A look at America’s craziness

 

   One Battle After Another, director Paul Thomas Anderson's loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 1990 Vineland, captures more of the novelist's feverish absurdity, incendiary comedy, and ragtag relevance than I would have thought possible. I don't think that was the case with Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014), another attempt at bringing Pynchon to the screen.

   In large part, One Battle After Another uses Pynchon as a springboard for an updated story that seems to sync with contemporary concerns about a badly fractured society that spins out one dizzying scenario after another.

   Wild and scattered, One Battle After Another takes a big dare. It's like a dinner brimming with side dishes and no main course. Don't take that as a failure but as an overriding observation about the incoherence of a time without a clear center. 

    A sprawling canvas allows Anderson to introduce a range of characters, some bordering on caricature. Looking like he's shedding the last vestiges of youth, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a rebel who -- in his younger days  -- blew up buildings in cahoots with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a Black woman and bold provocateur who finds sexual kick in armed defiance. Wielding power turns her on.

    The revolutionaries -- dubbed French 75 -- rob banks and free captured immigrants, saving them from internment, deportation, or worse. In one scene, Black women rob a bank, stamping bold fury onto the screen.

    The insurrectionists are opposed by a militaristic government police force in which Sean Penn's Colonel Lockjaw serves as a chief field officer. Lockjaw's sexual desires push him into racist hypocrisy when he's aroused by Perfidia. His ramrod walk -- a rigid rooster's strut -- makes for an ongoing sight gag.

    The opening scenes offer an unsettling blur of incident without much context. Anderson leaves it to us to ride the roiling wave he creates.  The characters will become more defined when the film leaps ahead 16 years. Still active, the revolution seems to be sputtering. 

     Time remains fuzzy throughout. Characters use cell phones, but pay phones still can be found in the story's dystopian surroundings.

     After her fierce opening salvo, Perfidia disappears from the story; we learn that she was captured and saved herself by turning rat. She entered the Witness Protection Program but escaped. She hasn't been seen since. For his part, Bob has retreated to a remote rural area where he's raising Willa (Chase Infiniti), the assertive high-school-aged daughter he had with Perfidia.

     Bob lives in a marijuana-induced haze, but his paranoia seems reasonable; the military would like to find him. I won't say more about it, but doubts are raised about Willa's parenthood.

      To the extent that there's a plot, it kicks into second gear when Willa is captured. Bob gropes his way out of a drug-induced fog as he tries to rescue her.

       An emerging string of characters adds to the movie's encompassing weirdness. Among them are members of the bizarrely named Christmas Adventurer's Club, a highly selective fraternity of powerful white men who stand for racial purity. Lockjaw yearns to join their ranks.

      Benicio del Toro delivers a funny comic turn as a martial arts instructor who sides with the revolutionaries. He also shelters immigrants the government would like to expel.  

      The humor hinges on overstatement, broadly drawn characters, shaggy detail, and unconstrained lunacy. Always a bit confused, Ferguson spends most of the movie trying to evade capture while still wearing the tattered bathrobe in which he flees the police. To make matters worse, time and drugs have obliterated the passwords Bob needs to reconnect with his former revolutionary colleagues so that he can discover where they've taken Willa.

     Action augments the gunplay and tension. A climactic car chase over rolling hills has a stomach-dropping quality that Anderson sustains for several minutes, and just about everything in One Battle After Another benefits from Jonny Greenwood's edgy score.

     Is One Battle After Another intended as a cautionary tale about where our divided country might be heading? Some may see it that way, but I didn’t view the movie as a flashing red light. Rather, it struck me as a depiction of the febrile craziness of a moment in which nearly everything seems possessed by an over-blown sense of absurdity that’s ridiculous, dangerous, and resistant to comprehension

     Of course, it’s all too much, but that’s how things often feel.

Wes Anderson's grand scheme movie

 I use a notebook during screenings to keep track of specifics -- dates, locations, and colors. Things like that. If my handwriting were better these notes would be more useful, but even as they drift toward indecipherability, they serve as a memory aid.

  During the screening of director Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, I reached a point where I stopped taking notes. I couldn't keep up with the surfeit of detail that cropped up in Anderson's carefully constructed sets, each of which becomes a kind of destination that can outweigh the importance of where the story might be headed.

