lil angel15
Bluelight Crew
Narrated by Johnny Depp, this is a probing look into the life of gonzo journalism inventor Dr Hunter S. Thompson. The film looks at the major touchstones in Thompson's life, including his intense and ill-fated relationship with the Hell's Angels, his near-successful bid for the office of sheriff in Aspen in 1970, the notorious story behind the landmark Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his deep involvement in Senator George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign.
Gonzo is the definitive film biography of mythic American figure Hunter S. Thompson, a man that Tom Wolfe called our "greatest comic writer", whose suicide, by gunshot, led Rolling Stone Magazine, where Thompson began his career, to devote an entire issue (its best-selling ever) to the man that launched a thousand sips of bourbon, endless snorts of cocaine and a brash, irreverent, fearless style of journalism - named “gonzo” after an anarchic blues riff by James Booker.
Gonzo is directed by Alex Gibney, the Academy Award nominated director of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side. While Gibney shaped the screen story, every narrated word in the film springs from the typewriters of Thompson himself. Those words are given life by Johnny Depp, the actor who once shadowed Thompson’s every move for the screen version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and who bankrolled Thompson's spectacular funeral in which the good doctor's ashes were fired from a rocket launcher mounted with a towering two-thumbed fist whose palm held a giant peyote button.
The film is distinguished by its unprecedented cooperation of Thompson’s friends, family and estate. The filmmakers had access to hundreds of photographs and over 200 hours of audiotapes, home movies and documentary footage of the man. In addition, the estate granted unusual access to the work itself, allowing the film to quote from unpublished manuscripts, as well as the many letters, books and articles that Thompson produced. Ralph Steadman – the visionary artist whose ink-splattered drawings and paintings created a subversively iconic visual landscape for Thompson's words – also granted the filmmakers access to previously unpublished artworks and Polaroid's.
The signature of the film, however, is its focus on Thompson’s work, particularly his most provocative and productive period from 1965 to '75. His wicked words resonate today, at a time when politicians have become manufactured celebrities, shrouding themselves in Teflon, issuing banalities whose only value is that they rarely offend. Too often, contemporary journalists play the politicians’ game, taking them seriously with a balance they don’t deserve. Thompson never stood for that. He understood, better than any other, that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
This one might be worth a look.
