why we are here
Every morning, I find myself lying in bed absent-mindedly consuming the articles on Indiewire and the AV Club. In my semi-delirious state, I rarely absorb any actual information besides the headlines—what big-name actor is in what big-budget movie and what semi-independent film will be added to Netflix next month. Somehow I seem not only disinterested in the writing, but also in the films themselves. Reading these blogs—and the seemingly endless amount of similar ones—becomes more like a daily routine than an engagement with any sort of passion. The articles are too often formulaic, relying on outdated cliches and lackluster describers. In this reliance on the familiar, a review for James Wan’s Furious 7 can lack a clear distinction from a review for Andy Fickman’s Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 or even one for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. Thus, I often feel left with reviews that tell us nothing about the the films or the experience of watching them, but yet simultaneously somehow influence my opinion. Even though, I recognize the formative structure of reviews, I still judge films by their unjust rubric of quality. I ignore the review’s by-line and syntax, as scroll to the bottom to locate the film’s grade. If the overall consensus signals the film as passable, then I consider it a “good” movie. If the film fails this pseudo prescreening process, then I rarely spend a second thought on it; the film joins the endless pile of forgotten titles. Feature articles in this format also lack a sense of ingenuity. They are more interested in providing irrelevant and way-too-early Oscar predictions and nonsensical cinematic rankings. Yet, I still read them. I find myself slightly interested in who Indiewire thinks can challenge Julianne Moore in the Best Actress category or what the AV Club considers the top twenty animated films of the past decade. This interest frightens me. Rather than read about the theatrical experience of the actual film, I focus more on hyperbolic assumptions and comparisons.
Thus, when we went to the New York Film Festival in October 2014, we knew we had to write about the films differently. We would not attempt to review the film, determining what works and what doesn’t. Rather, we wanted to focus on sharing our viewing experience. By attending premieres of each film, we avoided any reviews, thus requiring us to come at each film free from bias. We could write about the films without an outside influence who had seen it previously screened and evaluated the film. We found that by retelling and publishing our theatrical experiences we were providing ourselves a new way to write about the films. This blog provided us liberation from both the too-strict guidelines of academic writing and the overused conventions of feature and reviewing writing. We don’t offer rankings for the bizarre array of films that we saw, nor do we attempt to grade each. Instead, we simply write about our individual experiences. Despite attending the same screening, we had different responses to each film, so a ranking or grade seemed to ignore this experience lacking from so many other more traditional blogs. That said, we offer this blog not as a solution for the conventional, but rather as an alternative to it. Without including a judgment of quality, we (attempt) to reveal our experience of watching each individual film.
Thus, when we went to the New York Film Festival in October 2014, we knew we had to write about the films differently. We would not attempt to review the film, determining what works and what doesn’t. Rather, we wanted to focus on sharing our viewing experience. By attending premieres of each film, we avoided any reviews, thus requiring us to come at each film free from bias. We could write about the films without an outside influence who had seen it previously screened and evaluated the film. We found that by retelling and publishing our theatrical experiences we were providing ourselves a new way to write about the films. This blog provided us liberation from both the too-strict guidelines of academic writing and the overused conventions of feature and reviewing writing. We don’t offer rankings for the bizarre array of films that we saw, nor do we attempt to grade each. Instead, we simply write about our individual experiences. Despite attending the same screening, we had different responses to each film, so a ranking or grade seemed to ignore this experience lacking from so many other more traditional blogs. That said, we offer this blog not as a solution for the conventional, but rather as an alternative to it. Without including a judgment of quality, we (attempt) to reveal our experience of watching each individual film.
I can't start talking about the night we saw Inherent Vice without mentioning the back of Ralph Fiennes' head. Despite the fact that this was the movie we had all been waiting for (and which Reed and Hannah had stood in the rain to get tickets to), when we first sat down in Alice Tully Hall, Mr. Fiennes (and Patti Smith, who was sitting next to him) had our complete attention. Walking into the theater, we were all prepared to be star-struck; this was the film's premiere after all, and we knew we would catch a glimpse of people like Josh Brolin or Joaquin Phoenix from a distance. We didn't expect to be sitting behind Lord Voldemort and the Godmother of Punk. Seeing them raised myriad questions for us: Why were they sitting together? What were they going to laugh at? Why did they have worse seats than us? We said none of this out loud of course; after several poor attempts at snapping blurry photos with our phones, we snapped back to reality as the seats filled up and our anticipation peaked. Our encounter with Ralph Fiennes, though brief, assured us that we were in for a completely new movie-going experience, one in which celebrities and lowly Hendrix students sat side-by-side.
