manho
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Dec 20, 2008 16:31:05 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 20, 2008 16:31:05 GMT -5
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian, Friday 19 December 2008
1. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson 2. Release: 2008 3. Country: USA 4. Cert (UK): 15 5. Runtime: 120 mins 6. Directors: Alex Gibney
"Some may never live," wrote Hunter S Thompson, "but the crazy never die." This is debatable, of course - self-conscious craziness ages rapidly - but it certainly shows off the late author and gonzo wild man's gift for the epigram. This documentary about his life by Alex Gibney, though entertaining in many ways, is oddly uninterested in his strengths or otherwise as a writer, the very gift for which Thompson earnestly wished to be known. For example, it never quotes his great pensée about the music business: "A cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Barry Levinson's recent Hollywood satire, What Just Happened, reapplied this maxim to the film industry and it is probably now relevant to almost any 21st-century professional activity, including market gardening and pastoral work within the Church of England.
Gonzo is narrated by Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in Terry Gilliam's biopic, and begins with Thompson's long, slow slide into depression before his 2005 death, and his feeling that his best years as a writer were behind him. There's a grim shot of a picture of Ernest Hemingway on what appears to be Thompson's mantelpiece. Like Hemingway, Thompson elected to kill himself at the last. It was one final macho gesture to shore up his self-esteem, though his first wife, Sandy, challenges the sentimental consensus that this restored his "dignity".
Thompson first achieved notoriety with his 1966 book about the Hell's Angels, with whom he lived for many months - "embedded" as interviewee Tom Wolfe drolly puts it. He exposed a gang rape carried out by the Angels: or "gang bang", to use the more lenient term of the period. He helped to create the genre of high literary reportage, and was certainly a lavish contributor to its fictional aspect. As his taste for drink, guns and hallucinogens escalated, he departed sensationally from the boring business of fact-grubbing. Inspired by his illustrator, Ralph Steadman, Thompson cultivated the "gonzo" style. Assignments from Rolling Stone and others licensed his Conradian excursions into various American hearts of darkness, including the fleshpots of Las Vegas, but Gibney interestingly emphasises Thompson's importance in political journalism. He excoriated Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon and was a gallant, quixotic supporter of George McGovern. But it wasn't simply a matter of always backing the underdog. Gibney argues that a 70s article by Thompson in praise of Jimmy Carter was very material in mobilising liberal opinion in Carter's favour.
Young radicals become old reactionaries, of course, although unlike many gung-ho liberals, Thompson never lost his nerve and supported the military adventures of George W Bush. His uncool male-pattern baldness made him resemble Philip Larkin, and that cigarette-holder was a weirdly bohemian, almost Cowardian affectation, which passes unremarked by Gibney or anyone else. In the end, a lot of his work is like a massive improvised guitar solo. Maybe you had to be there. But he emerges from this film as a real American original.
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Dec 21, 2008 7:54:12 GMT -5
Post by dino on Dec 21, 2008 7:54:12 GMT -5
i always wonder what a "real american original" is
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manho
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Dec 21, 2008 8:42:11 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 21, 2008 8:42:11 GMT -5
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manho
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Dec 21, 2008 8:53:32 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 21, 2008 8:53:32 GMT -5
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manho
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Dec 21, 2008 14:55:00 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 21, 2008 14:55:00 GMT -5
Gonzo
Philip French The Observer, Sunday 21 December 2008
Alex Gibney is one of the most important documentarists at work today. Two of his recent films - Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, about high-level corporate corruption in America, and Taxi to the Dark Side, an account of US military interrogation and torture in Afghanistan and Iraq - are essential viewing for anyone seeking an understanding of our times. His films are sober, carefully crafted and thoroughly researched, politically committed but not propagandistic, and deeply felt without focusing the camera on his own bleeding heart.
