Hacker Cinema
Inherent Vice
2014 · Film · 149 min
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
In Los Angeles at the turn of the 1970s, drug-fueled detective Larry "Doc" Sportello investigates the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend.
6 positive1 negative7 neutralfrom 14 commenters
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18 comments on Hacker News
Second Inherent Vice as a book, also a brilliant film.
Apparently the new Paul Thomas Anderson film "One Battle After Another" is inspired by Vineland after the director adapted Inherent Vice previously.
I've read four Thomas Pynchon novels, probably the shortest and most accessible four:
The Crying of Lot 49, Bleeding Edge, Inherent Vice, and Vineland.
I have Gravity's Rainbow and Against The Day sitting in my bookcase, intimidating me with their voluminousity. I dare not start them for fear of how long they will take to finish.
Despite this, I look forward to any new Pynchon publications. This new one will take its place on my bookshelf, no doubt.
P.S. Inherent Vice is a great movie. Somewhat of a spiritual sequel to The Big Lebowsky.
I think mouth of madness maybe makes it. It's isn't always about reality being 'bent' in the fiction of the movie. It's also how the mood of the film contributes. For instance I would not put fight club on this list. I might consider seven. Zodiac has the mood but is missing something... I'm not sure I would put much fincher on the list personally, though I like many of his films.
Not Fincher, but a late edition. I would put PTAs 'Inherent Vice' on the list if I could edit it.
I absolutely love Inherent Vice, both book and film. Really good fun, like The Big Lebowski's edgier cousin.
As a little push to watch the Inherent Vice movie, I feel like it's a spiritual successor the The Big Lebowski.
I'd strongly recommend the Inherent Vice movie; a neo noir detective movie featuring a hippie detective nearly too stoned to keep track of a particularly LA conspiracy.
My gateway drug was the Inherent Vice movie, after that I started with the Crying of Lot 49 and workes my way through his oeuvre. That's when I realized what literature was for and started reading like a madman ever since. Ony Marcel Proust perhaps bests Pynchon.
Start with The Crying of Lot 49, which is dense-ish but short, then Bleeding Edge, which is longer but closer to the storyline of a traditional novelist, and is semi-sci-fi.
I then proceeded to Inherent Vice (because of the movie) and then Vineland. Vineland was difficult and heavy in parts, but I enjoyed it overall (the whole chapter on how the protagonist describes the receiving of a business card feels like some kind of fever dream). I own Gravity's Rainbow, but haven't yet had the courage to open to page 1.
It's not really the idea of it being dramatic, but how the story was developed and written.
I found The Master and Inherent Vice truly disappointing. I actually liked Phantom Thread, but it's not a movie I will ever watch again.
I feel his writing has gotten worse over the years, probably because he is considered a genius and left to do whatever he wishes. This is all my subjective opinion of course and I still haven't seen Licorice Pizza.
You don’t find a character poisoning her husband (maybe to kill him at first) dramatic?
That said, I agree they are different, but I love _The Master_ more dearly than most all films. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the source novel for _Inherent Vice_ so not super into that film. Loved _Phantom Thread_.
It's a wonderful tune -- I was an instant fan hearing it in the movie Inherent Vice.
The Divided Self + The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise + The Politics of the Family - all by RD Laing
Civilization and its Discontents - Freud
Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher
Gateless Gate - Mu-men? Very old Chinese mystical text that somehow resonated w me considerably..
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Snowcrash - Neal Stephenson
Inherent Vice (currently reading and enjoying a lot! - loved the movie so much I got the book but I think I enjoy the book way more even) - Thomas Pynchon
I haven't seen Inherent Vice, but I totally agree about No Country for Old Men. One of the differences there might be that both of those movies were made by very accomplished directors, Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers respectively. They might have the confidence to put their own interpretation of the story into their movie that lesser known directors dont feel comfortable doing.
> Honestly, i hate it when book SciFi gets put into movie shape. Its rarely looks like i imagined it.
Well, that problem is hardly specific to SciFi. If you read a book first, then watch the movie adaptation, the result is nearly always disappointing.
In fact, the only counter-examples I can think of right now are Inherent Vice and No Country For Old Men.
In "Inherent Vice", the VC firm is Voorhees-Krueger (think 80s horror movie characters).
Well, in that spirit look at the popularity on torrent trackers of the Master and Inherent Vice, both directed by PT Anderson, and compare with their box office performance at boxofficemojo.com (plus the wikipedia entries on the films have some additional information about budgets).
I don't feel comfortable discussing how that played out from the producers' standpoint (I'm not one of the producers, so I'll limit myself to saying it has lost money overall), but I hope you can see the incongruity of a highly acclaimed director making serious artistic work seeing ever-widening box office losses while simultaneously enjoying enormous-but-unpaid popularity via file-sharing. The Master has been available on Netflix streaming for months (at least in the US) and yet there are, um, over 9000 seeders for just the most popular torrent on oldpiratebay.org, closer to 35,000 if you add up all the active torrents for different formats, foreign language versions and so on, plus 35-40,000 leechers.
Regardless of how ones feels about it aesthetically, I think it's fair to say that the film is quite popular (measured against a random basket of 2012 films with better box office performance). But because it didn't do well in its initial release window, the longer-term popularity isn't reflected by its financial performance. Piracy is a real problem for films that depend on long-tail revenue, which is one reason you see so many franchise films and aesthetically conservative genre pics - they're an easier sell even though they don't necessarily age well.
The Nobel Prize in Literature always has been and likely always will be a controversial category. No doubt any book-lover can name a handful of authors that ostensibly deserve the honor, but there are a lot of great authors and only one Nobel Prize per year! For what it's worth, Pynchon is notoriously reclusive and not the kind of person who's likely waiting for the spotlight that the Swedish Academy would be shining. As things stand, the film adaptation of Inherent Vice seems to bring promise of greater attention to his work that it has received in a while now.