Inherent Vice

Well if the Master was too weird or hard to follow for a viewer, Paul Thomas Anderson does nothing to ease that pain with his follow up Inherent Vice. It's a strange switch up though as this film is technically a comedy about a stoner P.I. trying to find out what happened to his ex-girlfriend who is related to a bizarre plot that involves all sorts of odd-balls. The plot itself, though you can decipher it, is purposefully left to be hard to follow through the often strange way various characters speak when delivering pivotal exposition. The film though is more about experiencing the plot than following it, which might aggravate some, but not me. This film is a concise mess of a film, in that it is all over the place yet every moment of it seem intentional in terms of Anderson's vision for the piece. We follow the PI Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) again as he goes through a strange world of drugs, murders, and a sense of strange paranoia while attempting to get to the bottom of this neo-noir. This film seems particularly true to the stoner cause, as the film itself in this one seems to be a bit high, and one just needs to enjoy the trip even if it all doesn't make sense at first.
5/5