"Inherent Vice" Reportedly Completed; Details Begin To Emerge

According to Kris Tapley over at Hitfix, we should start preparing ourselves for "a very different Paul Thomas Anderson experience" with Inherent Vice. Tapley's sources have pretty specific impressions from seeing the movie, but they might suggest more than you would like to know about the movie this early on, so click below the fold at your own discretion.

That said, we can finally report: Inherent Vice is completed, and runs slightly north of two and a half hours.

So. The juicy bits...

First of all, some of Tapley's sources are skeptical that Inherent Vice will get much attention from the Academy come next Winter, despite the uber-awards-friendly release strategy...

Everyone who spoke to me about it was a fan of the movie, it should be said. But multiples times the film's Oscar fate was questioned. "I honestly, truly, really don't think it'll get much Oscar play, other than possible tech stuff," one said. Another asserted that its performances were its best bet, singling out Katherine Waterston in particular - though everyone agreed Joaquin Phoenix will be in the thick of the Best Actor hunt.

The reason behind their thinking? The movie is apparently pretty damn weird...

[Inherent Vice] is apparently a very faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's novel, which offers a zany blend of humor that could -- I stress could -- prove a tough sell to Academy types.

"It's BONKERS -- weird, weird, weird," one person who saw the film told me. "It made me laugh out loud several times, but not in the ways you might expect. The humor is not so much Boogie Nights as I think a lot of people are expecting. For reals, it tips into, like, Zucker bros.-level gags and broad humor. But, obviously, mixed with his other sensibilities. Strange, beguiling tone."

"It's a sui generis mix of broad comedy, suspense, romance, melancholy, and a touch of menace - unlike anything I can think of," said [another source.]

I'm told Josh Brolin stands out in the supporting ranks and that Martin Short's work as a druggie dentist is "batshit insane."Another compared the film to Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, starring Elliott Gould, "but amped up to 11."

"[Joaquin] Phoenix is in practically every scene, then I guess [Josh] Brolin has the second-biggest part. All the other names are extended cameos. Well, Del Toro has a BIT more than that, but not much."

"It looks gorgeous, though stylistically, it's somewhat more restrained than [PTA's] other films. That's because it's a lot of conversations, and he chooses to cover them with staid, well-composed back-and-forth static shots, or 'two-shots' that sloowwwllly push in." 

"The music is more all over the place than usual, and he uses a few songs of the era. The score is much more Radiohead-sounding, just by way of having actual guitar and drums thrown in. There's some atmospheric electronic stuff in there, too." 

Well that's certainly enough to get us more jazzed than we already were.

IV (theatrical premiere): 140 days

IV (world premiere): 71 days

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
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