While on the lips of most people, spontaneous thoughts and stunts are left to settle on dust-filled floors. But people like Hunter S. Thompson enact their impulses even before sounds begin to resonate.
Like a human cyclone never reaching climax, Thompson seems to have lived the life of excess to a pinnacle that has yet to be matched (at least by people who are still alive to tell the tale).
Smacking together one of the gonzo journalist’s more incoherent yet poignant works dealing with himself and life in a changing society onto celluloid is the always interesting Terry Gilliam. You’ll recognize Gilliam as the co-writer and director of many of the “Monty Python” films and other efforts like “Brazil,” “Time Bandits” and “12 Monkeys.”
Coming together like a train-crash-turned-permanent-art-fixture, Gilliam seems the perfect catalyst for Thompson’s visions (or acid flashbacks). “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is nothing new to college crowds, but this film is a perfect midnight movie of the week.
When the drugs begin to take over, Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp, “Edward Scissorhands”) and Dr. Gonzo (Benecio Del Toro, “The Usual Suspects”) are careening down a highway at mach speed heading towards a race in the titular city.
But for people like Thompson and his cohort, it’s a drug-fueled explosion that takes them through all of Vegas while on a perpetual trip. Running “savage burns” on casinos, picking up hitchhikers who scale buildings and, of course, the artwork of Barbra Streisand help make this film a puzzle of incoherent sounds and images that surprisingly form a coherent message in the end.
While all the visuals and the unique camera movements that seem to be classic Gilliam are there, audience members need to pay attention to what Thompson himself is actually saying in his drug-addled diatribes about society, the law, and drugs. People tend to get caught up on the chaos of the film, but keep your patience; look deeper and you will be rewarded.
Gilliam deserved much of the credit for taking on such an ambitious and psychologically defunct project and turning it into something Thompson should be proud of. While cookie-cutter films about long conversations and boring social life fill local multiplexes, “Fear and Loathing” offers a great alternative.
Taking a normal thought and throwing it in the blender, Gilliam seems daring enough to take on a left-of-center subject matter like this and make a cult film deserving of a larger audience. Gilliam may not always please the audience with his translations of thought to film, but like Hunter S. Thompson, it never stops him from trying.
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is playing this Saturday at midnight in the main lounge of Union South. Admission is free.