    Anderson tends to indulge in detailed design, so much so that it's only a mild overstatement to call his scenes  dioramas with actors. There's world building and then there's world building that feels chiseled; movies such as the Phoenician Scheme flood the screen with their drolly express detailing.

     The Anderson aesthetic is richly displayed in Phoenician Scheme, but the movie also includes dull stretches that take us from episode to episode, some set off by title cards expressing variable amounts of wit.

      So what's The Phonecian Scheme about? A greedy tycoon named Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) aims to control the resources of a fictional region called Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia. Zsa-zsa's ambition sends him to a tour to raise funds for an intricate infrastructure project.

     Kate Winslet's real-life daughter Mia Threapleton plays Korda's daughter Liesl, the character who brings the movie's father/daughter theme into focus. Korda wants Threapleton's Liesl to take over his empire, choosing her over his nine sons, the equivalent of non-player characters in video games.

     The problem: Liesl is on the verge of taking her vows as a nun, an occupation that would limit her ability to play Zsa-zsa's ruthless game. To the extent that it's possible, Liesl adds moral fiber to Zsa-Zsa's project: Unlike her father, she refuses to use slaves to help with any required construction. 

     A scorecard might be needed to keep track of the actors who appear in small roles. Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston turn up in a sequence involving a strange H-O-R-S-E-like game of basketball. Anderson also makes room for appearances by Riz Ahmed, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mathieu Amalric, and Scarlett Johansson. 

     Michael Cera gets more screen time as Bjorn, an insect collector who travels with Korda and Liesl. He serves as Liesl's tutor and Zsa-zsa's "guy Friday."

     The performances fit into the Anderson's deadpan presentation of a playful weirdness that extends to costumes (a striking set of pajamas) or personal appearance (Cumberbatch's graying two-tone beard).  

     Set in the 1950s, Phoenician Scheme seems more subdued than previous Anderson efforts, although it begins with a plane crash that might be read as a commentary on the preposterous inhumanity of contemporary action sequences. Zsa-zsa we learn has survived many plane crashes. He's like man living on perpetual borrowed time. Perhaps that's why he seems a bit bored with himself.

      Anderson's devoted fans who wouldn't miss one of his movies. Should others venture into The Phoenician Scheme they may have to settle for quiet appreciation of the environments Anderson creates and his occasional displays of audacity -- e.g., the basketball sequence. 

       I'm not sure where to rank Phoenician Scheme

in Anderson's extensive catalog. The movie struck me as one more stop on a continuing journey, something like a restaurant with a forgettable main course, but lots of tasty side dishes.

Wes Anderson's insular ‘Dispatch’

     Wes Anderson is an artful filmmaker and master miniaturist, a director who knows how to situate his films in the rich stream of cinema history. He's idiosyncratic and hardly ever seems to make a film in which his main objective is to soothe an audience. These are admirable traits and also the reasons why I always scold myself when I can't fully get behind an Anderson film.

   That's the case with The French Dispatch, a movie  apparently intended as a tribute to great magazine journalism. 

   Bill Murray plays the editor of the French Dispatch. Headquartered in the city of Ennui along the Blasé river, the Dispatch has built its reputation on the power of the written word and the idiosyncratic journalistic eye.

    Murray articulates two rules for those who work for the Dispatch. Don't cry and write in a way that makes it seem as if you did it on purpose.

   The plan: When Murray's Arthur Howitzer Jr. dies, the paper dies with him -- perhaps Anderson's way of acknowledging the disappearance of Great Editors; i.e., editorial titans who knew how to work with "difficult" writers -- and had never heard of focus groups, much less consulted one.

    An anthology divided into three parts with a prologue, the movie focuses on the Dispatch, a New Yorker-like publication complete with a table of contents and drawings. The meat of the movie involves three Dispatch feature pieces presented in black-and-white, color, and mixtures of the two.

    First among them, The Concrete Masterpiece, a story in which an art maven (Tilda Swinton) talks about a brilliant rebel painter named Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro). 

