Lashes by Covergirl...and Centurions: THE TOURIST, MASQUERADE and THE SEVENTH SIGN

Where o where hath my Angelina gone? The one who burned a whole through GIRL, INTERRUPTED, or even the one who dazzled with her mix of mature romanticism and aerodynamic toughness in MR. AND MRS. SMITH?

Like Natalie said in THE BLACK SWAN: "She's gone!!"

In SALT (2010 - see my review," From Russia with Adamantium Cheekbones") we saw the once mighty Jolie beginning to look a little frail. We winced when she fell from high bridges onto highway traffic, for her bones seemed brittle like a bird.  The only wincing in THE TOURIST (recently arrived on DVD) comes from the contrived situations and dialogue, barely audible as Jolie's manipulative narcissist triple financial double-crosser never speaks above a posh British purr she must have borrowed from Eva Green in CASINO ROYALE.

Jolie was only around 35 when she made THE TOURIST but she seems much older thanks to a Joan Collins-level makeover: botox frozen smile, cheeks glossy, deep black layers of smudgy eye liner, and the endless cutaways to rich beautiful younger men looking up from their Rolexes and Cristal flutes, enraptured, parting before her at the ubiquitous ball like a black and white formal sea, nodding in admiration as this old-before-her time diva passes in the latest expensive couture, walking like she's holding a vial of nitro in a place where no lover has ever trespassed; all that's missing is a tag for Godiva chocolate bars, or rejuvenating night creme. If it was 1984 and this was a TV movie called Jacqueline Susann's Venice Nights and Jolie was pushing 50, it would make sense.

Even in her seventies and drunk beyond measure, Marlene Dietrich, for example, could still pull off the trick of shining through such airless luxury and making mass adoration believable. And you might say you can't compare Jolie with Dietrich, to which I'd say, yeah, duh! Jolie could act circles around Dietrich, and is just as hot if not hotter, so why is Dietrich at 70 sexier than Jolie at 35? The truth is, these handsome moneyed guys on these euro-trains wouldn't give the Jolie in this film more passing glance if it wasn't her movie and the script required them to. Her vibe is dour; she seems to expect adoration too much --it's all that keeps her from crumbling into mummy dust. She's a black hole of compliments, and I've known girls like this--drop dead gorgeous but frozen solid in their personae like victims of their own mirror Medusa-- and any man who can afford a Rolex has already learned not to even make eye contact with this type of pretty woman ("it's so expensive!" as Mischa Auer noted in MR. ARKADIN), unless, of course, the director insists. 

When Bette Davis made herself the object of every man's desire in her films, for another contrast, it was fascinating because 1) she wasn't remotely hot (post, say, 1935) and b) she didn't try to hide her psychotic intensity. If she dreaded getting old, she'd just scream at the mirror in full Baby Jane make-up until the madness passed. Bette was so cool she even made films like THE STAR (above, with Oscar and Jim), which spoke to the tragic absurdity of actresses clinging onto juvenile roles long past their prime. In short, Davis embraced her own ridiculousness like a champ, like a boxer who doesn't even flinch when enduring a flutter of sharp jabs to the face.

THE TOURIST screams for a Davis! Lacking one, it insists we believe its phony emotional catharses and triple crosses; it prefers we swoon at Jolie's perfume ad acting while it itself remaining steadfastly cynical about its own ambition$ (the final line is as shameless a piece of subtextual vanity as I've ever heard). When the climax of a film involves the heroic self sacrifice of actually paying back taxes, you know you're watching a film made by people who've never flown coach or cooked their own food, or been chased by the cops, or slept on a floor, or drank Piels, a beer so bad you can only drink it ice cold via funnel; but who nonetheless think they know plenty about life.

Maybe that's the alchemical transubstantiatory rub, this is a film where rich people fool each other into thinking they're poor - like internet dating in reverse. But the film itself hasn't fooled anyone (it bombed), least of all the Cult d'Jolie. Our baby is a dinosaur now, with an array of war orphan leeches draining her charisma daily. Will we ever get her back? All signs point to no.We're stuck with the waxwork substitute.

