Opens with a crackpot on a TV talk show discussing the events of the previous film, not a good sign. Also not good that Devon has been killed offscreen in the interval. But I got the one thing I asked for: more Coroner Tony Todd, and now he’s even got a character name (Mr. Bludworth). Trying to avoid looking up how many more sequels he’ll be in. David R. Ellis had previously made Homeward Bound II, how’d he get this gig?

Cop and Kim:

Ellis acquits himself capably right from the start of the action – I knew this was the movie with the log truck, but thought that’d be a single-car accident, not this awesome super-fatal setpiece. Rewind to Kim (AJ Cook, a Virgin Suicides sister) seeing it happen and blocking the entrance ramp, saving herself and a bunch of strangers (not her friends, who still get killed a minute later, haha). The action remains good, but script is clunky, and each survivor is allowed one character trait: Pregnant Lady, Mom & Kid, Firebird Guy, Businesswoman (“my career is at a peak,” she will later tell us), and so on. Before they all die a la the first movie, Kim and Cop and Ali Larter (who checked herself into an asylum between movies to hide from death) are gonna have to solve the same ol’ mysteries.

Ali’s asylum wall:

It’s too late for Firebird Guy (David Paetkau of the second Alien vs. Predator) who gets the funniest death scene of the movie, everything in his kitchen trying to kill him all at once as he carelessly cooks fish sticks, until he escapes and gets his head smashed by the fire escape. Every survivor hears of his death that night on the TV evening news (everyone in 2003 watched the news). They repeat the trick with Kid (James Kirk, Iceman’s brother in an X-Men sequel), who survives a chain of dentist office catastrophes only to leave unharmed and be smooshed by falling construction equipment. I’m detecting references to Poltergeist (Kim’s room at night) and Hellraiser (“get them off me” in asylum).

Ali and Businesswoman after the elevator incident:

It’s decided that if Pregnant Lady (Justina Machado of a Purge sequel) gives birth then New Life will derail Death’s Plan, so Cop and Kim scheme to rescue her from Kim’s flashforward deathdreams. Meanwhile, Mom (Lynda Boyd of The V Word) gets beheaded by a elevator, Ali Larter and Verbose Black Guy (TC Carson of a Rob Lowe prison murder mystery) get fried in an explosion. They are so, so quick to proclaim that they’ve cheated death, should really know better. Half the movie was mega-death setpieces with spinning camera, so I’m happy and am gonna have to keep watching these.

Sure it’s the cutest-ever story of an orphan mouse who befriends a hermit criminal bear, but it also has major subplots about teeth theft at the behest of a sinister orphanage.

Also there’s a family with a dentist mom who works across the street from her candy seller husband, which is funny and low-key cynical but they don’t seem to deserve the chaos Ernest wreaks upon their businesses.

Beautiful watercolor backgrounds, often fading away at the edges. According to the codirector the writing was influenced by Studio Ghibli (naturally) and Kikujiro (ha!).

I was crazy about it, but something seemed off with the English voices. After just having seen The Little Prince and feeling Jeff Bridges was just perfect as the inventor neighbor, I wasn’t feeling Forest Whitaker as Ernest. The movie is short, so I watched it again in French with original Ernest Lambert Wilson (the American in Not On The Lips), which was perhaps an improvement, perhaps not, but either way a joy to see twice.

It feels, accurately, like an adaptation of a long, wordy book, in that it’s a long, wordy movie that crams in characters and investigations and descriptions and dialogues and backstories through its runtime, leaving little breathing room or sense that it’s all adding up to something. And it feels like one of those sprawling PT Anderson ensemble dramas, in that it’s packed to the gills with great actors, some of them never better than here. And it’s faithful to the madcap trailer, in that it contains those lines and comic scenes. And it’s similar to Big Lebowski, in that they’re both quizzically-plotted red-herring comedies featuring addled detectives. But it’s like none of these things, the visuals closer to Anderson’s The Master than I was prepared for, the mood less comic and hopeful. Some of the critic reactions I looked up mention the dark, disillusioned second half of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, a good point of reference. It’s being called the first Pynchon adaptation, but only because nobody (myself included) saw the semi-official Gravity’s Rainbow movies Impolex and Prufstand VII. Random movie references, presumably from the book: a company called Vorhees Kruger, a street called Gummo Marx Way.

This is Joaquin Phoenix’s show, but his cop frenemy Josh Brolin keeps trying to kick his ass and steal it. Also great: Jena Malone as an ex-junkie looking for her husband, Katherine Waterston as Doc’s ex-and-future girlfriend with questionable allegiances, and Martin Short as a depraved dentist. Plus: Martin Donovan, Omar, Eric Roberts, Jonah from Veep, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Benicio Del Toro, Maya Rudolph, Hong Chau and Joanna Newsom.

D. Ehrlich:

Anderson has imbued [Joanna Newsom] with a spectral dimension – every conversation she has with Doc sheds light on his isolation, but each of her appearances ends with a cut or camera move that suggests that she was never there, that she isn’t an antidote to his loneliness so much as its most lucid projection.

MZ Seitz, who is “about 90 percent certain [Newsom] is not a figment of anyone’s imagination.”:

Phrases like “peak of his powers” seem contrary to the spirit of the thing. Vice impresses by seeming uninterested in impressing us. Anderson shoots moments as plainly as possible, staging whole scenes in unobtrusive long takes or tight closeups, letting faces, voices and subtle lighting touches do work that fifteen years ago he might’ve tried to accomplish with a virtuoso tracking shot that ended with the camera tilting or whirling or diving into a swimming pool.

G. Kenny:

The movie walks a very particular high wire, soaking in a series of madcap-surreal hijinks in an ambling, agreeable fashion to such an extent that even viewers resistant to demanding “what’s the point” might think “what’s the point.”

D. Edelstein:

It’s actually less coherent than Pynchon, no small feat. It’s not shallow, though. Underneath the surface is a vision of the counterculture fading into the past, at the mercy of the police state and the encroachment of capitalism. But I’m not sure the whole thing jells.

Seitz again:

Something in the way Phoenix regards Brolin … suggest an addled yet fathomless empathy. They get each other. In its way, the relationship between the stoner “detective” who pretends to be a master crime fighter and the meathead cop who sometimes moonlights as an extra on Dragnet is the film’s real great love story, an accidental metaphor for the liberal/conservative, dungarees/suits, blue state/red state divide that’s defined U.S. politics since the Civil War.

A. O’Hehir:

Like Anderson’s other films (and like Pynchon’s other books), Inherent Vice is a quest to find what can’t be found: That moment, somewhere in the past, when the entire American project went off the rails, when the optimism and idealism – of 1783, or 1948, or 1967 – became polluted by darker impulses. As Pynchon’s title suggests, the quest is futile because the American flaw, or the flaw in human nature, was baked in from the beginning.