   Imprisoned for murder, Rosenthaler uses a prison guard (Lea Seydoux) as a model. Adrien Brody enters the story as an art dealer who wants to exploit Moses's work -- and is, therefore, outraged when Rosenthaler produces frescos on the prison's walls. How the hell can those be sold?

   The best and most genuinely bizarre of the three pieces, The Concrete Masterpiece features Del Toro as a genius who seems to have separated himself from the constraints of ordinary morality. 

   Next up, Revisions to a Manifesto featuring Timothee Chalamet and Frances McDormand. McDormand plays a writer caught up in what looks like the student rebellion of 1968. She develops a relationship  -- as a kind of mentor and sexual partner -- for Chalamet's character, leader of a student revolt. She also crosses  an ethical line, helping Chalamet's character write a manifesto. 

   By the time of the second movie, I found myself asking just how much quirkiness and intricate detailing I could tolerate. 

   OK, part three, The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner. Jeffrey Wright portrays a writer who's working on a profile of a chef. Listening to Wright's delivery of the segment’s abundant dialogue has its rewards. But Private Dining Room, which also makes room for animation and crime, seems crowded to the point of indulgence.

   Almost every Anderson movie has a finely etched quality as well as a whimsical sense of humor and French Dispatch is not without those qualities. Still ....

   I wouldn’t say that Anderson has chiseled the life out of his movie; it's more that the chiseling almost becomes the life of an intricate inward-looking movie that carves out a place for itself — but not always for an audience. 

   Is it possible for a movie to talk to itself?

'Soldado' bathes in cynicism

Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro reunite in Sicario: Day of the Soldado

The first few minutes of Sicario: Day of the Soldado conflate Mexican border crossings with acts of Islamic terror in the US. The picture wasn't five minutes old before I found myself wondering whether Stephen Miller, considered the hardest of the Trump administration’s immigration hardliners, hadn’t served as a script consultant.

But this sequel to 2015's Sicario eventually broadens its outlook to encompass a kind of inclusive nihilism in which the US government will advance its ambitions by fomenting war, in which CIA agents fight battles in which there are no rules and in which violence, cynicism, and wavering loyalties upset any semblance of international order.

This teeming doomy pile of hopelessness should have made Soldado feel like a keen-eyed movie of the moment, yet this edition of Sicario feels oddly out of touch, a movie in which events seem to be taking place in a world divorced from all other possible realities.

From the start, Soldado accepts its brand of amoral realism without question, perhaps establishing itself as another movie that expects us to admire the way it pushes violent efficiency to harsh extremes.

This time, the story centers on the way a hard-core CIA operative (Josh Brolin) enlists the help of a professional assassin (Benicio del Toro) in trying to start a war among Mexican drug cartels, groups of ruthless mobsters that have recognized a new economic reality: People -- namely immigrants who wish to be smuggled across the border between the US and Mexico -- have become the new cocaine, an abundant source of profit.

Emily Blunt, who appeared in the first movie as a novice who picked her way through thickets of moral corruption, has been replaced by Catherine Keener, a more credible hardass but one who has been given much less to do than Blunt.

Brolin reprises his role as a CIA agent who, for the most part, operates without principles. If there’s a dirty job, Brolin’s character does it with matter-of-fact efficiency. As the movie’s assassin, del Toro manages to do what he does best, bring unexpected flavor to his line readings, sort of Christopher Walker without the impish humor. I’m not criticizing del Toro for this; for me, his quietly off-kilter performance was the best thing about the movie.

The plot contrives to have del Toro’s Alejandro escort a teenage girl (Isabela Moner) out of Mexico. The daughter of a major drug lord, Isabella's kidnapping is part of a complicated scheme to pit rival gangs against each other. It's part of an ill-defined effort to stop Islamic terrorists from joining immigrants as they cross the border.

You probably needn’t have seen the first movie to follow this one, which tries up its ante of dread with Hildur Guonadottir's monotonously ominous score, which — I imagine — is what fog horns would sound like if they were able to mourn.

I still have enough appreciation of B-movie pleasures to have enjoyed parts of Soldado, although it’s difficult to say which without spoilers.