 

Speaking of back taxes and fooling each other with false personae, there's a forgotten, similar film called MASQUERADE (1965) on Netflix Streaming, which is marginally better than the very similar THE TOURIST, if only for its droll William Goldman script and wry performances from British spy movie regulars like Jack Hawkins and Charles Gray (Blofeldt in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER). The plot involves the 'kidnapping' of a young heir to an Arab kingdom who is about to turn old enough to depose the acting emir who's in league with the communists (the heir is pro-British). A coup is feared, and the kidnapping prevents it. Only who hired bungling playa Cliff Robertson to guard the chicken coop?

 Soon the kid is kidnapped from the kidnappers, Cliff finally realizes he's the fall guy and a traveling circus/smuggler troupe led by Michel Piccoli that includes femme fatale Marissa Mell (both were in DANGER: DIABOLIK!) and a knife-throwing dwarf are running the show. Double crosses galore, mes amis! No one is who they seem! Robertson owes back taxes to the British!

At least MASQUERADE has the self-awareness to regard its own facile nature with the same witty acumen it regards espionage and if there is no difference at least they're British enough to admit it. In MASQUERADE if you're not a triple agent with golden parachutes from here to Madrid, then you're worse than a fool, you're a patriot. THE TOURIST would probably smile at the notion of actual patriotism if it could (too much botox).

Luckily THE TOURIST's bombing at the box office showed we don't praise the golden mummy; we sell it on ebay. THE TOURIST will soon reside in the $5.99 rack next to THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE and SHANGHAI SURPRISE... and one day re-emerge from the rubble, like MASQUERADE did, half a century from now, like a memo from a presumed long ago melted-down-and-sold as-black-market-ingots golden calf.

Another Netflix streaming pick for this week is THE SEVENTH SIGN (1988), which as you may have heard is about 'the end of days,' set to happen this week or, failing that, 12/21/12. Excited? It stars Demi Moore as a pregnant Yenta busybody who--while snooping through her tenants' mail--discovers an ancient document: it seems Demi's child is the harbinger of the end of the world and Jurgen Prochnow (la tenant) is the looming 'Lamb,' opening seals and bringing down plagues, rivers of blood, snow in the desert, dogs and cats living together. Michael "I came back in time for you, Sarah." Biehn is the dad, which lets you know their kid is going to save the world from SKYNET or the Antichrist, maybe - that's called associative casting!

A low budget film of the kind that rarely get theatrical releases anymore, SIGN at least has the courage of its bizarro convictions: it's played stone-cold straight, all the while casting some doubt--not too much--as to Demi's sanity, making it the dead opposite of THE TOURIST. In fact, watching both in a period of days was enough to make me realize that Angelina Jolie is the lamb of God;  THE TOURIST a cinematic equivalent of morally bankrupt Sodom; Johnny Depp the hapless lamb led to slaughter at the altar of Jolie's martyr complex. Gone are notions of good guys and bad in all three films. What's left is just the soulless and bejeweled zombies that still walk slowly across the Saks Fifth avenues of the Earth, their souls half-devoured by invisible demons from the Orion constellation, and abetted by personal shoppers. But then of course there's always the mothers like Demi who won't let humanity just die for once. No one, but no one, is allowed to die on their watch. As GODSEND taught (if you never saw it, read my piece from 2004 here), even dying is no escape from their righteous clinging!

 

Semi-SPOILER ALERT--the possible pro-life associations in THE SEVENTH SIGN made me root, as I'm sure many have, for the end of the world, rather than this STEEL MAGNOLIAS / LIFE BEFORE HER EYES/ SWITCH/ soapy martyrish ending. Is Demi serving mankind or just the moral 'majority' by dying for her child? How can you tell if a woman's sacrifice is noble or just a symbolic subjugation? Well, either way, those Christians are gone in just a few more days and maybe Angelina Jolie will be able to resume undermining the status quo of feminine oppression like she did in FOXFIRE and GIRL, INTERRUPTED and stop pandering to rich materialistic women of a certain age on behalf of high-end make-up sponsors. After all, Demi Moore's dating Ashton, and that's ballsy. Why can't Jolie do something ballsy? Adopting endless amounts of orphans is not ballsy. I mean, am I the only one who's jealous of those little bastards? I get the impression they are responsible for both her terrible project choices and her weariness.

