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Get Breaking News on your cellSXSW 2008: Gonzo lives
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August 2008
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Gun nut, drug nut, all-around nut: the late Hunter S. Thompson was hell on literary wheels. He rolls on with full force in Gonzo, a robust portrait directed by recent documentary Oscar winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) and produced by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's HDNet Movies. Gibney's film takes care to give us the whole Gonzo, rage-infested warts and all (ex-wife Sandra Conklin makes it clear that living with him was a constant rollercoaster ride). But it also presents a man of considerable political conviction and disillusionment who ran for the sheriff's office in his beloved Colorado, championed the likes of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter and delivered a classic of campaign journalism in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It doesn't hurt to have Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , reading the man's work on camera. But the director's visual inventiveness is the real treat here: Gibney conjures psychedelia without resorting to cliche, and the wealth of archival footage is expertly and lovingly edited. The Saturday night screening at the Alamo on South Lamar came with its own special trailers: video clips of Thompson being interviewed by David Letterman over the years (No theater creates a mood like the Alamo). His trademark mumble became more pronounced in his later days, but somehow, after all of the substances consumed, his brain stayed more or less intact until he decided in 2005, as many had predicted, to put a bullet in his head. Gibney was not in attendance, but he should be for the film's upcoming screening at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. |
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Comments
Posted by Michael Merschel @ 12:54 PM Wed, Mar 12, 2008
I think Hunter S. Thompson is on the verge of becoming more popular in death than he was at the end of his life.
In addition to this film, he's the subject of at least two recent books, blogged about here: http://books.beloblog.com/archives/2007/12/fear_and_loathing_in_dallas_an.html
and reviewed (one of them) here: http://www.guidelive.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_gonzo_1230gl.ART.State.Bulldog.36a16c9.html )
He was always larger than life, of course. The kind of person who, had he lived 2,500 years ago, would now be the subject of ballads, poems and myths that nobody would believe.