Well here is Aguirre's review of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS!! I've been waiting for him or Hallenbeck or Moriarty to get a break and see it, cause well, I am usually in tune with them. And here is, what I believe is a sneak peek of what I'll think of this film. I'm a raving Gilliam maniac. I love the man's work and I have been a bit depressed by the previous reviews. Ya see he's one of them directors that some people just hate, kinda like Oliver Stone, that I happen to love. Weird, ha, I thrive on it. And quite frankly I can't wait to see this one.
Hey, it's Aguirre. I got to see the new Terry Gilliam flick Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the other day. Maaaaaaaan o man, lemme tell you. O man. Now I'm a huge, huge, huge Terry Gilliam fan. I don't have a problem with the cylical nature of his plots, I don't think that his films are just pieced together set pieces (enter Pauline Kael), and I love the surrealist tinge to almost all of his work. That boat, going across the sea of sand, with all the statues around it in Baron Munchousen, boy, right outta a DeChirico painting. Kevin's parents exploding at the end of Time Bandits. THE PARENTS EXPLODE!!! How crazy is that?!? It used to scare the hell out of me when I was a little kid, wacthing Kevin yell "Down't tuuch it, it's eeeviiiil!" I'd hide my head under the couch cushions so I wouldn't have to see it. But I loved it in a strange, gloriously dark fantastical way. I'd hide my head under those cushions, but then I'd poke it out and watch at the last second. I watch Gilliam's movies and feel like a voyeur peering into a scary and wonderful world, and I love it. I love it.
I also liked Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Hunter S. Thompson's novel that the film is based upon. I love crazy shit like Thompson's book, with Raoul Duke (Thompson in actuallity, played in the film by Johnny Depp) and his partner Dr. Gonzo (played by Benicio Del Toro in the film) taking every drug known to man and then some. Usually, drug cultre stuff is exceedingly lame. "Oh look, I'm so wasted, I'm seeing>four of you and the third one has a pig face..." Fear and Loathing worked, though, because it was so damn over the top that the reader entered a world of insanity. Gonzo stuff and the people who've read it know it's not cliched. I hate that word. But really, you read the book today and it still seems pretty psycho. Anyway, Thompson was also smart enough to comment on just how hollow a lot of the 60s drug culture actually was, all the while enjoying its fruits at the same time.Bad sentence structure...oh. Aw hell, here: I read the book four years ago, liked it a lot, and got real excited the other day when I found passes to a screening of the film.
The movie is good. Parts are great, especially the beginning, but it falters a bit. It is not mass market appeal stuff, it will scare old ladies (though not all of 'em, my grandmas are pretty cool), and there's bound to be some fundamental preacher who leads a protest against it. Man, I love Terry Gilliam.
It has been four years since I read the book, and some of it has faded from my memory. I think I can say, though, with a resonable degree of certitude that the film has a slightly different tone than the novel but is still very faithful to it. The novel wasn't as introspective as the film hopes to be. For the most part, the film follows the course of the novel and includes many of its episodes. What the film creates, though, is a sense of longing, of being lost in the drugs-not transported by them- and a growing desire to unburden all the gunk from the last decade (the 60s) and start fresh with a new one (the 70s). If I remember, the message was a bit more subtle in the novel. I could be wrong, I probably am and my memory is failing me once again. The movie, to me, seems a little deeper than the book, meaning that whereas the book was a crash-course in getting completely blotto with a couple of madmen and hearing them comment on the culture and themselves, the film is that plus an exploration of why. I know, I know, I'm hazy here. Just the feeling I got.
The film starts off so amazingly great that I was rocking back and forth in my seat with delight. THE FIRST FIFTEEN TO TWENTY MINUTES OF THIS FILM ARE SUPREMELY AWESOME!!! This is great like Hagfish (a real, real cool Texas band) is great. It cooks man, it moves so quick and so deftly and does so much. We get great, great, GREAT looks at the two main characters- we get to know them right away. It's really fantastic, really some of Gilliam's best work. For the first twenty minutes alone I would pay $7.50 to see Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The visuals are fantastic. The bat sequence is right out of the book, and its so cooool. This is great use of CGI- very simple, very quick, and the acting to back it up and complement it. GREAT SCENE.
Their convertible, ragging down the highway, great dialouge, great visuals...this really got my blood pumping. Some very funny flashbacks as well in here (Don't want to ruin it). There's a scene of a bunch Lounge Lizards (literally) in the hotel lobby that's done just as well, and it occurs right after this opening car sequence. Again, right out of the novel and really well done. Great pacing. And again, very good use of CGI- Duke (an awesome Depp, I'll get to him soon) is tripping and sees the paterns on the carpet start to slide up peoples legs. It looks great.
