Inherent Vice - 2014

"Inherent Vice"  - 2014
Dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson - 2 hrs. 28 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

"Inherent Vice" ended up being a nearly perfect situation for me.  I'd read the book when it came out, and really enjoyed it (it was my first Thomas Pynchon novel, and I was lured in by the notion of his doing a detective story), but it's been just long enough since I've read the book that I'd forgotten a lot of the details, and thus could just kick back and enjoy the movie and still be surprised from time to time.  So that way, I got to enjoy the story twice.  For those who aren't in the same boat, I think this version of "Inherent Vice" is shaggy enough, clever enough, funny enough, and nicks tone from "The Big Lebowski" (and "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, for that matter) enough that it's going to be a good time for a lot of people.

In 1970, in a beach community in Los Angeles, there lives a detective named Larry "Doc" Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix).  He's constantly referred to as either "doper" or "hippie," both of which are dead on.  An old flame, Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston), with a new look shows up at his pad in the middle of the night, asking for help and playing off his unresolved feelings for her.  The entire problem rests on locating her current fella, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), who is a big-time developer, is being targeted for his fortune by his wife and her lover, and who have offered to cut Shasta in.  But Mickey disappears, and Doc gets drawn further and further into a very complicated story.

Quickly, I felt that the movie did justice to the source material, and also was an entertaining movie on it's own.  I doubt that enough people read "Inherent Vice" for there to be a need to adhere to the source material word-by-word, in order to avoid outraged throngs.  The biggest things were that the film was cast very well, preserved (and in some cases, amplified) the shaggy tone of the novel, and that it worked as a film.  That's what matters to me, so no need to get further into that.

I have read a number of detective/crime stories over the years; aside from comedy, it's my mindless entertainment genre of choice.  The stock tropes of detective stories largely have been unchanged since Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, and Dashiell Hammett put pen to paper; it's liquor, bullets, being wronged by beautiful women while trying to untangle a knot of cords.  It works.  But if you're going to make a story in that vein currently, you're competing against nearly 100 years solid of very, very good work, all taking up residency on the bookshelf next to your attempts.  So as much as I enjoy reading that kind of story, it's also fun to see someone try to twist the genre on it's ear.  If you change the liquor to weed and psychedelics, you end up with something like "Inherent Vice."  Or, like I mentioned before, "The Big Lebowski" or "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas."  But you don't see attempts like this often, because the old formula still works just fine.  And that's one of the reasons that "Inherent Vice" stands out.

The tone of this film, especially compared with other detective stories, is kind of light.  Or a bit hazy.  There are lots of awful things going on, but the only person who ever seems to get mad is Bigfoot (Josh Brolin), a police officer who seems to have a love/hate relationship with Doc.  Everyone else is a little fuzzy, maybe a bit nostalgic or rueful, but as would befit the life of Doc, everything seems kind of tranquilized.  And when things get hairy, they actually get funnier, because the notion that any of these people (other than a handful of squares) could manage to organize crime in any meaningful way is kind of funny.

For me, the main appeal of the film was the tone of it.  The story itself makes sense, although it meanders at times, and it's interesting enough to keep one's attention.  But the fact of the matter is that the world of "Inherent Vice" is populated with some real weirdos, Doc being one of the least of them.  And seeing how they bump up against each other is like 75% of the fun.  So a lot of the credit for that has to go to the casting, and the performances of the cast themselves.  Joaquin Phoneix carries the movie, always looking like he's trying to figure something out that's just out of his grasp.  His big foil, Bigfoot, played by Josh Brolin, starts off as an asshole, ends up offering a lot of understanding for how he got that way, and spends the meantime doing things that make you wonder if he's trolling people or acting in a way that he's not aware of.  There are a lot of smaller roles that shine as well, especially Martin Short (in a purple velvet suit, even) and Owen Wilson.  Then there are all the women, all of whom are attracted to Doc, even if they don't want to be.  The biggie is Shasta, played by Katherine Waterston, who subtly pulls on and plays with Doc in ways that borderline on maliciousness, but her behavior and the on-screen relationship with Phoenix feels very real, and at times gives the scenes a voyeuristic uncomfortableness.

I'm not going to pretend that "Inherent Vice" is one of the greatest detective stories ever committed to film, but it's a highly entertaining one, and one that's different from most.  It has a distinctive feel, and the nearly two and a half hour runtime flies by.  There are some great performances here, and the story is solid enough to lay a good foundation for the hazy tone that's the real draw here.  And when you see the scene with Bigfoot eating a frozen banana, I defy you to tell me "Inherent Vice" isn't a fun movie.

