“I don't know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable.” “He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment,” Steadman said of his longtime accomplice. The longtime journeyman had been slowed by an aging body along with what his family reported as an ongoing battle with depression. In 2005, at the age of 67, Thompson took his own life at his haven ranch in Woody Creek, Colorado. Short shorts and shin-high white socks along with breezy open-chest Cuban shirts and orange tinted glasses pieced together a fashion style that was flashy and casual but also thoughtfully refined and never messy. Notably, the multicolored patchwork jacket worn through much of the film which was based off an Abercrombie jacket, a favorite of Thompson’s in real life. Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas intimately bound up in most readers’ minds with Ralph Steadman’s hallucinatory illustrations is set to be turned into a graphic. The fear is comical the loathing almost nonexistent.Via Hunter Magazine (left) & Universal (right)ĭepp’s portrayal of Thompson’s drug-laden adventure further famed the aging writer as a style icon of his time. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is as genial and cuddly as a Thompson adaptation possibly could be. Instead, Depp gives us Thompson as court jester, someone to distract us from the duplicity of the world rather than expose it. And nowhere do we get a sense, as we do from Thompson’s writing, of his disgust at his own participation in the hypocrisy that bedevils America.
Naturally, any description of the movie will fail to capture its hyperbolic mania, but its fair to say that at its most delirious, the movie is an acid-headed gate-crashing party turned paranoid all-night bacchanal. Terry Gilliams Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a deliberately incoherent evocation of the countercultures self-destruction.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas does, very briefly, glance toward Vietnam, the Civil Rights battle and other instances of the era which exposed the American Dream, but these moments feel reluctantly crammed into the film, as if Gilliam didn’t want to harsh the overall mellow. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by David Ng. The attention should be elsewhere, beyond Thompson’s histrionics and onto the external events and internal anguish that fueled his outlandish behavior. Watching Depp peck at a typewriter as if he’s a bird plucking worms from the dirt is briefly entertaining, but Gilliam lets this and similarly ostentatious moments drag on forever. And Gilliam, whose movies all resemble acid trips, offers little guidance. In Depp’s hands, mugging can be an art form, but it’s aggressively distancing here, as if you’re watching a party you haven’t been invited to. The emphasis here is on grotesque hallucinations (some cleverly inspired by the novel’s original Ralph Steadman illustrations) and clowning on the part of Depp (as the Thompson stand-in) and Benicio del Toro (as his suspect attorney). Thompson.Īdapting Thompson’s druggy fictionalization of his reporting adventures in Las Vegas, director Terry Gilliam and star Johnny Depp indulge in the surrealism and mania that lies at the surface of that landmark piece of gonzo writing. It’s a trip, alright, but not one that has much to do with Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Illustrations Illustrations British cartoonist Ralph Steadman added his style of beautiful yet grotesque illustrations to the Rolling Stone issues and to the novel.