Maybe in the future the good guys and the bad will once again be distinguishable based on something other than who's offering who the most money to stab their own unborn grandchildren in the back, and who oppressed the Third World first (the British) vs. who wants to do it now (the Russian Mafia / Zionists, the NWO, the CIA).  THE SEVENTH SIGN at least lets you contemplate your own ambivalence about humanity's inherent goodness and whether your soul's old enough that the end of days seems an impossibly sweet 'get out of eternal reincarnation jail' free card or young enough that all you care about is who will look after the children. Either way you can't help but thrill at the prospect of things changing and all those idiots (whomever they are for you) finally rotting in hell like they deserve. Those bastards!  In the words of Malcolm McDowell as CALIGULA, "If only all of Rome had just one neck!"

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Screw any Man under 30: ARIZONA DREAM (1993, dir. Emir Kusturica)

"Why must you screw any man under 30?"
"Because it's normal... in Papua New Guinea!"

The above lines of dialogue give you some insight into the hysterical weirdness of Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica's first English language film, ARIZONA DREAM (1993). Don't let it get confused with other ARIZONA movies, or quirky ensemble films too numerous to name (BENNY AND JOON springs to mind, but I've never seen it). Yes, it's got a post-structuralist's fascination with desert roadside attractions, and yes it's got a whimsical voiceover (from Depp) and whimsy involving Eskimos, a hypnotist sled dog; a fish with two eyes on the same side of his face, a balloon; an airplane propeller mounted to the chandelier for a ceiling fan; Depp acting like a chicken "buck buck buckcock!"; fish swimming through the sky whenever someone dies; ambulances going up to the moon; pet turtles at the dinner table, but none of it done in a corny 'faux-centric" way like a Sundance workshop "about family... about hope"  nor is it done in an 'aren't common folk delightful?' Capra style. Instead this has enough 'hysterics' to land it amongst films like Zulawski's 1985  L'AMOR BRAQUE (my piece here) or 80's Godard like DETECTIVE and CODE NAME: CARMEN. In short, it's genuinely nuts, not nuts-lite.

The story unfolds with nature conservationist Depp being lured by brother Vince Gallo out to Arizona to attend his uncle's wedding. Jerry Lewis is the uncle, a car dealer with a thing for pink Cadillacs. He's marrying--wait for it--noted supermodel Paulina Porizkova! So far so good. Yet that whole set-up is dropped once Lili Taylor as a rich heiress and Faye Dunaway as her hot mess stepmom show up at the dealership and Depp and Gallo start falling all over themselves like the Marx Brothers over Thelma Todd. Depp quickly moves in to the ladies' remote Arizona mansion, to shag Dunaway and help her realize her dream of building a fantasmastical flying machine. Kudos to any film where Faye Dunaway out crazies Jerry Lewis (I generally cringe watching Lewis' schtick, but he's restrained and excellent here).

Fans of Vincent Gallo should note there's early signs of his BROWN BUNNY austerity, when he performs the crop dusting scene from Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST at a talent show. Later during a pivotal scene of bedroom hopping upstairs, Gallo is down on the couch, watching GODFATHER II and reciting the whole Fredo bit "Don't you think I'm smaht?!" These scenes, immortal as they come, seems to be metaphors for middle America to the European cinephile mind, a place of endless expanse and emotional voidness, where space, time, and family cease to have any meaning, and we find ourselves hiding and dodging and hiding like a scarecrow at an airport. Gallo also quotes the Cowardly Lion ("I didn't bite hm!") and dances around when things get weird, which they do.