4 / 5 - Theatre

Guardians of the Galaxy - 2014

"Guardians of the Galaxy" - 2014
Dir. by James Gunn - 2 hrs. 1 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

By now, I have a good expectation for what I want to get out of a "Marvel Movie."  I mean, after three Iron Mans, two Captain Americas and two Thors, and the best of the lot, "The Avengers," there's a certain approach, charm, and skill that are an expected part of the package.  Thankfully, the first movie since the first "Iron Man" that doesn't have any real continuity propping it up completely fulfills that promise.  "Guardians of the Galaxy" is a little funnier, a little weirder than the "Avengers" line of films, but still has the familiar banter set against people in very tight outfits punching the crap out of everything in sight.

Peter Quill, you may know him by his other name, Star Lord (Chris Pratt), is abducted from Earth as a child, and has grown into something of an a-hole (the film's words, to be clear).  He's like a younger Han Solo, looting everything he can get his hands on (including, and especially women).  One of his jobs involves retrieving an orb from a desolate, formerly populated planet, but it turns out that he's not the only person interested in it, nor the only person on the planet.  A lot people are very focused on this orb, which eventually lands Star Lord, a pair of bounty hunters in the form of a very unpleasant intelligent raccoon named Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and a giant tree person named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), and a cosmic deity's adopted daughter, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in the slammer together.  With Drax's (Dave Bautista) help, they all break out of this space prison, with the goal of selling the orb, getting rich, and heading their different ways.  Which is, of course, exactly how things play out.

On one hand, I kind of envy people who are introduced to material like this for the first time, and through film.  Being a long-time comics reader, a talking raccoon bounty-hunter and his tree-based Chewbacca is the sort of thing that you just take for granted in comics.  That's not to say that it doesn't come across as weird when you're reading it, but it's there in ink just like everything else, and you accept that things like this are part of the deal.  But if you don't have that background, a film like "Guardians of the Galaxy" might come off like a surrealist action film, where insanity is the rule, and nothing makes any sense.  It would be awesome to see "Guardians" under those circumstances.  But I knew about Rocket and Groot way before the film, so I wasn't really struck by the weirdness of them.  They're just characters, albeit ones you might not run across in real life.  One of the achievements of "Guardians" is that both characters (well, all of the Guardians, really) are well-rounded enough that you can just take them as characters, and not have their very existence be a hit-or-miss joke.

Visually, there's plenty to feast on.  The cosmic backgrounds that are a part of the Thor films are everywhere here (and so much fun to look at).  There are tie-fighter...  I mean spaceship shoot-outs, there's hand-to-hand combat, there's chases, there's escapes...  I know that I keep making "Star Wars" references here, but "Guardians" really feels like a film made in the Cantina, in a world made up solely of Cantinas.  Only instead of the Cantina band, we've got Star Lord's mix tape of '70s and '80s soft-rock hits.  Normally, I'd instinctively hate anything that borrows so heavily from "Star Wars," but it works here.  "Guardians" is tight, action-filled, clever, and layered with great dialogue (there are at least a couple of instances of people misunderstanding Star Lord's colloquialisms, to great effect).  It's also been cast extremely well; Pratt is a great lead character, because he's able to be crude and awful at times, but with a lack of malice that suits the movie well.  Dave Bautista (WWE's Batista) does a great job playing a straight man, and also seems comfortable spending an entire film with no shirt on.  Rocket and Groot are fun together, and are integrated into the live-action material seamlessly.

In a broader sense, the one thing that I hate about the Marvel movies is that they've applied the "Fantastic Four" bickering-family dynamic to every team, and every interaction, and yet we still don't have a good FF movie, and even if they completely nail it next time around, the dynamic will seem old, or at least familiar.  Each of the teams (at least in the comics world) have their own personality, but the Guardians interact in pretty much the same way that the Avengers do.  And both teams act the way that the Fantastic Four do/did originally.  That's perhaps my only complaint about "Guardians," that there's a plug-and-play element to the interaction between the characters, even if the details do keep the characters distinct.  Also, in "Guardians'" favor, Gamora used the phrase "pelvic sorcery," which goes a long way with me.

I think there's almost no way anyone's going to be disappointed with "Guardians of the Galaxy."  If you've been on the "Avengers" ride since "Iron Man," no problem.  If this is the first "Marvel Movie" you've seen, probably even better!  "Guardians" is a fun ride, tonally consistent with the films that have preceded it, and has a lot of familiar faces in it.  I was happy to see the bit on the credits that said the Guardians would return.  I'm not sure what that means - another film, or being incorporated into an Avengers sequel - and I'm not going to research to figure it out.  I'll be happy to see them show up again in whatever form.  Any complaints that I have with "Guardians" is pretty much down to having seen enough movies in this series to start seeing duplication in structure and approach, and that I was never a fan of the comics, but I still enjoyed the film, and I'm pretty sure everyone else will, too.  It's a crowd-pleaser, not a challenging art film, and it delivers completely on that front.

3.5 / 5 - Theatre (3D)