Does anybody READ anymore?

No. And those who do read have the absolute advantage over those who don't. And those who don't should not complain and don't deserve to gain.

"Whatever your opinions are about this movie or PT Anderson, it's astounding that most people don't seem to appreciate that this movie is based on a recent novel by a man who is regarded as one of the great living American writers and whose previous novels have never been filmed and are all but un-filmable (some would say "Gravity's Rainbow" is also un-readable). "

a) that's a matter of opinion. personally i chose palahniuk over anybodybody else.
b) doesn't help. i love douglas adams. does that make the last hitchhiker film any better? no.

"I'm glad most people at least know what film noir is. That's why this movie SEEMS a lot like "The Big Lebowski"--they were both influenced by film noir and the LA noir variant. But those were also based on BOOKS originally (which were called serie noir in France) like Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep", which has a confounding, labyrinthine plot that makes this movie seem relatively easy to follow.

If this movie (and the book its based on) was inspired very much by another movie, it is probably the Robert Altman's adaptation of Chandler's "The Long Goodbye", which updated the 1940's novel to an early 70's setting when that film was made. But the fact that this is a book of literary merit explains why it's too complicated for a lot of today's simple-minded movie audiences to grasp. But I think the problem is literature is allowed to be vague and ambiguous and tell things only from an oblique and limited point of view. A fly struggling in a spider's web is NOT going to appreciate the full design of the web, but a writer is allowed to tell the story from the fly's POV. Today's movie audiences though think they need to have every little thing explained to them. "

doesn't make the film better though.

"My point is if Anderson had completely bastardized rather than (relatively) faithfully adapted the book, it would be a lot more popular"

true.

"with a lot of the illiterate nitwits bashing it on this page."

ignorant much?

If you struggled through Inherent Vice, then you are really dumb and closed-minded. Don't whine to us about your narrow taste. Your time would be better spent expanding it.

Now let's talk for a moment about high-handed clowns who brag about having read a book. Such people are reprehensible and likely struggled through said novel due to their general lack of intelligence.

Also, when claims are made that a film's enjoyment level hinges on whether the viewer read the source book or not, the movie must be regarded as something of a failure. A movie should be worthy of appreciation as its own entity.

I read "Against the Day", "Bleeding Edge", and "Vineland"... too many sex scenes, it made me scared. I do not want to read the rest for fear that I may go to hell. Plus, these are just spooky books... everything just randomly changes shape and size like the author is on some kind of a head-drug, "Vineland" was about... some guy who jumped through windows...? For a living..? Pretending to be mentally retarded on the nightly news? And this leads into a custody battle with some kind of secret military policeman who's trying to take down the paper industry? And "Against the Day"... Global military pirates ride around on a balloon and unlock the secret of time-travel with the help of a family of traveling circus-performing mathematicians? And "Bleeding Edge"... some esoteric order of vampiric dwarves underneath Manhattan plans the 9/11 attacks behind the front of a federally funded computer security operation to affect the stock exchange? These are plots that a madman would write, and even worse, while he is writing them he has momentary lapses in spatial perception and things will just randomly twist and contort like the characters are all living in the matrix. All of a sudden a character can just fly, or turn into another character and travel back in time and make things appear and disappear at will. I do NOT want to know what the author Thomas Pynchon was smoking when he started writing these ideas down, probably some kind of marijuana pot cigarette or joint. Thomas Pynchon is a private man, I would not be surprised to learn that what we think is Thomas Pynchon is actually several small, two foot tall men who have all piled together in a big man's suit and figured out how to walk and talk as a single unit, and Paul Thomas Anderson is personally keeping this a secret in exchange for several "kilometers" of marijuana, or grass, from drug cartels.

It's true -- people don't seem to read anymore. Books anyway.

It'd be wrong to chalk it up to one thing, but I do a lot of work with young people, and for many of them, even looking upon a page of print is an exhausting prospect (unless said text emits light -- see McLuhan). They don't have the stamina to struggle with meaning, nor the inclination to deal with ambiguity, whether it lasts for a second or an hour. The effort makes the task both worthless (it won't gratify) and impossible.

Some of us were lucky enough to grow up in households that fostered a love of reading. This is an invaluable thing to have, and if you've got it, you should set aside a few minutes and thank whomever is responsible.

But there are huge chunks of western society for whom "reading" means "that boring thing we did in school". By high school it's almost too late, with most students reading a book a year -- and that book is whatever novel study they have to deal with in English class.

Short of yelling and screaming about the fact that "nobody reads anymore dagnammit", I'm not sure what we can do. But is it any surprise that people aren't falling all over themselves to praise a spiritually faithful adaptation of one of the most difficult novelists of the age?

Having said that, to state the obvious, a movie is not a book, and it's probably not good form to criticize people for not appreciating a movie because they don't grasp the genre-contextual significance of its source material (book and film). It can be helpful, but it doesn't make the movie itself rewarding, necessarily.

What gets me -- setting "book learnin" aside -- is you'd think that if millennials could do one thing better than anyone, it'd be analyzing media texts -- they swim in them, breathe them, eat them, shït them.

And yet this doesn't seem to be the case. Films are fast becoming "the new reading" -- and not in a positive sense; if a film challenges in the least, the reflexive shutdown occurs almost as quickly as with text on a page. Maybe it's just a matter of newer, shinier media, one that panders more specifically to an individual's immediate needs and desires, consigning the old stuff to the waste bin.

I did like Inherent Vice though. 

Am I the only one who can't see any connection to Big Lebowski?

It has more to do with Chinatown and LA Confidential.

Your post title made me think of "Does anybody remember laughter?!" and I lol'd.