NYFF Review: Inherent Vice

My New York Film Festival coverage culminated last week with a review of Inherent Vice, the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson. You can read my piece on the film over at Next Projection. You’ll find the first few paragraphs below. Like all of PTA’s more recent films, Inherent Vice made for a beguiling but hypnotic first sit. I can’t wait to revisit it in December. To browse all of my 2014 NYFF pieces, click here.

Sometimes life hits you with a bunch of complicated shit when all you really want to do is spin a Neil Young record and roll another number. Inherent Vice is a film about that feeling. It’s about other things, too: capitalism, counterculture, California. It’s also about how much Paul Thomas Anderson, the film’s director, loves convoluted film noir plots, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, and the prose of Thomas Pynchon. Inherent Vice throws a lot at you in 148 minutes. It’s a chaotic noir odyssey – all comic mayhem and mournful weirdness. But really it remains a simple thing: the story of a man (and a decade, the ’60s) whose good times get interrupted by larger forces.

It’s the latest fascinatingly strange, sublimely cinematic look at a moment of American history as rendered by Paul Thomas Anderson.

The first film adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice tells its story of a nation in flux through Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a Southern California stoner and half-assed private eye. The film opens as Doc gets a visit from Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston), a meaningful ex from his past. Shasta tells of her current affair with Mickey Wolfmann, a real estate goliath so big even Doc knows his name. Wolfmann’s wife has her own illicit lover, and together the two have planned to have Mickey thrown into one of California’s recently privatized “loony bins.”

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Top 10 Films of 2012

Three films that almost cracked the top 10: (left to right) Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild, Matthew McConaughey in Magic Mike, and Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea.

And so another year comes to an end. 2012 was host to a number of messy, masterful films; indeed, ambition and excess seemed to be the name of the game this year. Were my own fear of excess not to get in the way, I could have easily extended this list to include such remarkable features as The Deep Blue Sea, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Killer Joe, Magic Mike, Les Miserables, The Avengers, or Skyfall. Regardless, the following collection will have to do. I give you my take on the 10 best films of 2012. I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Note: I was tempted to define “released in 2012” liberally to include the extended cut of Margaret on this list. That film would take the #1 spot here without question. Though Margaret debuted in 2011, the extended cut didn’t surface until 2012. I always find it obnoxious when critics shoehorn re-releases into their best-of lists, however, so I’ll simply use this real estate to once again suggest you seek out the extended cut of Kenneth Lonnergan’s seismic coming-of-age story.

Let’s start with an honorable mention…

Honorable Mention: Django Unchained

Django Unchained is an act of pure movie provocation. Who else would reduce America’s original sin to a cartoonish wish-fulfillment fantasy, let alone one littered with graphic images of “mandingo fighting,” a thing that never actually happened outside ’70s exploitation movies? Who else would troll the public with dubious use of the word “nigger” or an Uncle Tom character who makes the slave masters in a slavery film look downright benign? Who else would wade into the subject of slavery and race-relations with a movie that’s seemingly calibrated to bait conservatives and liberals, whites and blacks? Quentin Tarantino has made a sloppy, at times incoherent film — one with none of the formal precision of Inglourious Basterds — but one with a mischievous glee that’s very much contagious. At this point in his career, Tarantino makes films with zero connection to the real world or its problems. To enjoy a film like Django Unchained, you’ll have to divorce the movie wholesale from your adult feelings about slavery and race. Some people can’t or won’t do that. For others, Tarantino’s Candieland offers its own set of perverse pleasures.

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Top Films of the 2000s: #9 There Will Be Blood

This review first appeared on Quarantine the Past on November 16, 2009.

“All of life’s questions and answers are in [the film],” Paul Thomas Anderson, director of There Will Be Blood, said in 2007. “It’s about greed and ambition and paranoia and looking at the worst parts of yourself.”

Taken out of context, as I’ve done so here, that sounds like a self-flattering synopsis for his own movie, doesn’t it? Those words — greed, paranoia, ambition — trigger distinct images in my head, namely ones of Daniel Day-Lewis browbeating a gangling zealot in a bowling alley. But Anderson isn’t talking about his movie; he’s talking about his favorite movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

I mention this because, as with Quentin Tarantino, Anderson is a filmmaker guided by his cinematic obsessions. He hails from the “video store” or “VCR” school of American indie cinema. That is, he learned his craft through osmosis, by exposing himself to tape after tape, DVD after DVD, of the classics. Films like The Treasure of Sierra Madre comprise the foundation of his filmmaking powers.

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Top Films of the 2000s: #4 Inglourious Basterds

This review originally appeared on Quarantine the Past on December 14, 2009.

“If I reach high points with Inglourious Basterds, it is partly because Paul [Thomas Anderson] came out with There Will Be Blood a couple years ago, and I realized I had to bring my game up.” (full clip)

Quentin Tarantino, like the films he makes, is nothing if not self-aware. He must have known something was off in 2007. Paul Thomas Anderson, his dear friend and competitor, unleashed There Will Be Blood as he drooled out Death Proof, a masturbatory and insular B-movie homage. One was an instant classic; the other a Tarantino-dialogue vehicle, this time with chicks. To some, the movie marked his “creative death.” By 2009, Tarantino didn’t just need to bring his game up. He needed a veritable game-changer.

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