FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
**** out of 4
Rated R
Directed by Terry Gilliam
NOTE: Between the Presidential Elections and the remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, times are ripe for disillusionment. And disillusionment and Hunter S. Thompson go together like peanut butter and MORE peanut butter. The Good Doctor has been heavy on my mind lately, and being as it's been ten years since this movie came out and I haven't written anything in a few days, I figured why the hell not? This is the closest you're getting to a personal blog.
There are many ways you can tell a movie has had an effect on you. Sure you can quote it without pause like those pitiful MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL idiots, or you can dress up in a homemade STAR TREK red-shirt costume and proclaim your virginity to the world. But one way above all is most telling.
That you start referencing it through sheer osmosis.
That's right, when a movie is so ingrained in your psyche that it becomes part of your mannerisms, to the point where you don't even know you're doing it. So when I'm groggy from waking up in the morning, trying to make up my mind, or am generally confused, I revert to Johnny Depp's muttering Thompsonisms from Terry Gilliam's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. Talk to Mike Watne, and he'll tell you it's true. I so deeply and wholly fell in love with this film when it came out on May 22, 1998 that I saw it five times while it was in the theater.
Or to put it more succinctly, I saw it five times in the theater... On opening weekend. Once when I got out of school on Friday (Do the math, I was fifteen), twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday.
I'm one of the precious few who read Hunter S. Thompson's book BEFORE they saw the movie, and if I had the money and all your street addresses, I would mail you each a copy. It is a classic and one of the five best uses of the English language I've ever heard or read. It's a rarity in that it's widely acknowledged and critically acclaimed, yet anyone who is open-minded and halfway cool can read it.
The movie... Not so much. It was booed at Cannes, the critics (with the notable exception of Gene Siskel) hated it and it bombed... Although it opened the same day as Roland Emmerich's GODZILLA, so that couldn't have been helped. It has developed a cult following, but only after it came out on video. If those same people saw it in a theater, the outlook would not have been rosy. Indeed, that it's a tough movie to surround yourself with is one of its better selling points.
Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro play journalist Raoul Duke and attorney Doctor Gonzo (based on Thompson himself and real-life Chicano-Rights lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta). In 1971, Duke is assigned to cover a motorcycle race in Las Vegas. So they get unlimited credit and a drug cache that would make cartel runners in Bogota envious and they go high on the hog in Sin City.
Writing about the plot of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, the book or the movie, is an exercise in complete and utter futility. There ISN'T one. It's all about mood and culture as Duke and Gonzo go head-to-head with all the ills of The American Dream. They stumble around this vast and all-consuming capitalist enterprise still clinging to all the ideals the sixties instilled in them, while watching all those hopes assailed one by one. Gilliam reaches the ugly heart of America's hatred of its fringe, those people of every generation clinging to hope and a lifestyle that embraces that hope.
Because what the book and the film are really about, in my opinion, is the act of going out of style. Here we have two men of ideas who slowly but surely turn into monsters as they see their way of life going extinct as the world turns. They turn to drugs to keep the fun going until they become the very men they hate. Universal Studios tried to sell FEAR AND LOATHING as a comedy upon its release, and even the poser-fans will tell you it's funny as hell, but every man-jack of them is missing the point somewhat. This is one of the saddest films I've ever seen. It manifests itself in small ways, but one of the most telling scenes is where Duke and Gonzo go into a performance hall in a Casino to see Debbie Reynolds, only to find her singing SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND. They're escorted out laughing at the sight of this glitzy Vegas symbol co-opting a song that defined a generation younger than hers for sheer kitsch value. They're laughing so they don't cry. Imagine your parents singing SOULJA BOY, and see how YOU like it.
Gilliam is a master at capturing a vast and sickly bright Vegas hellhole through drug-soaked aviator shades. He humorously and often hellishly depicts a massive and thunderous drug-trip gone terribly, horribly wrong. But I think where people got mixed up and angry with the film is that all of Gilliam's effects aren't used to convey that drugs are bad. He's just seeing what Duke is seeing. I guess when drugs are being used on screen, they need a moral to go with it, and you you should never, EVER use them, right kids? REQUIEM FOR A DREAM was even harder to sit through and didn't catch half as much shit. With FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, drugs are just the means to the thematic end.
