at the guy's feet.

33 - I agree that ideally Inherent Vice would've moved at a much more frenetic, off-the-wall pace.

In principle I agree about adaptations, but we're not talking about Grisham or Danielle Steele, we're talking about the Greatest Living Author and the first film adaptation of his work. Pynchon acolytes like me and TTM are expecting something that honors the tone, pace, sense of humor, structure* of a Pynchon book, and in Inherent Vice that is lacking.

*Re structure, there is more fractured narrative and flashback in a single chapter of Pynchon than there is in the entirety of, say, Pulp Fiction or Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Pynchon will start a chapter in a place, go back, go back again, go back again, break the narrative entirely, go back some more, then drop you back where you started after going through a century of time in six different places. It adds to the paranoia/confusion aspect that's in all his work, and other than the scene where Doc and Shasta Fay flash back to a Ouija board thing with Sortilege** it's absent from Ineherent Vice.

**Re Sortilege as narrator, normally the stuff she's saying (much directly quoted from the book) is, in the book, a character's internal monologue. Again, this is part of the fun of Pynchon and it adds to the paranoia/confusion (which should lend itself nicely to a neo-noir) in his work. "Is it You or is it a big plot by Them? You better figure it out quick, Jackson, because They are coming for you" is all over the work of Pynchon. If it registers as Doc's own internal monologue instead of a voiceover by Sortilege (who the film does not do a good job of portraying the way she is in the book--a psychic whose powers seem real***--it's better.

***That part of the book where Doc gets LSD-dosed by Sortilege's mentor/guru is so fun and illuminates Doc's situation so damn well, and it's the one movement from the book that I'm sad did not make it to the film. In that acid trip he sees Shasta Fay on The Golden Fang (the boat) and knows she's ok and out there alive for him to find.

[The Third Man]

PTA certainly acquitted himself at adapting the melancholy and humanism of a Pynchon novel, but he's too much of a formalist to really go off-the-walls to the extent that capturing Pynchon onscreen would require. I'm happy with what we got, but it was certainly not what I pictured in my head.

*Re structure, there is more fractured narrative and flashback in a single chapter of Pynchon than there is in the entirety of, say, Pulp Fiction or Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Pynchon will start a chapter in a place, go back, go back again, go back again, break the narrative entirely, go back some more, then drop you back where you started after going through a century of time in six different places. It adds to the paranoia/confusion aspect that's in all his work, and other than the scene where Doc and Shasta Fay flash back to a Ouija board thing with Sortilege** it's absent from Inherent Vice.

The best part is how subtly he's capable of doing that. Nobody segues like Pynchon, it might take you a full paragraph before you even realize you're in a different timeline.