Rewrite, Reboot, Remix
Rewriting the classics has become a stale and risk-averse strategy. But that shouldn’t spoil the fun of our larger culture of remixing.
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Posts Tagged: Inherent Vice
Lighten Up
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a light neo-noir comedy, just like the Pynchon novel that inspired it. Despite our eagerness to overanalyze film adaptations of complicated books, Katie Kilkenny warns us not to take this one too seriously: Inherent Vice inherently rewards only half-serious analysis… Semiotics nerds, who so love Pynchon, might call the […]
...moreAnderson Doesn’t “Cut and Paste”
In an interview for NPR, director Paul Thomas Anderson shares his experience adapting Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for the big screen: I approached it in the most straightforward but laborious way I could come up with. I transcribed the dialogue… And there were multiple times when I thought, “Why don’t I just call the publisher and get a […]
...moreThe Private Eye Period Piece
For a while now, such characters, if not totally extinct, have been on a steady life-support drip of nostalgia. In an age when GPS tracking, oversharing and 8 Signs Your Man Is Cheating listicles make their services unnecessary, the old-school gumshoe feels as irrelevant as Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple felt a generation before. All […]
...moreThe Thomas Pynchon Myth
Thomas Pynchon is a reclusive author—or so we are told. Vice unearths the origins of Pynchon’s famous isolation, attributing the legend to the Paris Review‘s George Plimpton: It all started 51 years ago, in 1963, when George Plimpton in the New York Times published the line: “Pynchon is in his early twenties; he writes in […]
...moreWill Pynchon Surface?
With Inherent Vice the centerpiece of the New York Film Festival, Logan Hill sits down with the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, for the New York Times. He seems particularly eager to learn whether or not Pynchon, the notoriously reclusive author, makes a cameo.
...moreSome Kind of 29th-Century Sci-Fi Lobster
Over at New York Magazine, Sam Anderson (interviewed here) has published a review of Inherent Vice that is one of the funniest pans of a novel I’ve ever read. “There is no easy way to say this,” Anderson begins, “so here it is. I hate Thomas Pynchon.”
...moreThomas Pynchon’s Summer Read
Inherent Vice is “a noir-like novel set in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s” that follows “a dope-smoking private detective named Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello.” It is 384 pages long and hits book stores tomorrow. An agency in LA is already handling the story’s film rights. Oh yea, it also happens to be the […]
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