But what unifies FEAR AND LOATHING and keeps it from becoming a senseless episodic technical exercise is the performance and voice-over narration of Johnny Depp as Thompson surrogate Raoul Duke. Muttering Thompson's spare and lurid prose (being as the film is pretty much verbatim from the book), Depp maintains the illusion of interior monologue. His command is tying the whole enterprise together, bringing us into Duke's head. In a brilliant use of sound mixing as a narrative device, almost all of Duke's dialogue is dubbed in post-production, so that it's louder than all the ambient dialogue from everyone else. This makes it feel as though we're inside all the psychosis, and that it's part of a well-managed thought process that came back from the speeding rush towards the edge that's playing out on screen.
What I walk away with ten years after the initial advent of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS is that it is the best film ever made about those nasty and wondrous Vietnam years at home. Better even that EASY RIDER, which is more of a period piece now than anything else. Moreso, it's about hopes and dreams dying unmourned on burning Nevada sands. Ideals vanish with time and age. And we can kick and scream and say they don't, little knowing that they really DO, and the kicking and screaming only speeds it along. Hope springs finite, instead of eternal.
And the future ain't what it used to be.
EPILOGUE: In spite of what you see in the film and what others may tell you, the late and great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is not just mere folktale. If you can, track down the Criterion Collection DVD issue, and he has a commentary track with producer Laila Nabulsi and Benicio Del Toro. For the rest of you... Check THIS shit out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzJW1rYAeiw
**** out of 4
Rated R
Directed by Terry Gilliam
NOTE: Between the Presidential Elections and the remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, times are ripe for disillusionment. And disillusionment and Hunter S. Thompson go together like peanut butter and MORE peanut butter. The Good Doctor has been heavy on my mind lately, and being as it's been ten years since this movie came out and I haven't written anything in a few days, I figured why the hell not? This is the closest you're getting to a personal blog.
There are many ways you can tell a movie has had an effect on you. Sure you can quote it without pause like those pitiful MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL idiots, or you can dress up in a homemade STAR TREK red-shirt costume and proclaim your virginity to the world. But one way above all is most telling.
That you start referencing it through sheer osmosis.
That's right, when a movie is so ingrained in your psyche that it becomes part of your mannerisms, to the point where you don't even know you're doing it. So when I'm groggy from waking up in the morning, trying to make up my mind, or am generally confused, I revert to Johnny Depp's muttering Thompsonisms from Terry Gilliam's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. Talk to Mike Watne, and he'll tell you it's true. I so deeply and wholly fell in love with this film when it came out on May 22, 1998 that I saw it five times while it was in the theater.
Or to put it more succinctly, I saw it five times in the theater... On opening weekend. Once when I got out of school on Friday (Do the math, I was fifteen), twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday.
I'm one of the precious few who read Hunter S. Thompson's book BEFORE they saw the movie, and if I had the money and all your street addresses, I would mail you each a copy. It is a classic and one of the five best uses of the English language I've ever heard or read. It's a rarity in that it's widely acknowledged and critically acclaimed, yet anyone who is open-minded and halfway cool can read it.
The movie... Not so much. It was booed at Cannes, the critics (with the notable exception of Gene Siskel) hated it and it bombed... Although it opened the same day as Roland Emmerich's GODZILLA, so that couldn't have been helped. It has developed a cult following, but only after it came out on video. If those same people saw it in a theater, the outlook would not have been rosy. Indeed, that it's a tough movie to surround yourself with is one of its better selling points.
Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro play journalist Raoul Duke and attorney Doctor Gonzo (based on Thompson himself and real-life Chicano-Rights lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta). In 1971, Duke is assigned to cover a motorcycle race in Las Vegas. So they get unlimited credit and a drug cache that would make cartel runners in Bogota envious and they go high on the hog in Sin City.