Lili Taylor has perhaps never looked sexier or seemed more relaxed, as the stepdaughter, even as she commits bungee jumping pseudo-suicide, and dreams of coming back as a turtle, but--like Lewis--she lets Dunaway--sexy cougar-style in country frock, pale denim jacket and beauty contest hair-- out-crazy her. The cast clearly has affection for each other and the chops to improv and ham it up without moving out of character or grandstanding. Thanks to his endless Tim Burton movies, Depp's quirkiness isn't quite as fresh as it may have been back in 1993, but Kusturica is no Burton, and the film never loses its giddy, mystical edge. Actors tend to talk a lot about the friends and collaborative energy they experienced on the set of whatever film they're plugging, but here none of that friendly collaboration feels like it needs to be mentioned. It's there, for real, so there's no need to talk about it. Let the Iggy Pop songs on the soundtrack (written by Kusturica for the film) tell what needs telling, and leave it at that.

After this, Kusturica would make his definitive politico-black comedy UNDERGROUND (1995) and you can see some of the ideas in that later film born in DREAM's scattered, hypertextual framework. Long unavailable on DVD or VHS, it's a delight to find ARIZONA DREAM on Netflix streaming! Fans of acid cinema are obliged to, if not plunge, at least wade tentatively in... before it vanishes into the fishnet ether from which it came.

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Johnny Two Times, because he said everything ad nauseum

That dumb-looking movie released this week, MIDDLE MEN (2010, above) is clearly--just from the preview which is all I ever want to see--modeled on the now-classic GOODFELLAS (1990), i.e. Rags to riches to rags with a male voiceover spoken in disaffected regular guy English ala "We were just a buncha regular guys, hustlin' to make a buck like everybody else." and "I mean we had 24/7 cocktail jet plane lunches, villas, private pools -- it was all there for the taking, and we f**ked it up." All this while period bling flies by in short overlapping crosscuts with slow-mo walking scored to rock or soul classics through nightclubs where everybody knows your name: "All Along the Watchtower" or "Superfly" depending on the era and the race, blurred together in one movie-length montage that indicates the editor considers this a crazy ass trip - but your mileage is bound to vary.

Off the top of my head, the Fella imitations include: BLOW (2001), LORD OF WAR (2004), to a lesser extent AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007), even 2005's DOMINO, though the last basically gets it right, probably thanks to its real-life subject acting as advisor. I'm sure there are others I haven't seen, like CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, which I also saw the preview for, and remember its use of the now horribly cliche'd "Watchtower" playing over a slow mo walk around a red-lit club as Tom Hanks narrates in the "It was a time when anything could happen... and often did" vein in the preview.

The main ingredient missing, which most director copycats don't understand, is drug culture accuracy. You either know the culture or you just get the info second hand from other films, and any hep person can see the difference a mile off. TRAINSPOTTING (1996) latches into the speedy thrill of drugs that GOODFELLAS captures in its landmark awesome "big bust" day, and rides it like a bullet, but most of these imitations forget about the druggy effects of good editing and instead just copy the form -- kind of like the way those college campus-sponsored parties where you can't smoke and they don't serve alcohol, and everyone pretends like it doesn't matter and that the party's not lame and they're not losers just acting a role of party goer for each others' illusory benefit. They prefer to ignore the minutiae of the drug world they long to depict, beyond what they read in Rolling Stone.

You know the issue, with Neil Young on the cover?

Neil Young on the cover? 

To narrow it down, lets focus on two GOODFELLA-wannabes that I have seen: LORD OF WAR is "fiction based on true events" which means it's not even based on a true story, the way, say, GOODFELLAS was based on real life mobster Henry Hill's actual memoir (and he acted as 'trip' advisor). BLOW--a script based on a dealer's memoir written in minimum security prison--lacks any connection with the cocaine and marijuana dealing world beyond numerous viewings of GOODFELLAS by its director and proves the point that you're an L.A. phony who never stepped outside the movie set bubble your details are going to ring false no matter how many coke parties you've cruised or heard about. And both BLOW and LORD OF WAR ring as false as loudly GOODFELLAS rings perennially true.

What makes Marty Scorsese's lower rung Italian mob films work so well because, for one reason, he grew up watching wiseguys across the street from his house while he convalesced with a string of respiratory illnesses as a child. When he strays from working class Italian New York, however, he strikes out as often as he connects, i.e. his last four films with his new life partner, Leo DiCaprio (THE DEPARTED excepted, of course, your highness). If he partners with Nicholas Pileggi or Jake La Motta or some tru-baller like that Marty can make a film so authentic you go into a kind of swooning trance, but with a thug-lite like Leo it's just the Hollywood bubble filming itself through a reflection. The film Marty needs to make would be about Leo: a drama about a once great actor squandering his romantic lead gifts in order to ape De Niro in roles that he's just too purty fer.