He is thus considerably different from the subject of his latest film, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson, one of the creators and most extreme exponent of the "New Journalism" of the 1960s, and the man who gave us that overworked phrase "fear and loathing". Thompson, who had an obsession with guns, owning 22 of them (all kept fully loaded), committed suicide with a gunshot to his head in 2005 at the age of 67.
The film is an impressionistic portrait of Thompson as eccentric libertarian, admired outsider, rebel, scabrous social critic. A romantic utopian, he was searching for the American Dream and lamenting its death. As an ambitious writer, he was chasing after that chimera "the Great American novel", but inevitably finding it eluded him.
Early on, Gibney takes us to the study in the Colorado farmhouse where Thompson lived for the last 40 years of his life, the camera scanning photographs of Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, the heroes he sought to emulate.
Thompson was one of three brothers raised in a lower-middle-class family in Louisville, Kentucky, and was in constant trouble at school and then in the US Air Force. The film, however, passes rapidly over the youth and early career, eager to get to the wild, rebellious 1960s, which he observed, participated in, helped shape the image of, and of which he was ultimately a victim through his reckless addiction to every possible kind of drug.
There is an extended section on his first book, Hell's Angels (1966), an excellent piece of reportage on California's motorcycle gangs, written after spending a year with them, and ending when he was given a terrible beating after they'd demanded a share of any money he made out of them. Gibney shows Thompson going to the self-destructive edge in writing this book and then plunging over that edge into Gonzo journalism.
Hell's Angels was participatory journalism that put the writer into the story and drew on the techniques of fiction. Gonzo happily stirred actual fiction into the brew (some of it extremely mischievous, as when he wrote of politician Ed Muskie as a drug addict) and added touches of the surreal. Thompson was introduced to the term 'Gonzo' by his friend, the Boston journalist Bill Cardoso; it's apparently an Irish-American term for the last man standing after an all-night drinking session. From 1970, British cartoonist Ralph Steadman illustrated many of Thompson's books and articles, and his bold graphic style, an expressionistic combination of George Grosz and Thomas Rowlandson, became an essential element in the Gonzo package. Steadman speaks with a warm, wry candour about their collaboration.
Having started out as a sport journalist, Thompson became immersed in politics. He ran unsuccessfully for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, on an independent hippy ticket. More importantly, he covered all the presidential elections from 1968 onwards. "The Kennedys - they were his guys," one witness observes, but he became a friend of George McGovern, Gary Hart and Jimmy Carter, all of whom speak well of him, as does a less likely friend, the right-wing ideologue Pat Buchanan, who must have loathed everything Thompson stood for, yet arranged for him to ride in the back of Nixon's limousine during the 1972 election.
During this period, we see Thompson developing a public persona through his signature dark glasses, cigarette holder, floppy hat and outrageous behaviour and being taken over by it. By 1976, when travelling with Jimmy Carter, it was Thompson's autograph people sought, not the presidential candidate's. The peak of Thompson's madness was reached in 1974 when he accepted a Rolling Stone assignment to cover the Foreman-Ali 'Rumble in the Jungle' in Kinshasa. Instead of attending the fight (as more responsible New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer did), he took a load of drugs and floated in his hotel pool wearing a Nixon mask and clutching a bottle of whisky.
Gibney's elaborately textured film draws on much home movie footage, new interviews, old TV appearances and clips from the feature films inspired by Thompson's antics (he's played by Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam and Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). It's often hilarious and captures the spirit of the time, both in its early hopes and its inevitable disillusionment. Yet it's a sad movie and somehow inadequate in its lack of true pity or understanding. Thompson's first wife, Sondi, mother of his son Juan, put up with him for 20 years, until his excesses and egotism forced her to leave, and it is she alone who says: "I think his story was tragic."
And it is she who demurs from a general agreement that his suicide, like that of Hemingway, was somehow a courageous act. In this documentary, we watch a man go insane and destroy himself, his final act of madness being the funeral he organised in which his ashes were sent into the skies with red, white and blue fireworks from a self-aggrandising tower he'd designed with the help of Steadman.
