![]() ![]() Pynchon's protagonist, a pothead private detective named Doc Sportello, is a character that was once eyed by Robert Downey Jr., who surely would have brought some energetic invention to the role. (Although at a run-time of two and a half hours, it's also too much of one.) He's unflaggingly faithful to the novel, but the result-in terms of narrative involvement and simple entertainment-isn't much of a movie. Anderson simply lays out Pynchon's giddy plot elements and invites us to join him in admiring them. ![]() Pause for a moment to recall Raiders of the Lost Ark, a movie that parodied the conventions of pulp thrillers, but also functioned as one-it didn't let its parody take the place of its story. But writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't take Pynchon's story seriously either-a considerable misjudgment, I'd say. Pynchon didn't pretend that any of this added up to much, which was fine-we enjoyed his taffy-pull prose and his little hipster jokes. beach-town culture of 1970, is a stoned shaggy-dog story that's fat with pulp-fiction signifiers: snarling cops, neo-Nazi bikers, Indochinese drug smugglers, and, best of all, the Golden Fang-which could be either a mysterious red-sailed schooner, a shadowy international heroin cartel, or a syndicate of coked-up dentists. Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel, set in the L.A. ![]() Inherent Vice might have been more fun if it had been played a little straighter. ![]()
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