Then...things slow down a bit. This is Las Vegas, so the plain visuals alone are uber-trippy. Unfortunately, there's an extended sequence in Duke and Gonzo's hotel room that really slows the story down. It's overly long, and not too funny. The hotel room is dark, ugly, piss stained and nasty, almost hellish. Being thrust into it after all the aforementioned craziness is kinda sudden, and it's too long. The material at the bike race is a little better, but also somewhat slow.
So the first twenty minutes are dynamite, the next twenty are okay, and then the film picks up again and is pretty good. There's an insane set of a Circus-themed Casino (there's no way Circus Circus is like this) with monkeys and clowns and completely distorted ratios- it's so trippy. Midgets are all around (and throughout the rest of the movie too), I love it. Midgets are to a Gilliam movie as Joseph Cotten is to early Orson Welles stuff. Ooo, speaking of which, I got The Third Man for four bucks yesterday!!! How cool! Sorry, I digress. Some truly great visuals, especially Duke and Gonzo as they whack out on mescaline and ether. So nuts. Not nuts in "We're trying to be sooo crazy way", nuts in a genuinely crazy way. Big difference. A very freaky adrenocrome trip later in the film (Dr. Gonzo as a demon with six tits on his back...really) that doesn't quite go as far as I thought it would, but still pretty cool to behold.
The stuff I was talking about before, about how Raoul Walsh comments on society and himself, is provided for in some intersting segments that are done quite well. In one, Walsh envisions himself going back to the late sixties in San Fran. Usually I hate stupid narration, but this is some really good stuff. Very poignant in the end. I know I'm not a part of that generation, I wasn't there and I can't really understand it, but the dialouge with Walsh at his typewritter made me understand it a little more in a very real, very sincere, very true way. Someone's gonna call me a wuss, but fuck 'em; I thought the scene was beautiful.
There's also a real funny scene with a cop convention, first at a reception counter and later in a lecture hall. Won't ruin these. I very muched liked the end, which does a good job of tying up the ideas of the film in Gilliam's own vauge way (it's still cyclical!!!).
Now the acting. Oh, man, okay. I have most every cell in my body telling me not to like Johnny Depp. He's pretty boy 21-jump-street motherfucker. I can't be that stupid and ignorant anymore. He was cool enough to be in Ed Wood (and was very good in it) he's done a lot of solid work since his TV days, and he's more than a hunk of the month. I can still be pissed at Hollywood pretty boy types, but shit Depp is a good actor. Damn, this guy is good. He is so great in this film, I think I can seriously say it's one of the most enjoyable perfomances I've seen in a while. That narration I was talking about- it was very well written, but Depp made it. Some people will probably say that he's too over the top here, a caricature. He's not. He's playing Hunter S. Thompson. THOMPSON IS A CARICATURE!!! The man is crazy, that's just what he sounds like and, from interviews I've seen with him, acts like. It's dead on.
Benicio Del Toro is good for two reasons. One, I admire any guy who'd get a big fat ass fat gut for a role. Actually, it would be pretty cool to eat anything for awhile and get paid to be fat, but still...the boy has a fat gut here. And two, he's good as well. He mumbles a lot, he moans and you can't understand half his dialouge. He plays the character perfect. Reading the novel, I envisioned Gonzo to be more straighlaced in terms of looks- clean cut, glasses, but still a drug fiend. So Del Toro looks 180 degrees opposite of what I thought. I think his verison is better.
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas is good. Hallenbeck, you should be somewhat sated. If it could keep up the tempo of the first twenty minutes, it'd be amazingly great. Gilliam's made a helluva neat movie, one about drugs that you don't need to be on drugs to enjoy. In fact, that might be a bad idea. At the screening I attended there was a row of kids in front of me stoned out of their gord and laughing like hyenas. At one point, the visuals got so intense that one of them started to freak out, like he was having a bad acid trip or something. "No, nooo waaayyyy....NOOOO...NOOOOO GET ME OUTTA HERE!" My guess is that a lot of people are going to completely misinterpret the film- the stupid critics are going to hate it, the same ones who said that said that The Big Hit was "cutting edge action excitement." If you go see it, just go with very open, willing eyes. You'll get a lot more out of it than some flashy acid trips and midgets.