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Dec 21, 2008 19:11:32 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Dec 21, 2008 19:11:32 GMT -5
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Dec 22, 2008 0:56:17 GMT -5
Post by cripes on Dec 22, 2008 0:56:17 GMT -5
That's pretty kewl Cat.
I was watching Clint Eastwood the other night and it occurred to me that he was *the man*. Like John Wayne was, but even cooler.
Jack Nicholson and DeNiro have done too much crap. Pacino's cool, but Clint could kick his ass, right? Am I missing anyone? If not, then Clint is officially *the man*.
We're talking living actors here btw.
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manho
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Dec 22, 2008 5:41:23 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 22, 2008 5:41:23 GMT -5
"Am I missing anyone?"
the terminator?
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manho
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Dec 22, 2008 5:42:49 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 22, 2008 5:42:49 GMT -5
"I'm seeing Ennio Morricone live"
don't forget to shout out for "se telefonando".
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Dec 22, 2008 12:47:22 GMT -5
Post by hobo on Dec 22, 2008 12:47:22 GMT -5
don't forget to shout out for "se telefonando". uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uKSuG1LOaYICat would Whet his pants if Ennio started playing this - not sure who'd have the lungs for Mina's job these days though
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Dec 22, 2008 12:50:52 GMT -5
Post by cripes on Dec 22, 2008 12:50:52 GMT -5
I remember when you posted that video on the old board.
One of your best ever posts.
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Dec 22, 2008 15:12:04 GMT -5
Post by hobo on Dec 22, 2008 15:12:04 GMT -5
Not a difficult accolade to acheive..but...there we are...
It's an unbelievable song though isn't it?
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manho
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Dec 22, 2008 18:03:04 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 22, 2008 18:03:04 GMT -5
"not sure who'd have the lungs for Mina's job these days though"
well, mina's still around and still recording so... who knows. stranger things have happened. remember the famous all-star jam at the end of dylan's set at the isle of wight?
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Dec 23, 2008 3:20:40 GMT -5
Post by dino on Dec 23, 2008 3:20:40 GMT -5
mina is second only to aretha franklin as best female singer ever
what all star jam?
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david
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Dec 23, 2008 6:03:54 GMT -5
Post by david on Dec 23, 2008 6:03:54 GMT -5
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manho
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Dec 24, 2008 15:51:32 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 24, 2008 15:51:32 GMT -5
liza minelli was in italy a couple of weeks ago and was raving about mina's greatness. i think she's what was once called " a singer's singer". offhand i can't think of many other women who are greater. billy holiday, nina simone, tina turner, aretha, probably a couple of others. all black. mina is maybe the greatest ever white woman singer.
"what all star jam?"
the main reason for the unfavourable reaction of the crowd at the end of dylan's isle of wight set was the fact that an all star jam (clapton, the beatles, herman noone, et al) had been heavily talked up in the press and didn't happen. two other reasons were that the set was very short even by 60s standards and the fact that dylan was singing like someone had a finger up his anus.
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manho
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Dec 24, 2008 16:03:09 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 24, 2008 16:03:09 GMT -5
"My favourite of hers" il cielo in una stanza was written by the great gino paoli. here's gino's big number (co-written and arranged by morricone): www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwwclipeKGc
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david
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Dec 24, 2008 16:14:53 GMT -5
Post by david on Dec 24, 2008 16:14:53 GMT -5
White woman singers . . . I guess I'd rate Edith Piaf and Sandy Denny higher than Mina. If we're including country singers, there's Sara and Maybelle Carter and Patsy Cline. But that's just saying Mina's up there among the best, because I can't think of too many others. Oh, Janis Joplin too.
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manho
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Dec 24, 2008 16:15:14 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 24, 2008 16:15:14 GMT -5
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Jan 4, 2009 18:13:30 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jan 4, 2009 18:13:30 GMT -5
end of page.
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