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Hollywood: Filmmaker Cites Birthers In Indiewire Movie Review For WB's Inherent Vice
Birther Report
12/22/2014
Excerpt:
Hollyweird: Filmmaker Cites Birthers In Indiewire Movie Review For Warner Bros. Pictures' Inherent Vice
Birthers get a shout-out from filmmaker and writer Steven Erickson in an Indiewire review.... Sort of...
Excerpt via Steven Erickson @ Indiewire:
I guess Erickson forgot about Clinton backer, and NAACP life-member, Democrat Phil Berg....
This explains it...
Bio: "Steven Erickson is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. He has published in newspapers and websites across America, including The Village Voice, Gay City News, The Atlantic, Salon, indieWIRE, The Nashville Scene, Studio Daily and many others. His most recent film is the 2009 short Squawk.
INHERENT VICE MOVIE TRAILER:
The movie actually looks pretty entertaining...
View the complete Birther Report presentation at:
http://www.birtherreport.com/2014/12...rthers-in.html
Birther Report
12/22/2014
Excerpt:
Hollyweird: Filmmaker Cites Birthers In Indiewire Movie Review For Warner Bros. Pictures' Inherent Vice
Birthers get a shout-out from filmmaker and writer Steven Erickson in an Indiewire review.... Sort of...
Excerpt via Steven Erickson @ Indiewire:
On Paul Thomas Anderson's INHERENT VICE: Between the Pavement and the Beach Lies the Shadow
"Inherent Vice" plays like a stoner’s version of Howard Hawks’ "The Big Sleep," with a coherent narrative getting lost in clouds of pot smoke. To some extent, that’s the point—the film’s characters have only one foot in reality. But it doesn’t make for articulate filmmaking.
Doc (Joaquin Phoenix), the hero of Inherent Vice, is a hippie but not a radical. He just wants to get stoned, laid and left alone. However, his job as a private eye, as well as his involvement with some women he’s dated, involves him in 1970s politics. I expected Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, adapted by the director from Thomas Pynchon’s most accessible novel, to be a stoner goof, and I wondered if it would have any more present-day relevance than Cheech & Chong’s Up In Smoke, even if it comes from a far more literate sensibility. On the other hand, even stoner goofs play to a political climate in which four U.S. states have legalized marijuana. There’s more than a little melancholy beneath Doc’s euphoria, brought out by Phoenix’s performance. The cultural idealism around drugs was running low by the time Inherent Vice is set, and it’s largely dead now. Those who advocate legalizing marijuana argue that it’s a healthier alternative to alcohol, with fewer social costs, not that a cultural revolution would come about if beer drinkers switched to vaporizing kush.
Like most of Pynchon’s work, Inherent Vice is soaked in conspiracy theories. This isn’t new for him: The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow pioneered countercultural paranoia when the counterculture was still fresh. Pynchon’s fascination seemed skeptical yet open-minded. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, conspiracy theories were mostly the property of leftists. Now, some individuals argue that Barack Obama isn’t really a U.S. citizen, venting thinly concealed racism. I’m sure Pynchon would hate to think he helped pave the way for birthers and truthers. For example, the website vigilantcitizen.com, which mostly analyzes music videos for their supposed hidden messages, seems to simultaneously come from a far-left and far-right position: it vociferously attacks the CIA, yet almost all the singers and rappers it denounces as Illuminati pawns are black and/or female. Thom Andersen was right to point out the conservative potential of conspiracy theories in Los Angeles Plays Itself, yet conspiracies do happen, as in COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secret plot to undermine radical American politics in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Inherent Vice refers to it by name, and alludes to other programs as well. [...] Continued @ Indiewire.
"Inherent Vice" plays like a stoner’s version of Howard Hawks’ "The Big Sleep," with a coherent narrative getting lost in clouds of pot smoke. To some extent, that’s the point—the film’s characters have only one foot in reality. But it doesn’t make for articulate filmmaking.
Doc (Joaquin Phoenix), the hero of Inherent Vice, is a hippie but not a radical. He just wants to get stoned, laid and left alone. However, his job as a private eye, as well as his involvement with some women he’s dated, involves him in 1970s politics. I expected Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, adapted by the director from Thomas Pynchon’s most accessible novel, to be a stoner goof, and I wondered if it would have any more present-day relevance than Cheech & Chong’s Up In Smoke, even if it comes from a far more literate sensibility. On the other hand, even stoner goofs play to a political climate in which four U.S. states have legalized marijuana. There’s more than a little melancholy beneath Doc’s euphoria, brought out by Phoenix’s performance. The cultural idealism around drugs was running low by the time Inherent Vice is set, and it’s largely dead now. Those who advocate legalizing marijuana argue that it’s a healthier alternative to alcohol, with fewer social costs, not that a cultural revolution would come about if beer drinkers switched to vaporizing kush.
Like most of Pynchon’s work, Inherent Vice is soaked in conspiracy theories. This isn’t new for him: The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow pioneered countercultural paranoia when the counterculture was still fresh. Pynchon’s fascination seemed skeptical yet open-minded. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, conspiracy theories were mostly the property of leftists. Now, some individuals argue that Barack Obama isn’t really a U.S. citizen, venting thinly concealed racism. I’m sure Pynchon would hate to think he helped pave the way for birthers and truthers. For example, the website vigilantcitizen.com, which mostly analyzes music videos for their supposed hidden messages, seems to simultaneously come from a far-left and far-right position: it vociferously attacks the CIA, yet almost all the singers and rappers it denounces as Illuminati pawns are black and/or female. Thom Andersen was right to point out the conservative potential of conspiracy theories in Los Angeles Plays Itself, yet conspiracies do happen, as in COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secret plot to undermine radical American politics in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Inherent Vice refers to it by name, and alludes to other programs as well. [...] Continued @ Indiewire.
I guess Erickson forgot about Clinton backer, and NAACP life-member, Democrat Phil Berg....
This explains it...
Bio: "Steven Erickson is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. He has published in newspapers and websites across America, including The Village Voice, Gay City News, The Atlantic, Salon, indieWIRE, The Nashville Scene, Studio Daily and many others. His most recent film is the 2009 short Squawk.
INHERENT VICE MOVIE TRAILER:
The movie actually looks pretty entertaining...
View the complete Birther Report presentation at:
http://www.birtherreport.com/2014/12...rthers-in.html