LORD OF WAR on the other hand rests on the conceit that it's a dark political satire. It's important! 60 Minutes-style important. But I left the theater feeling ripped off. Even the little details (Cage laying out a line of coke on the leather car seat each time he drops brother Leto off at rehab; the Darfur-type arms dealer halving a payment of blood diamonds with a machete after conscience-stricken Leto blows up half the arms delivery; picking up hot models at the Chelsea Piers 'arms convention') ring false, like writer-director Andrew Nicol is 'trying' to come up with funny little details to mesh into his skeleton framework, like he's quietly sneaking peaks at Robert Mckee's Story while trying to be 'true' to half-remembered facts from some article in Time magazine. They could have filmed Brecht's Mother Courage and been much better off, or even used it as a reference! Compared to LORD, Mother Courage is a bedrock of gritty authenticity. I know, that's like saying Godard's re-enactment of Vietnam in PIERROT LE FOU is more gritty and authentic than PLATOON. It's not, but it is more authentic than the Vietnam of FULL METAL JACKET -- another film that feels like the director presumes no one else has seen a single other film about Vietnam.

To lay out the LORD premise: Nic Cage is a Brooklyn Russian-American diner worker who decides out of the blue he wants to get into arms dealing. Knowing nothing about it, he goes to an armory convention with his better-looking younger brother (Jordan Catelano, above). The first thing they spy are two hot convention models posing by a big tank, wearing camouflage short shorts. Cage goes up and tries to worm his way into a conversation with someone he recognizes as a top flight arms dealer. Next scene - Cage and brother wake up sleeping next to the hot models in their hotel room. Ta-Daa! Not only does it seem Nicol knows nothing about arms dealing, he doesn't even know anything about conventions, or at any rate, being at a convention when you're just a working class Ukrainian-American shlub trying to break into the big time weapons dealing with no capital instead of just being the guy who made GATTACA (1997). Instead wasting all his money on what are assuredly very expensive ladies. Our two Latvian brothers wake up next to them to prove they are two wild and crazy guys as the writer could never write a believable seduction scene or even a prostitute monetary negotiation.

What does it matter? Cage is now "officially" an arms dealer. Later he magically has a Ukraine military General uncle anxious to unload a bunch of discontinued Russian tanks and armaments. How fortunate! Nowhere is there that kind of authentic "shop talk" you would find in, say, THE GODFATHER or THE FRENCH CONNECTION or THERE WILL BE BLOOD or any movie by Robert Altman, Howard Hawks, or Sam Peckinpah, where you soak up the strange lexicon of a particular lifestyle. Going in to see LORD you know just as much about the international arms trade as you do coming out, presuming you've ever read a Times article on child soldiers in Africa. Hell, IRON MAN tells you more about the international arms trade.

In the end, the GOODFELLAS difference is that Marty knows the minutiae personally - he has a keen eye for authentic Italian detail: the thin slicing of garlic for the sauce while in jail; the way a coked-up Henry gets obsessive about stirring the sauce and breading the veal: "I'm gonna cook all this... I'm gonna cook all this meat!"; the slow peripheral way his wife becomes a coke head; the snotty babysitter drug mule cutting vegetables; or how each of the mob cronies is a unique character unto himself, like "Johnny Two Times, because he said everything two times."

In Hollywood's GOODFELLA-ripoff cycle, it's now Johnny 20x, who says less each time, but with more money and a voiceover that doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's borrowing even the inflection of words from Ray Liotta. Any good writer would be smart enough to embed him or herself into the sleazy milieu they wish to write about, or interview--in depth--someone who lived through this kind of stuff. (Howard Hawks famously had real mobsters from Al Capone's gang on hand during the shooting of SCARFACE.) But any smug trust fund idiot who saw GOODFELLAS (200x!) thinks he can "do a movie like that" even if he doesn't have a mom like Tommy's,3 who makes paintings (at right), where "one dog's looking one way, one dog's looking the other way, and this guy's goin; "Whadda ya want from me?"

