Gonzo! Worth a watch...
July 7th 2008 07:11
In my last post I mentioned the 11th Annual Revelation Film Festival here in Perth WA. One of the most eagerly anticipated films of the Festival was the documentary 'Gonzo' about New Journalism maverick Hunter S. Thompson.
In the eighties, a family friend who worked in the record industry used to give me the Rolling Stone, Spin and Billboard magazines that they got for free but never read. I guess Mom saw Huey Lewis on the cover and thought it was just all tame well-intentioned fun. Hunter's articles were full of words and phrases that I could never use or ultimately had no comprehension of, and that was cool! To read words from someone who felt so comfortable excoriating the authority figures so ubiquitous in American life in the eighties, like our 'Dear Leader' Ronald Reagan, was an exhilirating but confusing experience, why could he get away with that (and get paid for it) and I couldn't tell my Mom to take a hike?
Watching this film on Saturday night made me wish I had all those copies of RS back.Although the nastier aspects of Hunters life were mildly glossed over, this was a pretty well balanced and honest look at the life of someone who deservedly belongs among the titans of American letters. Johnny Depp predictably shows up reading excerpts from the good Doctors tomes, ironically overacting. This was excusable when he was portraying Hunter but unforgivable in a documentary. Lighten up Johnny!
Conservative demagogue Pat Buchanan shows his smug face (and almost gets the last word!) as the Establishment ying to Thompson's counter-culture yang. The ever foppish Tom Wolfe makes an appearance as the serendipitous benefactor of Thompson's literary largesse; without the raw material for Hunter's Hell's Angels book, there would be no 'Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'.
I saw a few people return to the theatre from the book store across the street with copies of whatever they had left of Thompson's catalogue. His words will have the power to appeal to our sense of adventure and iconoclasm for a long time.
A few years back I had the pleasure of seeing Al Gore speak at our Perth Concert Hall. As inspired as I was to take heart in Gore's warnings about the environment, I couldn't help but sit there depressed thinking that Al shouldn't be here, he should be wrapping up a successful two-term Presidency. This was how I felt watching the portion of this film that dealt with Hunter's covering of George McGovern's disastrous '72 Presidential campaign. Promising to pull America out of Vietnam, McGovern lost to the soon to be disgraced Richard Nixon. For all the vitriol that Thompson seemed to throw onto the page, at heart he was an idealist, and seemed to absorb the disappointment he often found himself among.
In the eighties, a family friend who worked in the record industry used to give me the Rolling Stone, Spin and Billboard magazines that they got for free but never read. I guess Mom saw Huey Lewis on the cover and thought it was just all tame well-intentioned fun. Hunter's articles were full of words and phrases that I could never use or ultimately had no comprehension of, and that was cool! To read words from someone who felt so comfortable excoriating the authority figures so ubiquitous in American life in the eighties, like our 'Dear Leader' Ronald Reagan, was an exhilirating but confusing experience, why could he get away with that (and get paid for it) and I couldn't tell my Mom to take a hike?
Watching this film on Saturday night made me wish I had all those copies of RS back.Although the nastier aspects of Hunters life were mildly glossed over, this was a pretty well balanced and honest look at the life of someone who deservedly belongs among the titans of American letters. Johnny Depp predictably shows up reading excerpts from the good Doctors tomes, ironically overacting. This was excusable when he was portraying Hunter but unforgivable in a documentary. Lighten up Johnny!
Conservative demagogue Pat Buchanan shows his smug face (and almost gets the last word!) as the Establishment ying to Thompson's counter-culture yang. The ever foppish Tom Wolfe makes an appearance as the serendipitous benefactor of Thompson's literary largesse; without the raw material for Hunter's Hell's Angels book, there would be no 'Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'.
I saw a few people return to the theatre from the book store across the street with copies of whatever they had left of Thompson's catalogue. His words will have the power to appeal to our sense of adventure and iconoclasm for a long time.
A few years back I had the pleasure of seeing Al Gore speak at our Perth Concert Hall. As inspired as I was to take heart in Gore's warnings about the environment, I couldn't help but sit there depressed thinking that Al shouldn't be here, he should be wrapping up a successful two-term Presidency. This was how I felt watching the portion of this film that dealt with Hunter's covering of George McGovern's disastrous '72 Presidential campaign. Promising to pull America out of Vietnam, McGovern lost to the soon to be disgraced Richard Nixon. For all the vitriol that Thompson seemed to throw onto the page, at heart he was an idealist, and seemed to absorb the disappointment he often found himself among.
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