INCREMENT VICE - EPISODE #2: "...I need your help, Doc..." with Kim Morgan

Sprawling yet intimate…digressive yet focused…surfing curlicued wavelengths of obsession and obfuscation—such is a fairly apt way of describing the tone of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice; it’s also a fair assessment of tonight’s megaconversation between our host and writer Kim Morgan.

Inherent Vice. The death of the 1960s. Regret. Obsession. Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. The melancholy of oceans. Linda Darnell. Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel. Shasta Fay Hepworth. Jacques Demy’s Model Shop. John Garfield. Joaquin Phoenix. Time traveler Thomas Pynchon. Drugs. Paul Thomas Anderson. “Vitamin C.” Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. Sam Fuller vs. Film Twitter. Josh Brolin. Bigfoot Bjornsen. Neo-noir shootouts. Ralph Meeker. The ambiguities of cinema, life, and self. The cars of Neil Young. Moviegoing in the mornings. The sorrowing hope of Nick Cave. The sweet heroism of Doc Sportello. These are but a few of the subjects Travis and Kim touch upon as they watch the opening minutes of Inherent Vice and ask one another a single, obsessive question: “Why is this so heartachingly beautiful?”

Kim Morgan writes for the New Beverly Cinema, Sight & Sound, the Criterion Collection, and more. She was a short films juror at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, has guest programmed for TCM, presented a series on Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick for FilmStruck, and was the guest director of the 2014 Telluride Film Festival. Recently, she cowrote the adaptation of NIGHTMARE ALLEY with Guillermo del Toro. You can find more of her writing at her own site, Sunset Gun. Or, read her amazing essay on INHERENT VICE for the New Beverly Cinema.