In our star-struck daze, we turned our attention back to the stage as Paul Thomas Anderson walked out to introduce the film. After informing us that we were watching the movie on his personal 35mm reel, Anderson cheered film as the best and only way to watch movies before telling us “we'd better get started, 'cause this is a long one.” As the lights went down and the movie started, I realized I had no idea what I was about to see. For every other P.T. Anderson film, or any film directed by someone of that caliber, I already knew what the critics thought of it. When I saw There Will Be Blood, I had already heard people proclaim it a masterpiece and seen its score on Rotten Tomatoes; this didn't detract at all from my enjoyment of it, but there was nothing surprising about its greatness.
This was not the case for Inherent Vice. After seeing his other films, I certainly came in with high expectations for Anderson. However, having (partially) read the novel on which this film was based, I was unsure of how the material would translate to the screen. Thomas Pynchon's novel left me with the same feeling of hazy forgetfulness that its hero, private eye Doc Sportello, constantly falls prey to. Although it did pay homage to the long literary (and cinematic) heritage of P.I.'s like Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade, it enveloped its hard-boiled trappings in an almost impenetrable cloud of drug-induced paranoia. Doc constantly remains on alert against a variety of conspiracies, and he loses track of his case-load as quickly as the reader loses track of the plot. This incompetence on the part of a private detective, the figure that the reader has come to trust to solve whatever mystery steps in front of him, confounds the reader into accepting that the only atmosphere he'll find in Inherent Vice is one of ambiguity.
The sense of foggy uncertainty exuded by this book has baffled every attempt of mine to finish it: on three separate occasions, I have read around 100 pages in, set it down for a couple of days, and then totally forgotten what was happening where I left off. The (vague impressions of) characters and settings hit me like a puff of smoke in the face before disappearing completely. It wasn't that I'd lost interest in the plot, which the book clearly isn't all that worried about anyway, or that its style was too dense. In fact, compared to some of Pynchon's other work like Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon, reading Inherent Vice was a breeze. It was just that I had lost all the momentum with which I had started, and I felt that, unless I read it in one sitting or over the course of a couple of days, I would never finish it at all.
With my readerly difficulties in mind, I felt equal parts doubt and hope as the film began. At the very least, I told myself, I would have to see the “story” through from start to finish, barring some catastrophe that would force me to exit the theater or the film reel going up in flames. The film opens exactly as the novel does, and once Joaquin Phoenix and Katherine Waterson appear onscreen as Doc and his old flame Shasta, I knew at once that this was different from most film adaptations. As Doc struggles to pay attention to the convoluted case (involving, but not limited to: Neo-nazis, shady land grabs, psychiatric institutions) that Shasta lays out before him, I didn't feel like I was watching a “filmed version” of the novel. It was more like the images of these characters I had imagined as I was reading were projected onto the screen, only with defined faces and features.
My immediate realization of this film's evocation of its source material gave me a sense of surreal recognition, as if I was visually picking up where I had left off with the novel. Along with the appearance of its characters, the film maintains the novel’s almost aggressively confusing narrative twists and turns. In fact, the film throws in red herrings that were absent from the novel. As Doc walks into a strip club during the early stages of his investigation, a formation of soldiers suddenly stand up in the desert background behind him. No one within the film remarks upon this scene, nor is there any evidence that these soldiers are anything more than a product of Doc's own paranoia. From this instance, and the numerous others that pepper Inherent Vice, I got the impression that Anderson felt no need to make the story more easily digestible for audience members who aren't so familiar with sitting through a two-and-a-half hour long movie that seems to make no sense. Instead, he made a film even more freewheeling and unhinged than the novel and as difficult-to-pin-down as whatever it is that Doc is trying to I figure out.