Another way you can always tell when the filmmakers aren't Marty Scorsese is because all the mobster's clothes look like they're fresh out of the costume department: pure black, ironed and empty of lived-in detail. Nobody smokes or drinks, unless it's 'crucial' for character development, and then it's just one scene, one cigarette, held onto like a kid holds onto the candy version, or one sip of a drink which is then left behind, half-full. A Scorsese character meanwhile smokes until his fucking fingers are yellowed, his curtains dingy, his ashtrays scratched by careless maids.

You can tell even in bar scenes: a guy in a bar in a Scorsese film orders a drink the way a real man orders a drink, "A Cutty and watta" = a Cutty Sark (a scotch) cut with water; "gimme a seven and seven" - that's a Seagram's Seven (blended whiskey) and 7-UP, on the rocks. A guy in a movie like LORD OF WAR says: "Gimme a drink," and the bartender magically knows what that means. In real life, even "Gimme a beer" is total bullshit. Dude, you can't just order 'a beer' at a bar. Be specific! Has anyone ever gotten away with being so vague? Do you want a pint or a half pint, a bottle or a draft? A Bud or a Heineken? We also have 150 microbrews on tap... and if you can't answer her because all you do is watch movies in a plastic bubble, well now you're looking like a grade-A idiot, the kind all the liquor ads pitch to, the young man of means stepping into the post-21 bar tourist class. And how come after drinking a whole drink of presumably straight liquor your face is not flushed, your voice not slurred? Where is the music on the jukebox that makes you have to shout to be heard by the person next to you? Scorsese wouldn't let details like that slide. Scorsese must have actually been to a bar at least once in his life. Imagine that.

As for BLOW (left, 2001), I don't remember hating it quite as much, but I still felt like I was watching someone try to tell the same story as GOODFELLAS without any of the skill, expertise, experience, or patience. I realized early on it would be too weird for my date to suggest we sneak out and duck into something else, so I just made the best of it and marveled that anyone as dumb as the protagonist played by Johnny Depp could even survive one drug run, let alone dozens, before getting busted. The only real part for me was when he's fighting with his bratty-hot Latina wife (Penelope Cruz) while being pulled over for speeding, and in a blind rage she tells the cops he's holding. I had a chill because I could have easily imagined my then-wife, a high-strung but very statuesque Argentine filmmaker, doing just that! Luckily by then I was safely embedded in AA and long since out of 'the biz.' Dude, they should hire me as a drunk/druggie technical advisor. I'd demand everyone finish their drinks and have to talk loud over the jukebox. And no one would get away with ordering "a drink." They'd learn to be shpe-shific! La putre madre forro! 

You can look all over these other films and you'll never find another moment that even approaches the giddy highs of GOODFELLAS. Even CASINO--Scorsese's own ripoff of GOODFELLAS--never really brought it home (though it's still compulsively re-watchable and hypnotic). So there it is, the way Hollywood steals the thunder but ignores the rain, then wonders why their version of the storm rings so false and no one goes home soaked. We asked for spaghetti and we got cold noodles and ketchup.

 Now you can't even smoke in bars. Or dance. Next up, volume limits. Cops with decible measurers, next a guy going around making sure the ice isn't too cold it might hurt your widdow toof.

Perhaps part of this horrible sanitizing is the curse of the information age - computer screens take the place of night clubs and all conversations aren't at bars but on IMs. In short, as filmmakers struggle to make stories about the internet into films, we can relax and know that, at least in this decade, being stuck at home in witness protection may not be so bad. We didn't have the internet when GOODFELLAS came out --a lot has changed. Marty now has Leo and screenwriter William Monahan to steer him away from his Italian neighborhood and into the uncharted terrain of Boston accents and shadowy conspiracy, so he's out of "real" details himself. And Johnny Two Times will never get "the papez, the papez" because he hangs frozen on a hook in a meat truck for all our sins. Johnny Two Times! Thank god you never lived to see the papez replaced by the kindles... the kindles.


