Category: Paul Thomas Anderson

Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel

The trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is out. Featuring Joaquin Phoenix as Doc Sportello and Josh Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen, it comes out in the UK on 30 January 2015 (according to IMDb). In case you haven’t read the book, this is from the New York Times:

Like the novel, the film is set in 1970 in the fictional Gordita Beach, Calif., among paranoid burnouts, white-supremacist bikers, black-power ex-cons, and hippies turned toothless heroin addicts. The “gum-sandal” detective Doc Sportello (a mutton-chopped, mumbly Mr. Phoenix) begins investigating a mystery at the behest of his free-spirited ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) and to the consternation of the corrupt cop Bigfoot Bjornsen, played by Mr. Brolin with a “flattop of Flintstone proportions,” as a character says in the film, and a malicious “twinkle in his eye that says ‘civil rights violations.’ ”

Along the way, Doc uncovers a conspiracy that touches the shady land developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) and a surf-rock saxophonist named Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), both of whom may either be dead or alive. Looming over them all is the specter of the Golden Fang, which may be a boat, an Indochinese heroin cartel, a rehab center, a syndicate of dentists — or something even more vast.

Watch the trailer here.

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