"Inherent vice," a term used in marine insurance law, means anything you can't avoid: chocolate will melt, glass will shatter and fruit will spoil. For "Inherent Vice" the movie, the thing that can't be avoided is a comparison to "The Big Lebowski."
Based on the 2009 novel of the same name by reclusive author Thomas Pynchon, director Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vice" — like the Coen brothers' "Lebowski" — is a Sunshine State noir, which follows a stoner detective who's halfheartedly trying to unravel a web of intrigue in Los Angeles.
Set in 1970, the film tries its damnedest to capture the entire paranoid zeitgeist of the era, when the '60s came to a gradual, inconclusive end. The film is filled with flower children, hippie-hating buzz-cut cops, mangy biker gangs, Black Panther militants, a shadowy pro-Nixon organization called Vigilant California, peace-sign flashing undercover snitches, and enough drugs to sedate a horse. If Dennis Hopper had directed "Chinatown" as a comedy, it might have looked this.