dvd of the week
Joaquin Phoenix plays Larry “Doc” Sportello, a pothead private investigator who works out of a doctor’s office near the beach in 1970s Los Angeles. He’s disheveled, confused, bumbling and occasionally philosophical. One day, his ex-lover, an ethereal blonde named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, serving hippie realness), appears out of nowhere and asks for him to help her escape a kidnapping and ransom scheme she’s entangled herself in with her new, married, real estate mogul boyfriend (Eric Roberts). The film is about the chaos, corruption, narcissism, ironies and aesthetics of Los Angeles in 1970s. Sometimes writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is channeling Altman, or Kubrick, or even Lynch, but even with those influences, Inherent Vice is an Anderson film, working wonderfully alongside Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
