Inherent Vice Reviews

"Though Pynchon can impressively sling jargon and his encyclopedic knowledge he’s really a quite innocent sentimentalist at heart, always on the side of the stoners, losers, loners, and weirdoes—the romantic thinkers." (Review in Reverse Shot by By Jeff Reichert)

NY Times By Walter Kirn "The private eyes of classic American noir dwell in a moral shadow land somewhere between order and anarchy, principle and pragmatism. They’re too unruly to be cops and too decent to be crooks, leaving them no natural allies on either side but attracting enemies from both. Their loneliness resembles that of cowboys, those other mournful individualists who pay for their liberty with obscurity, and it makes them at least as intriguing as their cases, which usually start as tales of greed and lust but tend to evolve into dramas of corruption that implicate lofty, respected institutions and indict society itself."

Christopher Tayler in the Guardian "Behind a lot of Pynchon's complication, there's a simple sadness about lost possibilities and the things that America chooses to do to itself."

Anthony Lane in New Yorker reviews the film. "The adaptation alone deserves an award for valor. Nobody has ever turned a Pynchon book into a movie before, for the same reason that nobody has managed to cram the New York Philharmonic into a Ford Focus." 

And, "...of all Pynchon’s novels, it may be the most gag-infested." 

Plus, "If that reminds you of chewed-over Chandler, you’re not wrong, and one of the fables on which “Inherent Vice” ruminates is “The Long Goodbye,” and the loping, unflustered movie that Robert Altman made of it, in 1973, with Elliott Gould as Marlowe."

And, "In those days, the film suggests, you could be present and correct and yet seem freakily awol, with your body in the room but your spirit out of town, the result being that everyone, not just Doc, becomes a private dick of sorts, constantly cross-checking on other people’s existence."

Plus, "I am as suckered as the next guy by the sight of two lovers running through the rain, in flashback, to the dolorous strains of Neil Young, as Shasta and Doc do in the film." (See scene here)

Finally, "a sexual encounter, which feels goofy and even playful on the page, becomes a difficult fugue of confession, aggression, and pain, rounded off with a line that makes you wince—“It doesn’t mean we’re back together.” Paul Thomas Anderson has done Thomas Pynchon proud, but, at moments like this, you want him to leave the writer’s orbit and follow his own strange star."

The above image might be described on page 137 of the paperback.

Guardian Movie Review: Interesting videos of actors interviewed. There were 2 Oscar nominations: Best adapted screenplay is one you really want to give to him. One bloke on there has the contention that all the movie references were taken out because the director's ego, but I seem to remember a few movie references, though they were older movies.