Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, here with the Slate's spoiler special podcast on Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of the Thomas Pinchot novel of the same name.

And joining me in the new Slate Studio B, which is this exciting foam box built for a to accommodate Slate's growing podcast list, is Aisha Harris, a culture blogger for Slate.

Hi, Aisha. Hi, Dana. And Chris Wade,

our video producer, audio producer, the man running the board. Hi, Chris. Hi, Dana. So Inherinvice

is a very shaggy movie that's an adaptation of a very shaggy novel. And I know, Aisha, you've read

the book. I'm in the middle. I'm about three quarters of the way through the book. I had one of those moments where I was racing to finish it before the movie screening. I didn't quite get to it. Chris, you have not read the book. I have not. I wanted to talk about it as an adaptation and see whether it's successful as one, but also just to talk about the particular kind of vibe the movie is going for, which is maybe something out of Robert Altman by way of, I don't know, what other director would you throw in there? Somebody who makes movies that are not about making sense.

Robert Altman by way of Cheech and Chong, as I believe he described it.

Well, it is a stoner comedy, right?

Which Robert Altman also specialized in making, and apparently Robert Altman's sets were just very liberally smoke-infused at all times.

But this very much has that feeling of a fiction that is about the impossibility of discovery, right? It's a kind of an epistemological detective novel that I think Paul Thomas Sanders had made into an even more epistemologically confusing detective story on film. So essentially this is a classic noir setup, right, with a detective

investigating a mystery, but the mystery seems to proliferate endlessly and introduce new characters

and never necessarily resolve. So I want us to try to get into this incredibly convoluted plot

and start spoiling it. But I think first I want to just hear a quick thumbnail reaction from

you guys. Did you like the movie? Were you disappointed? Were you pleased entertained?

I thought it was much more entertaining to watch than it was to read the book. But it was

just as confusing. Oh, I think I'm enjoying the book more, although Chris, what about you?

This movie is like every part of a movie that I would like, a mystery, a slack laid-back stoner

protagonist, enough holes in it that you can form your own interpretation of it.

Thematic residents about what it means to either be a square buy-in to

culture or a stoner dropout of culture. But yet it seems like it was less than the sum of

its parts in a way that I found a little disappointing, though I still liked it.

I think less than the sum of its parts very much sums up how I feel about this movie,

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