Overall, though, Soldado takes us into dismal emotionally parched terrain where morals have been strip-mined, decency has been eroded and most values have been discarded. The movie follows characters who are accustomed to doing society’s dirty work for bureaucrats —- Matthew Modine portrays the US Secretary of Defense -- who are committed to covering their own asses no matter what their decisions may cost others.

Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, who wrote the first movie and followed with Hell or High Water and Wind River, hasn't imagined the same movie twice but doesn't do much to expand the second helping's thematic reach. And in taking the reins from director Denis Villeneuve, Italian director Stefano Sollima has made a movie that, like many of its characters, seems to lack conviction about the corrupted world into which it pumps a fair measure of bullets.

Those who find Soldado realistic may want to consider the near-miraculous recovery made one of its characters after ... I'll say no more. Check it out for yourself and tell me if you bought it.

A welcome 'Star Wars' addition

Director Rian Johnson takes the reins for Last Jedi and the result mostly satisfies.

Now, where were we?

If you're among the zillions of Star Wars enthusiasts, you know that the last chapter (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) concluded with young Rey (Daisy Ridley) finding her way to a remote island where Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) had withdrawn from all things Jedi, including battling whatever evil currently had harnessed the dark side of the series' fabled Force. Luke, we learned, had hung up his Lightsaber.

Now comes Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the next installment of what's billed as a Star Wars sequel trilogy -- and the plea for Luke to shake off his funk continues.

This edition should please fans as it deftly barrels its way through two and half hours with only a few lags as the screenplay fulfills expositional obligations.

Director Rian Johnson (Brick and Looper) picks up the reins from J.J. Abrams and gives us a Star Wars with a bit of nuance, flashes of humor and plenty of well-crafted action.

What brings the whole enterprise to life -- aside from the generosity of its spectacle -- are the inner torments of characters who embody the great Star Wars theme: the tension between the light and dark sides of the force. This clash, of course, includes the knowing acknowledgment that even the most morally superior characters might be a hairsbreadth away from answering the dark call.

In a way, the plot of any Star Wars movie could be its least important attribute. You already know that Rey has found Luke Skywalker, so the only remaining question is whether she persuades him to leave his island retreat -- formally known as the planet Ahch-To -- and return to action as an inspiration for the Resistance, which is busy fighting the First Order.

The First Order, of course, is run by Supreme Leader Snoke, a cadaverous-looking creep played by Andy Serkis with the usual CGI boost. Snoke has great power, but looks so decayed, you half wonder how he lifts himself out of bed in the morning.

Disney, which has taken charge of the Star Wars franchise, has cautioned critics against revealing spoilers. I don't consider it a spoiler to tell you that unlike its 2015 predecessor, this edition includes more than a cameo appearance by Hamill. His Luke quickly establishes himself as a cranky, bearded figure who has shed every bit of the wide-eyed enthusiasm of his character's youth.

A bit of sadness tempers the fun. The Last Jedi marks Carrie Fisher's last performance. Fisher appears as General Leia Organa, head of the Resistance, and yes, Fischer's presence is more than ceremonial. (Fisher died a year ago this month.)

Johnson does a good job of weaving new characters into a mix that brings back Adam Driver, who digs as deep as he can as Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren tops Snoke's list of prospects to become the new Darth Vader. Ren, you'll recall, killed his father, Han Solo, in the last episode.

Look for Laura Dern, with purple hair, as Vice Admiral Holdo, evidently the second in command of Resistance forces after General Leia. Benicio del Toro plays DJ, a hacker who knows how to disable a device that figures heavily in the plot. Del Toro gives Last Jedi a sly, juicy boost. Finn (a returning John Boyega) and Rose Pico (newbie Kelly Marie Tran) are forced by circumstance to trust del Toro's genially larcenous character.

As you can tell, many characters populate this increasingly complex story. Oscar Isaac returns as the dashing pilot Poe Dameron. Also returning: Domhnall Gleeson as General Hux, another First Order purveyor of evil, and Lupita Nyong'o, the goggle-eyed pirate Maz.

Ridley already proved herself a worthy addition to the Star Wars fold and does nothing here to convince us that we weren't right to welcome her for what evidently will be a long run.