Once I realized just how little regard this film has for its own narrative, I was free to enjoy the humor that lurks in every scene. Inherent Vice is by no means Anchorman or The Hangover, and the cinematic atmosphere that the characters inhabit is definitely akin to Anderson's other films; still, I found myself constantly laughing, even in situations that initially seemed somber. Its comic moments didn't merely give me the pleasure of laughing, either: they allowed me to let go of trying to “figure out” this film. I realized the rest of the plot didn't really matter when I was watching Doc repeatedly knocked to the ground by a group of police officers, or when his police nemesis Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) suggestively eats a chocolate covered banana. While this humor was present in the novel, it didn't pack the punch of these gags, which provide a perfect accompaniment to Doc's ineptitude.
The effect of seeing the film in Alice Tully Hall amplified my disjointed experience of its comic disruptions. The huge size of this venue, as well as the relatively quiet level of speech in the film, made many parts difficult to hear, and as the film progressed, I could feel the crowd's palpable excitement turn to confusion punctuated by bouts of laughter. I paid specific attention to Ralph Fiennes reactions and at which jokes he laughed hardest (they were always the dirtiest ones). After the screening had ended and the film's funky soundtrack played us out of the theater, I listened for whatever instant reactions I could gather. The majority of what I heard was positive, albeit in a confused “I-didn't-quite-get-it-but-I'm-sure-it's-brilliant” kind of way; others expressed anger or frustration at having sat through stoner nonsense for almost three hours.
Hearing these reactions gave me a glimpse of something I had never encountered: a fairly large group of people who thought Paul Thomas Anderson had made a bad movie. While I disagreed (as did the majority of critics), I was struck by the equal playing field provided by the New York Film Festival. Greatness is expected of every single film at this event, and not even a director like PTA gets off the critical hook easily. On leaving the theater that night, I felt as if I had just witnessed some kind of radical experiment take place; I had gone into the screening feeling uncertain and had left feeling pleasurably confused. At that point, I had no other critics to explain to me what I had seen. The absence of such authorities in that moment gave me a new perspective on these reviews once they were published. Instead of viewing these as definitive opinions on the film, I was able to put them in conversation with my own experience of the film. Being able to do this gave me a greater sense of freedom in choosing what films to watch; I realized that, and ought to remain open to whatever feelings or opinions a film provokes in me. Because when it comes down to it, when faced with something like Inherent Vice, not even critics have all the answers, or any answers at all, really.
In our star-struck daze, we turned our attention back to the stage as Paul Thomas Anderson walked out to introduce the film. After informing us that we were watching the movie on his personal 35mm reel, Anderson cheered film as the best and only way to watch movies before telling us “we'd better get started, 'cause this is a long one.” As the lights went down and the movie started, I realized I had no idea what I was about to see. For every other P.T. Anderson film, or any film directed by someone of that caliber, I already knew what the critics thought of it. When I saw There Will Be Blood, I had already heard people proclaim it a masterpiece and seen its score on Rotten Tomatoes; this didn't detract at all from my enjoyment of it, but there was nothing surprising about its greatness.
This was not the case for Inherent Vice. After seeing his other films, I certainly came in with high expectations for Anderson. However, having (partially) read the novel on which this film was based, I was unsure of how the material would translate to the screen. Thomas Pynchon's novel left me with the same feeling of hazy forgetfulness that its hero, private eye Doc Sportello, constantly falls prey to. Although it did pay homage to the long literary (and cinematic) heritage of P.I.'s like Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade, it enveloped its hard-boiled trappings in an almost impenetrable cloud of drug-induced paranoia. Doc constantly remains on alert against a variety of conspiracies, and he loses track of his case-load as quickly as the reader loses track of the plot. This incompetence on the part of a private detective, the figure that the reader has come to trust to solve whatever mystery steps in front of him, confounds the reader into accepting that the only atmosphere he'll find in Inherent Vice is one of ambiguity.
The sense of foggy uncertainty exuded by this book has baffled every attempt of mine to finish it: on three separate occasions, I have read around 100 pages in, set it down for a couple of days, and then totally forgotten what was happening where I left off. The (vague impressions of) characters and settings hit me like a puff of smoke in the face before disappearing completely. It wasn't that I'd lost interest in the plot, which the book clearly isn't all that worried about anyway, or that its style was too dense. In fact, compared to some of Pynchon's other work like Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon, reading Inherent Vice was a breeze. It was just that I had lost all the momentum with which I had started, and I felt that, unless I read it in one sitting or over the course of a couple of days, I would never finish it at all.