Writing about the plot of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, the book or the movie, is an exercise in complete and utter futility. There ISN'T one. It's all about mood and culture as Duke and Gonzo go head-to-head with all the ills of The American Dream. They stumble around this vast and all-consuming capitalist enterprise still clinging to all the ideals the sixties instilled in them, while watching all those hopes assailed one by one. Gilliam reaches the ugly heart of America's hatred of its fringe, those people of every generation clinging to hope and a lifestyle that embraces that hope.
Because what the book and the film are really about, in my opinion, is the act of going out of style. Here we have two men of ideas who slowly but surely turn into monsters as they see their way of life going extinct as the world turns. They turn to drugs to keep the fun going until they become the very men they hate. Universal Studios tried to sell FEAR AND LOATHING as a comedy upon its release, and even the poser-fans will tell you it's funny as hell, but every man-jack of them is missing the point somewhat. This is one of the saddest films I've ever seen. It manifests itself in small ways, but one of the most telling scenes is where Duke and Gonzo go into a performance hall in a Casino to see Debbie Reynolds, only to find her singing SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND. They're escorted out laughing at the sight of this glitzy Vegas symbol co-opting a song that defined a generation younger than hers for sheer kitsch value. They're laughing so they don't cry. Imagine your parents singing SOULJA BOY, and see how YOU like it.
Gilliam is a master at capturing a vast and sickly bright Vegas hellhole through drug-soaked aviator shades. He humorously and often hellishly depicts a massive and thunderous drug-trip gone terribly, horribly wrong. But I think where people got mixed up and angry with the film is that all of Gilliam's effects aren't used to convey that drugs are bad. He's just seeing what Duke is seeing. I guess when drugs are being used on screen, they need a moral to go with it, and you you should never, EVER use them, right kids? REQUIEM FOR A DREAM was even harder to sit through and didn't catch half as much shit. With FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, drugs are just the means to the thematic end.
But what unifies FEAR AND LOATHING and keeps it from becoming a senseless episodic technical exercise is the performance and voice-over narration of Johnny Depp as Thompson surrogate Raoul Duke. Muttering Thompson's spare and lurid prose (being as the film is pretty much verbatim from the book), Depp maintains the illusion of interior monologue. His command is tying the whole enterprise together, bringing us into Duke's head. In a brilliant use of sound mixing as a narrative device, almost all of Duke's dialogue is dubbed in post-production, so that it's louder than all the ambient dialogue from everyone else. This makes it feel as though we're inside all the psychosis, and that it's part of a well-managed thought process that came back from the speeding rush towards the edge that's playing out on screen.
What I walk away with ten years after the initial advent of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS is that it is the best film ever made about those nasty and wondrous Vietnam years at home. Better even that EASY RIDER, which is more of a period piece now than anything else. Moreso, it's about hopes and dreams dying unmourned on burning Nevada sands. Ideals vanish with time and age. And we can kick and scream and say they don't, little knowing that they really DO, and the kicking and screaming only speeds it along. Hope springs finite, instead of eternal.
And the future ain't what it used to be.
EPILOGUE: In spite of what you see in the film and what others may tell you, the late and great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is not just mere folktale. If you can, track down the Criterion Collection DVD issue, and he has a commentary track with producer Laila Nabulsi and Benicio Del Toro. For the rest of you... Check THIS shit out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzJW1rYAeiw
2 comments:
YOu read my mind. You know my story and how I got into Thompson though Where The Buffalo Roam in 1984 and read Hell's Angles and Fear And Loathing in high school.
Yeah, Still reading about him this year. He never goes away. Never!!
He is missed, especially now.
Gilliam got it right and Depp and Del Toro-- perfect. Just reading a bout the making of it this week while reading Wenner's Oral history HST. Pluse that coffee table book that just came out.
Damn fine blog.
Because I can't get enough of Thompson.
Yeah, this blog made me happy, but than my American Dream crashed and burned as soon as I got in my car.
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