I do not claim to know all that much about Hunter Thompson. I have seen "Fear and Loathing" and having gone through a phase where I loved counterculture, I knew some degree of his life...This documentary brings out a whole new level of Hunter I was not aware of. I knew about the Hell's Angels, but his appearance on game shows was foreign to me. And I was never aware that he took his run for Aspen sheriff so seriously or received so much coverage.Johnny Depp as narrator seems fitting. I thought it was a bit too obvious, but somehow Depp has come to represent Hunter... why not Bill Murray? I have no idea.

I saw this inserted in a festival. Festivals are great occasions. There is a mood in the air, which invites us to see new things, ambitious ones. Most of the time, it must be said, i see failures, some glorious, others pure crap. But the possibility to see new surprise life altering creations compensates for all the eventually boring proofs we might have to endure. This little documentary is something of an exception in these types i described.As a film in itself it has little value. It's a collection of photographs, testimonies, old videos and testimonies made for the documentary, with a plus, Johnny Depp narrating Thompson. It is tailored like the serial documentaries the Discovery or History channel usually makes. But i actually enjoyed it. For one reason, i was ignorant about many of the aspects in his life, namely the politic involvements, which is a contradiction, among others, in the life of a counter-culture icon.Anyway, it's the very facts of Thompson's life that move the whole thing, and sparks the whole interest this may have. Because there was something that displeased me, a kind of formal contradiction which nevertheless is fun to find: H.Thompson was important as a writer, fundamentally because he broke forms, and in the process created a genre on its own. His kind of writing is essentially visual, which means it's also potentially cinematic - Gillian understood this, but in 'Fear and Loathing...' he was either to literal in his interpretation, or to attached to his own vision, so though he made a good piece, he was not fully faithful to Thompson. The visual quality of his writings can be tested in this documentary, whenever Depp reads. It's powerful, and probably more effective than any of the footage used. There lies the contradiction. The documentary is vulgar, it uses a worn out formula for serial documentaries, equivalents to the kind of dull journalistic writing Thompson wanted to evade. See my point?So, probably, Hunter will last for what he wrote, not for what he 'was'. After all, it's not uncommon or specially thrilling the kind of things he effectively did. Though that provided most of the juice and energy he puts in his writings, it's not the orgies, or the guns, or the acids that make his life worth knowing.Nevertheless, Thompson would perfectly incarnate the mood of a film festival. That's a complement.My opinion: 3/5 http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson is a very well put together documentary from Alex Gibney, whose Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room was a fascinating insight into the fluff and fraud of a section of Corporate America in the early years of the 21st century. Not sure how I managed to miss Gibney's Who Killed the Electric Car? but I intend to track it down now, as on the evidence of this movie, it will be worth the effort. Gibney frames his subject well, with a wealth of background detail on the 60s West Coast counter culture which launched Thompson's literary career, and he has assembled a great soundtrack; it's almost worth watching this movie just to hear the music. Gibney follows Thompson's story coherently. He tracked down some revealing home movies and some unexpected people (Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter) to explain Hunter S Thompson to the world, (his first wife seems remarkably lacking in angst despite having to call the sheriff when she feared for her safety), although I felt there could have been a little more emphasis on the early years (the air force, the time in Puerto Rico and Brazil). There is some suggestion that Thompson carried a fairly major chip on his shoulder from his teen years, when his father died, leaving his mother to raise 3 sons in genteel near-poverty. Hunter, with his sharp intellect, mixed with the rich kids but was in actuality a fairly poor kid, and one incident when he was jailed for his proximity to a crime, may have contributed to his life long despising of authority.I'm slightly too young to have been a fan of his writing back in the late 60s and early 70s, when I was a teenager living on another continent, and although I've caught up with some of it since, the movie of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I re-watched recently, produces little reaction from me these days beyond a yawn. It's better on the page. But he was a fascinating character, no doubt about it, and I can't think of anyone around today who can write with quite his accuracy and style (and how we need it.) My husband confessed that he had never heard of Thompson (well we are foreigners!) before watching this movie, so it may well be an indication of how good a documentary this is, that we both enjoyed it so much.Gonzo tracks the journey of Thompson from outsider journalist and acute spectator, whose acid sharp observations skewered the Great American Dream, to the sad situation where Thompson himself became the story, stoned, drunk and wasting his talents, apparently feeling a need to live up to the over-the-top persona he had created on the page. On an objective level, it's intriguing to watch the winding path from the great and original writing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hells Angels and the 1972 presidential election - where he championed the decent McGovern - to the debacle in Zaire, the Ali Forman match-up, where Thompson gave away his tickets and spent the time drunk in the hotel pool, thereby missing one of the greatest boxing matches of all time, (and failing to report on the fight for the mugs who had paid his expenses.)Much as I admire his well pointed vitriol and satire – and wish we had it around today - I have a very limited amount of sympathy for people who choose self destruction as a life style, and Thompson always seemed to blow it just as true greatness beckoned. He comes across as utterly self obsessed and I found myself lacking any real sympathy for him, or connection to him, rather feeling impatient that he chose not to hang around long enough and stay sober often enough, to wield his pen a few years longer. Everyone, of course, is free to chose their own path to death, and Thompson's makes interesting viewing. Just don't ask me to feel much sympathy for the guy. Still, it's a good movie.

After Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side, and this vivid, significant depiction of the Sixties and Seventies superstar journalist Hunter Thompson, Alex Gibney has emerged as clearly one of the best documentary filmmakers we've got and also one of the most prolific.Gibney tells a very smart, very verbal, very funny but also intensely significant story here. Some of the people who speak most highly of Thompson on camera are Billy Carter, William McGovern, and longtime Republican presidential adviser Pat Buchanan,as well as writer Tom Woolf and Thompson's editors at Rolling Stone, for which he did his best periodical pieces, the notable ones turned into books. More intimate details--but the man was such a perpetual performer that public and private are hard to separate--come from Thompson's first and second wives. And the English artist Ralph Steadman, who illustrated the writing, has much to say, as do plenty of others. When Steadman first met Thompson he fed the Brit Psilocybin and he was never the same. Steadman became an invaluable cohort and collaborator and his wild drawings provide a perfect visual counterpart to Thompson's written words on screen.Thompson was a notorious wild man from early on. "I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me," he said. Prodigious in his consumption of drugs and alcohol, he was witness to some of the great events of his time, and got deeply involved in politics and opposition to the Vietnam war and of course the counterculture. Lean, athletic, flashily dressed, with trademark balding pate, big sunglasses, cigarette holder and drink in hand, Thompson was a demon at the IBM Selectric, gleefully spinning out brilliant pieces nobody else could have written, a master of outrage and wit.Fueled by craziness, substances, and his own tongue-in-cheek joie de vivre, he devised his own outrageous style of writing in which cold clear fact was blended with wild invention and the adjectives and metaphors flew like hornets around a honey pot. Others too partook of the kind of journalism he practiced. The times--the flamboyant and boisterous and revolutionary Sixties and early Seventies-- seemed to call for a new more violent, more committed language in journalism. Norman Mailer also wrote about the democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 and on hand for Esquire were the likes of Jean Genet and William Burroughs. Three is something of Burroughs in Thompson, the drugs and the outrage and a way of seeing convention as conspiracy. One of Thompson's famous quotes gives a hint of the link: "America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." This was the moment when the distinction between fiction and non-fiction blurred: Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which used raw material from the more adventurous Thompson), Thompson's act of "embedded journalism" as Wolfe calls it, Hell's Angels), Truman Capote's murder story In Cold Blood done for The New Yorker, were all variations on the idea of the "non-fiction novel." Mailer had done a heroically personal and novelistic account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night. The film might do a bit more to put Thompson in all this context, but it's clearly implied. He called his wild style "gonzo" journalism.Thompson also wrote about Las Vegas as the American dream and about Nixon, whom he loathed. He also used a tape recorder a lot. This provides great material for the film. So does the Terry Gilliam film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in the film and became a great fan and friend, reads salient passages sitting in front of a well-stocked bar. Depp paid for the spectacular monument/funeral for the writer that Thompson had--on film--planned out long before, in which his ashes are fired into the Colorado hills. Ralph Steadman did the sketches. This is shown at the end of the film and provides a lovely son et lumière finale.Thompson's innate violence may explain how he could have blended in so well for a while with the Hell's Angels. He kept at least twenty firearms on hand in his house, all loaded, his first wife reports. He always planned to end his life with suicide and he shot himself. He did it on a nice day in February almost as a family event, with his son, daughter-in-law and grandson at the house and on the phone with his wife, a shot to the head, at the age of 68, not an act of depression but the completion of a careful plan. It was over. And he had been here to see George W. Bush and predict the decline and fall of the American empire. A late collection of short pieces is entitled Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.His dissipation took its toll and so did fame. He fell into playing a self-parodying avatar of himself and his writing deteriorated after the later Seventies, so he had about ten good years and about twenty not-so-good ones. Some have dwelt on his decline; Gonzo doesn't. His writing faltered as early as 1974 when he went to Zaire with Steadman to cover the Foreman-Ali "Rumble in the Jungle" and he got drunk at the pool during the fight and never finished the story. Given how bright he burned and how hard he lived, it was inevitable that the man would burn out early And writing did not by any means fizzle out even into the Nineties. There is an immense wealth of spinoffs on film; Gibney had rich, rich material to work with here.The best that could happen is that this beautifully edited and greatly entertaining film makes a host of new converts to the writing.