journal features

movie review - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 1998.06.28

This is the insane and loosely-factual telling of a two week period in "our foul year of the Lord 1971" when Hunter S Thompson went to Las Vegas on first one assignment and then another only to live a life of such excess that it would take on the sort of mythical status that they make a movie 25 years later. It's up to the viewer to decide what's real, of course and it's worth bearing in mind that with Terry Gilliam behind the camera it's anybody's guess at the best of times. Johnny Depp nails the lead role, and the supporting cast - led by the always credible Benicio Del Toro - fills out the story with precision. I mean it takes a lot of work to pull off being that far gone. One scene that's stuck with me from all the madness is where Hunter comes in on "his lawyer" (a real-life lawyer friend who would three years later disappear from the face of the Earth) is in the tub demanding that Hunter toss in the radio at the foot of the tub. It would potentially kill his friend, but the conversation starts with:

Raoul Duke : Oh god... did you eat all this acid?

Dr. Gonzo : That's right. MUSIC!

Strongly recommended. If you have a taste for drug-fueled madness from another era. This is some of Gilliam's best work, and certainly Depp's.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)