Johnson and his production team gives us plenty of visual diversion -- from Luke's monkish stone hut (it looks like something sculptor Andy Goldsworthy might have created) to the imperially sized vessels of the First order to the obligatory trip to a bustling casino planet -- it's called Canto Bight -- where rogues, aliens, and intergalactic swells meet and mingle.

New creatures pop up, notably cute little Porgs, a type of seabird that inhabits the planet Ahch-To. Thankfully, the Porgs are used sparingly enough not to create an overdose of cuteness, the dreaded Ewok effect.

Look, directing a Star Wars movie requires an ability to juggle a large cast of characters without creating too much confusion, as well as a commitment to preserving Star Wars mythology without miring the series in undue reverence for its past. Every new Star Wars movie must earn its own stripes.

Johnson gets the job done and, in the bargain, makes us the beneficiaries of his success.

A hard-core look at the drug war

French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's Sicario is a dense, complicated and deeply pessimistic movie about the drug war and, quite possibly, the collapse of just about all civilized values.

If you're looking for a diverting night at the movies, look elsewhere. In Villeneuve's supremely caustic drama, even triumph tends to feel bad.

So there's your warning.

If, on the other hand, you're ready for a dark thriller that pulls no punches, you may want to give Sicario a try. Watching Sicario -- the word means hit man -- I half wondered whether Villeneuve (Prisoners and Incendies) felt that Steven Soderbergh's Traffic was a little too light-hearted and needed a corrective.

The story introduces us to FBI agent Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt), an agent who's recruited by shadowy forces to participate in an anti-drug task force that's led by a swaggering Matt Graver (Josh Brolin).

We're not sure whether Brolin's Graver is a CIA agent or a DEA agent, but whoever writes his checks seems willing to let him play by his own rules. When we first see him, he's at a meeting wearing flip flops, an obvious clue that this is no ordinary cop.

In addition to the cops who work with Brolin, we meet Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), a mysterious fellow whose role in the proceedings remains vague. It's a safe bet, though, that the taciturn Alejandro isn't handling human relations.

It takes a while for the plot to clarify, a smart decision on Villeneuve's part. He keeps us at Kate's meager level of understanding; she's thrown into a chaotic situation she doesn't comprehend. Neither do we.

Slowly we learn that the mission of this drug-fighting force involves undermining the stability of the Sonora cartel so that law enforcement officials can locate the guy who heads it.

Set in Chandler, Ariz., the movie's opening raid makes it clear that the cartel isn't playing around. Blunt's Mercer joins agents who find a house full of mutilated bodies hidden behind its walls, one of the more macabre sights you'll see in a movie this year.

Villeneuve's depiction of Juarez, site of a mid-picture raid, will do nothing to boost tourism in that town, except maybe for those who want to see what a city looks like when bodies are left hanging from overpasses.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men) gives Villeneuve images to match his foray into a world without clear moral boundaries.

A late-picture swerve into revenge territory may be a bit too pat, but Villeneuve gives most of this down-and-dirty drama an undertow of dread that's augmented by Del Toro's unnerving performance. Brolin's smug savvy seems right for a character who wants people to think that only he truly understands what's happening.

Blunt may be a bit too soft for this kind of role, but if you don't entirely buy her performance, you may not entirely reject it either, and it does nothing to undermine the corrosive atmosphere Villeneuve creates.

A insistent score by Johann Johannsson comes as close as you'll want to get to an aural equivalent for what it feels like to experience pure dread. That score has its softer moments, but it also includes sounds that could pass for the agonized groans of hell.

Violent and harsh, Sicario is the kind of movie that leaves tread marks on the psyche.


The

Inherent confusion in 'Inherent Vice'

Paul Thomas Anderson tackles a Thomas Pynchon novel and ... well ... er ... that is ...

Director Paul Thomas Anderson has gone where no director has gone before; i.e., he has attempted to bring a novel by the reclusive Thomas Pynchon to the screen.

Those familiar with Pynchon's work immediately will understand why this is such an audacious endeavor on Anderson's part. Pynchon's novels aren't plot-driven, and frequently veer off into clouds of digression as he watches the social order break into bizarre fragments.

