Why don’t Bond villains just shoot Bond? Why didn’t the Empire plug that troublesome exhaust port? Why didn’t the Eagles fly Frodo to Mordor? There’s a tedious school of movie criticism that asks such questions in earnest — call it the CinemaSins mode of thinking — that’s borne from apparently genuine wonder as to why characters don’t act like ruthlessly rational automatons with access to their own screenplays.
Such deep thinkers were presumably confounded by Inherent Vice, a hazy neo-noir aggressively disinterested in being comprehensible. While it’s somewhat unlikely that director Paul Thomas Anderson spends a lot of time absorbing subpar video essays, the movie, released 10 years ago today, still feels like a rejection of the nitpicking that’s come to define how YouTube and social media’s most annoying elements engage with film.