With my readerly difficulties in mind, I felt equal parts doubt and hope as the film began. At the very least, I told myself, I would have to see the “story” through from start to finish, barring some catastrophe that would force me to exit the theater or the film reel going up in flames. The film opens exactly as the novel does, and once Joaquin Phoenix and Katherine Waterson appear onscreen as Doc and his old flame Shasta, I knew at once that this was different from most film adaptations. As Doc struggles to pay attention to the convoluted case (involving, but not limited to: Neo-nazis, shady land grabs, psychiatric institutions) that Shasta lays out before him, I didn't feel like I was watching a “filmed version” of the novel. It was more like the images of these characters I had imagined as I was reading were projected onto the screen, only with defined faces and features.
My immediate realization of this film's evocation of its source material gave me a sense of surreal recognition, as if I was visually picking up where I had left off with the novel. Along with the appearance of its characters, the film maintains the novel’s almost aggressively confusing narrative twists and turns. In fact, the film throws in red herrings that were absent from the novel. As Doc walks into a strip club during the early stages of his investigation, a formation of soldiers suddenly stand up in the desert background behind him. No one within the film remarks upon this scene, nor is there any evidence that these soldiers are anything more than a product of Doc's own paranoia. From this instance, and the numerous others that pepper Inherent Vice, I got the impression that Anderson felt no need to make the story more easily digestible for audience members who aren't so familiar with sitting through a two-and-a-half hour long movie that seems to make no sense. Instead, he made a film even more freewheeling and unhinged than the novel and as difficult-to-pin-down as whatever it is that Doc is trying to I figure out.
Once I realized just how little regard this film has for its own narrative, I was free to enjoy the humor that lurks in every scene. Inherent Vice is by no means Anchorman or The Hangover, and the cinematic atmosphere that the characters inhabit is definitely akin to Anderson's other films; still, I found myself constantly laughing, even in situations that initially seemed somber. Its comic moments didn't merely give me the pleasure of laughing, either: they allowed me to let go of trying to “figure out” this film. I realized the rest of the plot didn't really matter when I was watching Doc repeatedly knocked to the ground by a group of police officers, or when his police nemesis Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) suggestively eats a chocolate covered banana. While this humor was present in the novel, it didn't pack the punch of these gags, which provide a perfect accompaniment to Doc's ineptitude.
The effect of seeing the film in Alice Tully Hall amplified my disjointed experience of its comic disruptions. The huge size of this venue, as well as the relatively quiet level of speech in the film, made many parts difficult to hear, and as the film progressed, I could feel the crowd's palpable excitement turn to confusion punctuated by bouts of laughter. I paid specific attention to Ralph Fiennes reactions and at which jokes he laughed hardest (they were always the dirtiest ones). After the screening had ended and the film's funky soundtrack played us out of the theater, I listened for whatever instant reactions I could gather. The majority of what I heard was positive, albeit in a confused “I-didn't-quite-get-it-but-I'm-sure-it's-brilliant” kind of way; others expressed anger or frustration at having sat through stoner nonsense for almost three hours.
Hearing these reactions gave me a glimpse of something I had never encountered: a fairly large group of people who thought Paul Thomas Anderson had made a bad movie. While I disagreed (as did the majority of critics), I was struck by the equal playing field provided by the New York Film Festival. Greatness is expected of every single film at this event, and not even a director like PTA gets off the critical hook easily. On leaving the theater that night, I felt as if I had just witnessed some kind of radical experiment take place; I had gone into the screening feeling uncertain and had left feeling pleasurably confused. At that point, I had no other critics to explain to me what I had seen. The absence of such authorities in that moment gave me a new perspective on these reviews once they were published. Instead of viewing these as definitive opinions on the film, I was able to put them in conversation with my own experience of the film. Being able to do this gave me a greater sense of freedom in choosing what films to watch; I realized that, and ought to remain open to whatever feelings or opinions a film provokes in me. Because when it comes down to it, when faced with something like Inherent Vice, not even critics have all the answers, or any answers at all, really.