If a Pynchon novel doesn't always make sense in conventional terms, well, look around you. What really does?

When I was in college during the '60s, we were all devouring Pynchon's V., a debut novel that revolved around a character named Benny Profane.

Pynchon provided a counterweight to the formalized rigor of academic reading. We were smitten. We congratulated ourselves for getting "it," whatever "it" was.

In Inherent Vice, Anderson dips into Pynchon's 2009 neo-noir fantasy, an LA-based story that introduces us to a character named Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix). Doc's 1970s life unfolds in a pot-induced haze that keeps him wandering through post-Manson, hippie detritus in a fictional town called Gordita Beach.

If the private eye was staple of 1940s Hollywood, he's reduced to blood-shot eye by Anderson, less a savvy guy with his own moral code than a bemused idler.

The movie opens when Sportello is visited by a former girlfriend, the elusive Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston). It seems Shasta Fay has become the lover of real-estate magnate Michael Z. Wolfmann (Eric Roberts).

Wolfmann has disappeared and Shasta Fay wants Sportello's help to locate him, presumably to save him from those who would put him in a sanitarium -- or something like that.

At this point, I'm going to let the ship that's carrying the Anderson/Pynchon plot sink. No more attempts to recount what can't be recounted. The plot is a blur of dodges, gestures and noir mimicry. Trying to follow it is a bit like getting lost in a new town without benefit of a map or GPS. You either panic and scream or you decide to enjoy the strange sights.

For me, these sights are embodied in the form of characters who enter the movie like figures from a pop-up book.

A sampling:

-- Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro). He's Sportello's lawyer, a guy who seems like a refugee from a Hunter Thompson story.

-- Lt. Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), an LA cop who specializes in civil rights violations.
-- Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short), a dentist who wears purple suits and heads a mysterious ring called Golden Fang.

-- Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a saxophone player who's presumed to have died, but whose wife (Jena Malone) thinks he's still alive.

You can tell by the character names that Pynchon's universe is one of broad comedy carved with a satirist's knife.

I'm putting off my assessment for a bit because (as a matter of public service) I want to share with you the way that I watched the movie.

I tended to drift in and out of the various episodes. While each was unfolding, it held my attention, but as Anderson shifted from one bit to the next, I had difficulty remembering exactly where I'd been.

I enjoyed the music -- both Jonny Greenwood's score and the tunes selected by Anderson to accompany various segments. I chuckled. My mind wandered. I chuckled some more. My mind wandered some more.

When Reese Witherspoon showed up as Deputy DA Penny Kimball, I was amused to see her. She's one of Sportello's sexual companions and informed sources.

I felt a sense of alienated indifference as the characters exchanged information that seemed important to them, but left me shrugging.

The movie's narration -- delivered by Joanna Newsom as a character named Sortilege -- sometimes approaches Pynchon's eloquence, but doesn't necessarily clarify much of anything.

Two performances are of special note. Phoenix, who appeared in Anderson's The Master, brings stoned integrity and his own level of confusion to the role of Sportello.

He's best in scenes in which he squares off with Brolin's Bigfoot, a character who becomes a bold parody of a quintessentially starched Los Angeles detective. Bigfoot has a crew-cut and a fondness for phallus-shaped popsicles. Unashamedly brutal and a man of porcine appetites (he's always eating), Bigfoot stands as a kind of one-man satire of law enforcement at its worst.

Now, what to make of all this?

You can probably tell from the tone of this review that I'm not ready to rip into Anderson's movie. I hope you also can tell that it's an experience to which not everyone will take. The old adage -- it helps if you're stoned -- may be applicable here, an observation I offer not as an encouragement for pot smoking, but as a guidepost to the experience that awaits you.

I enjoyed some of the movie's asides, watching Bigfoot in a non-speaking role in Adam 12, for example. On top of everything else, the guy wants to be on TV. Martin Short made me smile, as did Sportello's visit to a massage parlor in the middle of nowhere.

I'm sure I'm leaving something out. The neo-Nazis who guard Wolfmann perhaps? I'm not sure it matters.