NOTES:
This post is dedicated to my dear buddy, David Maxwell, who introduced me to Goodfellas and thus changed my life forever - he tried to introduce me to Kindle, but I gots to hold out a little longer.

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Still the Tourist: FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.--Hunter S.

Poor Terry Gilliam, a high brother from across the pond (though born in the states, which just goes to show ya) - he's always made the mistake of going bigger when smaller would serve, and Hunter S. Thompson has always been a difficult figure to capture either small or largely. WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM was a small mess, and Hunter himself has few kind words for Gary Trudeau who's satirized him for decades in Doonesbury, and then Gilliam hits the story with an elephant gun.

The mighty Thompson has been Hard Rock calcified as the trustafarian's badboy,  the party animal supremis for Bob Marley's LEGEND-owning frat guys who want to be "edgy" before they're swallowed up by dad's law firm. Mixing acid and testosterone is a bad idea even in the sunniest of locales, and bad ideas are what Hunter S. Thompson seems to run on, but it's an easy mixture to misinterpret, and Gilliam's film is so busy being beautiful and full of time capsule relevance and hot color intensity that it forgets its primary job, to be a goddamned movie about a goddamned guy in Vegas screwed up on goddamned drugs. Mike Figgis, where is thy stinger?

Gilliam does the classic original book a disservice by this glossing of every dingbat realization of our addled narrator until it shines with Hard Rock petrification. You can imagine dopey kids soaking their car floor covers with ether and then crashing their car and the suing Thompson for making it cool. It's not his fault but Hunter's been consumed by the consumer culture vultures and when he screams in pain the vultures imitate him like it's the hot new song on the charts. They did the same thing with Kurt Cobain and it drove both these poor besotted poets to the shotgun. The vultures know no better way than this; the tourists shall inherit the earth and bring back postcards with God's genuine imitation autograph. And that, I think, is the handle. If you go to a high hill in Woodstock, NY or Portsmouth, New Hampshire, you see that the beautiful wave never really broke and rolled away at all. It just learned to hide its foam from Hunter. As long as Hunter doesn't know, the vultures don't either, and the wave can quietly roll on.


We see glimpses of how great LOATHING could be early on, as when his lawyer, Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro, stealing the show) guides a flipping on too much acid Hunter through the casino bar: "We'll get you some peanuts, they're good for you, man," he says--capturing exactly the right way to talk to a person peaking on acid, like it's their birthday and wherever you're taking them is going to be safe and full of peanuts and all the demons and distorted elderly faces leering in hushed church hostility will be gone -- to which Hunter screams "Peanuts?" way too loudly, jumping like a coiled slinky as he tries to walk. It's true and funny and clearly Depp has 'been there' and the red checkered carpeting pulses just right in the hotel lobby. But considering the amount of digital altering effects at his disposal, Gilliam's visuals end up remarkably disengaged. After the carpet design breathing, there's nothing in the way of hallucinations for the rest of the film, other than light effects and puppetry. Why not have the whole room swim in overlaying imagery, elaborate twirls and swirls of movement traces? Gilliam's been there--that's clear enough--so why didn't he bring back some ruby slippers?


For some ungodly reason, Gilliam prefers to keep it 'realistic' --even while ole Raoul Duke is flipping out on adrenochrome in the hotel suite the best Gilliam can do is blaze some intense pink lighting. One longs to see some CGI artist who's "gone the distance" really add some trails and vortexes, the glimmers of alternate realities that create shadowed 'near' events overlaid over current ones. But after awhile it seems that no one involved in the production has gone the distance after all... maybe not even Thompson. Compare the scene where he asks "how much for the ape?" to scenes of James Fox trying to buy Mick's coffee table in PERFORMANCE and you realize Duke's a tourist! He's no boundary-busting free spirit at all, just a political journalist with an expense account and a masochistic yen for bad acid and violence. I know because I've embodied that persona myself, a John Wayne framed in the closing door of THE SEARCHERS, deciding to stay behind as the kids all go back to the garden without you. But unlike Raoul Duke and the Whale, the real Duke and I know the reason you stay behind isn't heroism or sacrifice, it's so you can scream oaths into the wind along with the dying old guard rather than have to act like you dig garlicky vegan stir-fry and patchouli-soaked girls with hairy legs and no make-up, and man, I don't blame you.

