First 'Vice' Reactions Roll Out From Industry Insiders; Doubts Cast On Cannes Premiere

8 months before Inherent Vice is set to hit theatres, and nearly 8 months after it officially entered post-production, we are starting to get some faint glimmers of what form the film's exhibition will take. With the 2014 Cannes Film Festival's full competition lineup slated to be announced this Thursday, April 17, we will finally have concrete resolution for one of the film's most hyped-up potential premiere venues once and for all. Unfortunately, according to a new report by Jeffrey Wells over at Hollywood Elsewhere, an Inherent Vice debut at Cannes is not looking likely.

This morning I spoke to an industry friend who's seen Vice and who thinks it's brilliant and mesmerizing in an atmospheric, non-linear sort of way. He says that [Paul Thomas] Anderson, currently doing the sound mix, doesn't really want to subject Vice to Cannes and would rather take his time and tinker around over the summer and then unveil it in Telluride/Venice/Toronto. 

This follows what a friend told me a week or two ago, which is that Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux "has been courting and wooing PTA like mad to get Inherent Vice to Cannes, and that PTA has been telling him since January that it would be very tight for him to get post-production done in time and that he wouldn't show it to Thierry until then. Perhaps PTA would privately like to go to Cannes, but I'm also told that Warner Bros. is against the idea, considering it too early given its December release date. If PTA insists and finishes the film to his satisfaction over the next couple of weeks, he could probably prevail over WB, but the latest I hear is that everything is still very much up in the air."

 Of course, a healthy grain of salt should be taken with this information, given that the sources are all anonymous and that the situation appears to very much still be fluid. In any event, we will know one way or another in only a few days' time.

The much less nerve-racking take-away from this development is that the film (to the few eyes that have seen it) is apparently as astonishing as we all want it to be. The Film Stage provided some other anonymous impressions of the movie from one lucky insider today:

Mix together The Big Lebowski and [Robert] Altman's The Long Goodbye and turn it into a two-and-a-half hour PT Anderson epic and you're getting close to the awesome experience of Inherent Vice. Even Joaquin Phoenix's performance has echoes of '70s Elliott Gould with a touch of The Dude. But don't get me wrong, the film is its own animal. A drug-fueled detective story filled with great psychedelic music and beautiful, grainy cinematography. It's both hilarious and confounding at times. But Anderson does an incredible job of making the incredibly complex plot both comprehensible and entertaining. Even though he's apparently said he's still tinkering, it felt like a finished film and will definitely go down as one of my favorites of his.

242 days.

Find more information about the film on our Inherent Vice page. 
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