Doc Sportello & The Dude: Separated at Birth?

Tropics of Meta

When I heard that Paul Thomas Anderson would be translating a Thomas Pynchon novel for the the screen, I could not help but be excited. Here was one of today’s most ambitious and talented filmmakers interpreting an author of such dazzling obscurantism that his novels were generally considered by critics to be the acme of unfilmable.  It was like the unstoppable force finally met the immovable object.  Who would prevail?

The answer was probably not Anderson.  The film adaptation of Inherent Vice only made back $14.7 million on its $20 million budget, though it earned a respectable 74% approval from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.  The movie was universally ignored by the award shows and seemed to leave many viewers puzzled by its labyrinthine, shaggy-dog storyline and unmistakable resemblance to The Big Lebowksi. Lovable stoner gets mixed up in crazy crime plot, full of wacky side characters and red herrings?…

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— syd williams.

Dick (1999): The Forrest Gump of Stoner Movies

Tropics of Meta

It is the fate of the cult movie to be ahead of its time. One thinks of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which opened to middling reviews and pitiful box office receipts in 1983, only to see its dark media fantasia look far more prescient as video games and the Internet matured in the 1990s. Mike Judge had the distinction of directing two modern classics that tanked at the box office but flourished in video release; 1999’s Office Space resonated with the deepening economic malaise of the early twenty-first century, while 2006’s Idiocracy makes more sense today than ever before.

Sometimes, though, a film manages to be both ahead of and behind its time—as the 1999 alternate-history farce Dick makes clear. Numerous commentators over the years have noted that the Watergate spoof faced an impossible dilemma in its search for an audience; as a quasi-teen movie, it likely turned off the…

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HA. — nemo williams.

— nemo williams.

“Eyes Wide Shut” and the Paranoid Style in American Pop Culture

Tropics of Meta

What is it about Stanley Kubrick that makes people crazy?

I was truly excited about the release of last year’s film Room 237—as a historian and Kubrick fan, the idea of an hour or two of deep interpretation of the themes and symbolism of his 1980 horror classic The Shining sounded delightful.  It would be like taking a cultural history or film studies class where all the insights of a semester’s discussions were distilled into one megacut.

As it turned out, though, the film was more like a documentary about a cult or conspiracy theory, or simply the adherents of a weird fetish or hobby (say, a King of Kong for ersatz anthropologists).  Fairly ludicrous and elaborate inferences about the genocide of Native Americans or the faking of the Moon landing were narrated by the film’s motley, disembodied lot of amateur analysts, who even admitted that they may be…

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— nemo williams.