I blame it on the budget, which is way too large. Never send a white elephant to do a termite job. There's an extra on disc two of the Criterion edition wherein we see Hunter in his dressing room, being led to the set where they're filming a hallucinatory courtroom scene and they end up sitting in the back row of a huge throng of seats on set, while far up ahead, barely visible, is this ridiculously lavish court set, all for this one small scene. You can hear the money just leaking in buckets down the drain. Like Ridley Scott or Stanley Kubrick, or Tim Burton, Gilliam has some deep-seated artistic insecurity wherein he has to keep tinkering with seemingly every scene until: a) his producers are brought to the brink of bankruptcy, b) it his personal stamp on it and c) it's completely sapped of momentum and useless as a connection to the next scene and overall story arc.

Inevitably, this strategy means that the film begins to hang together more as a string of exotic, beautifully crafted but empty scenes rather than as a coherent narrative; one longs for the giddy, ballsy high wire flow of Thompson's prose to find a match in the images, but Gilliam's still setting up the high wire to reflect the green gel spotlight just right, no a little to the left... and by the time he's ready to shoot the sun is going down, the drugs are already wearing off and people are beginning to slip out the door... What makes LSD such a good experience (when it's good) is that it helps you escape the kind of situations Gilliam seems addicted to, the ones where you're expected to voluntarily sit in someone else's ego prison.

Now as an old 'head, I don't want to knock this film as bad as I already have; perhaps it will become more relevant with the passage of time. Then again, maybe not. A film like EASY RIDER or PSYCH-OUT makes you feel like the psychedelic lifestyle choice is within easy reach of anyone with guts enough to stick out their tongue, FEAR AND LOATHING makes it seems like the best you can hope for is to touch the hem of Johnny Depp's loud Hawaiian shirt as it hangs over your booth at Planet Hollywood. The physical effects of dry mouth and nervous anticipation that accompanies the best acid cinema is replaced by mere idolatry. Instead of trying to ride the waves you just buy an autograph from some old junky surfer.

My anti-idolatry rant aside, FEAR does have great moments such as the orange in the tub scene; the mind-fuck with the hotel maid; the carpet swirls as mentioned, and all the scenes where Del Toro's character is presented as an unlikable but powerfully magnetic, lysergic monster, challenging our impetus to love him the way Bogart did as the violent screenwriter from IN A LONELY PLACE. Del Toro is the best part of the whole film because he alone magnificently captures the tortured feeling one can have riding in an elevator with some gorgeous tan creature like Cameron Diaz; how while peaking on acid one can seem to absorb a woman's beauty at such a deep, aching sensory level that the rest of your trip becomes tortured by her imprint; how your whole mission in life id compromised in a warm fuzzy second h and the deep animal longing that goes beyond sex--beyond even cannibalism--into the tortured realm of pure sensual feedback.

Depp is fine, as usual, though clearly treading on eggshells between wanting to be unhinged and yet also portray his friend Hunter in a favorable light. When he likens del Toro's Dr. Gonzo to the last of the buffalo--a unique one of a kind original--at the end of the film, you finally begin to understand the relevance of what you have just seen. From thence forth drugs will have to be done on the sly, indoors, at shows or other safe havens. The days of giant monster men carving their carnivorous hallucinations large into the flesh of the mainstream are over. The gonzo method, apparently, includes leaving no bridge unburned, only strings of draconian laws made to ensure no one pulls the same shit you just got away with.

Only Hunter's angry, wistful original book is left as a possible escape plan. Read it, of course, as many times as you can, but then use it as inspiration for your own mad dream or else face the consequences of being just another spectator, just another dupe in line at the corporate-owned 'High and Beautiful Wave' ride at Disneyland. One of Hunter's big catch phrases was "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." The tragedy of Gilliam's film is that he reverses it. He's a pro who tries so hard to be weird that he ends up missing the turn altogether. 

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