Was a time when I might have gotten more pleasure from this meander through a lost moment in the counterculture moors. I suppose in the end, Anderson didn't totally convince me that Pynchon's work should be brought to the screen, even with the help of the gifted cinematographer Robert Elswit who coats each scene with downside lacquer.

If you're an Anderson fan (and I mostly am), you probably owe it to yourself to give this one a try. If you're a Pynchon fan, you're already used to plots that leave you scratching your head.

Everyone else? I'd say that the movie unfolds as a series of digressions from ... well ... let's talk.

Did I feel hostility toward Inherent Vice? Not really.

Did I like it? Sometimes.

Was I bored by it? Occasionally.

Would I watch it again? Not immediately. Probably someday. Who knows?

Oliver Stone gets his groove back

Savages takes a blistering look at the drug trade.

If you didn't already know that it's a bad idea to get crosswise with a Mexican drug lord, Oliver Stone's Savages will deliver the message in bold, gut-kicking fashion. Author Don Winslow's 2010 novel of the same name has provided Stone with a cornucopia of ingredients that he definitely knows how to cook.

Spilling over with sex, violence and ill-gotten luxury, Savages is Stone's best work in a long time, a movie that tells a vivid story that pretty much keeps Stone off his soapbox.

The action revolves around three characters. Chon (Taylor Kitsch) is a former Navy SEAL who runs a thriving marijuana business along with his parter Ben (Aaron Johnson), a brainy Berkeley grad with a social conscience. Ben uses some of his money to help folks in Third World countries.

Chon and Ben live with Ophelia (Blake Lively), a woman who goes by the name of "O" and who narrates this seductive story of crime and corruption. Both men sleep with "O," and both profess to love her. She insists she loves both of them. It takes two guys to make a whole man for "O" -- or so she says.

Stone wisely surrounds the movie's young leads with a veteran supporting cast that includes Salma Hayek (as a drug czarina); John Travolta (as a corrupt DEA agent); Benicio Del Toro (as a brutal mob enforcer) and Demian Bichir (as a well-dressed executive in Hayek's crime network).

The trouble starts when Hayek's Elena decides that she's going to take over Chon and Ben's business. She's attracted to this California duo because they've cultivated the best pot in the U.S., marijuana known for its killer THC count.

Ben, who's had enough of the drug business, is ready to sell. Chon wants to hold onto the enterprise they've built. Besides, he's convinced that no involvement with Mexican drug lords comes with insurance: It only can end badly.

If there's a certain amount of callowness among the movie's younger actors, the old pros compensate. Looking thick as a side of beef and sporting a close-cropped hair cut, Travolta is both funny and appalling as a rogue DEA agent; Del Toro's turn as the quietly vicious Lado follows suit; it's, by turns, chilling and amusing; and Hayek brings power-hungry bitchiness to new levels of steely-eyed intensity as Elena.

The rest of the plot involves kidnappings, torture and a level of brutality from which Stone never shrinks. Think of it this way: When drug lords decide to "punish" someone, they're not talking about spankings or slaps on the wrist. The squeamish should know that the movie includes beheadings and a scene in which a suspected rat is doused with gasoline and burned alive.

I don't know if there's a larger point here, although we can't help noticing that the drug trade couldn't thrive without massive police corruption and wanton violence.

Stone and cinematographer Dan Mindel balance the bloodshed with the rich light of Laguna Beach, where Chon, Ben and "O" reside. They also do a fine job of pointing out how luxury contrasts with squalor, depending on where characters fit on the drug-trade ladder.

Some of the dialogue is burdened by a phony, pulp toughness that rings hollow ("You don't charge the world, it changes you") and some of it is bitingly funny. I can't cite the movie's best darkly funny example without including a spoiler, so you'll have to take my word about the amusing part.

You'll find many of Stone's trademark visual tricks, but this time, he's letting the story do most of the work, and Savages is better off for it. Put another way: The movie is good enough to make you forget all about Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Even an overly tricky finale (bound to annoy some viewers) can't cancel the pleasures of this robust, sensual and unashamedly scabrous movie.

The real fun of Savages springs from the movie's pungency, from Stone's bravura handling of its violent set pieces and from his insistent acknowledgement that the dark side doesn't necessarily disappear just because the California sun is shining.