The Long Goodbye Meets The Big Lebowski Meets The Two Jakes

Inherent Vice clearly lives in its own peculiar world. Well, THREE worlds actually...the world of the stoner(the movie itself seems stoned); the world of Thomas Pynchon (an "art" writer , evidently, not just paperback man); and the world of Paul Thomas Anderson, who manages to invest Vice with touches of his Boogie Nights/Magnolia/Punch Drunk Love oddball rhythms while at the same time creating "something different"(as he did with There Will Be Blood.)

That said, there have been too many movies made through history to be able to avoid referencing one (or more) of them, no matter what you try to do.

And it is downright pleasurable in Inherent Vice to feel the other movies that came before it:

The Long Goodbye. Inherent Vice is set in 1970; The Long Goodbye was MADE in 1973, so what is nostalgic in 2014 was real in The Long Goodbye. The films share: a laid-back private eye who turns out to be better at his job than you'd think; a mysterious "medical rehab center" which with a mysterious head doctor, that is possibly imprisoning a famous man; and..Los Angeles in all its glory, particularly down by the beach.

The Big Lebowski. Better known and more beloved than The Long Goodbye, this film doesn't have a professional detective in it, but it has an amateur one (Jeff Bridges' Lebowski) and he's as much a laid-back stoner as Doc Sportello(Joaquin Phoenix) here. Moreso than The Long Goodbye, Lebowski shares with Vice a sense of a "mystery" that is at once too complex to truly solve and too inconsequential to matter -- though there are real deaths in Vice that make it serious enough.

The Two Jakes. Chinatown with its 30s PI Jake Gittes(Jack Nicholson) is a precursor to Inherent Vice, but the lesser sequel "The Two Jakes' is on point in a more particular way: The Two Jakes centers on a developer of homes ..reconfiguring the orange groves of Los Angeles into rows and rows of tract homes (in Vice, its decades later and its ethnic neighborhoods that are being transformed.)

The three films rather interweave and echo off of its other, and ambiance is a big tie-in: the sun of Los Angles, the beaches(and beach shack housing.) Pot courses through The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski and Vice.

And all four films(The Two Jakes included), make sure to take in the availability (or lack thereof) of nubile young women of a certain relaxed sexual lifestyle. In The Long Goodbye, its the topless yoga instructors who live next door to Elliott Gould's Marlowe. In The Big Lebowski, its the OTHER Lebowski's porn star wife and the Teutonic artist(Julianne Moore) who sexually pursues Bridges for...the more housewifey reasons. And even a rather portly Jack Nicholson in The Two Jakes ends up with an insatiable woman in his office who needs it...right now. Meanwhile, Doc in Vice finds an interesting massage parlor on the site of the developer's unbuilt tract homes, and is confronted with his beloved ex-girlfriend both naked and "in the mood."

Message here being, I suppose: laidback male private eyes in Los Angeles in any era are going to be confronted by the tantalizing prospects of women and sex...but never really win in that arena.

And there is the love-hate relationship between the PI who "knows too much" and the cops that want the information. The ones who question Gould in The Long Goodbye("Wait, aren't you supposed to say "We ask the questions?") The FBIers who question Phoenix in Vice("Wait, we ask the questions here.") The beach town police chief who dresses down Bridges: "I don't like your name, I don't like your face, I don't like the way you dress." And wonderfully in Inherent Vice: Bigfoot. Say no more. Except...a tough cop who is an extra on Adam-12? Gotta love it.

Anyway, while Inherent Vice is very much its own movie -- the dialogue, the characters, the pacing and the moral -- it follows in a long line of LA private dicks in the sunshine with the difficult women.

You can throw in Paul Newman's "Harper"(from Santa Barbara crime novelist Ross MacDonald) and Kiss Me Deadly while you're at it.

From Altman to Aldrich...