![]() ![]() For me, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about drugs as much as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff? is about drinking. Sure, drinking and drugs are part of both works, but there is a lot more going on as well. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid. And Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing never gets beyond a line from the beginning of the book and also used in the film: “The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. But the play is NOT ABOUT DRINKING! And yet many productions of the play never really get beyond the bottle. But that is how I was left feeling after Fear and Loathing.ĭo you know Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There is a lot of drinking in the play (and in the 1966 film version starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as well). the end experience is much more rich.” Of course he was not talking about his own work but the difference between the first version of King Kong and Peter Jackson’s CG-laden remake. And I think that many could get people’s imaginations functioning, exercising. If you’re doing drama on the radio, you have to imagine. It’s turning cinema into a passive experience, because you don’t have to imagine anything. To turn Gilliam’s own words on him, “All the work is being done for you. To have a film literally translate ALL of Thompson’s words & ideas to the screen leaves the audience with only one way to go. I always read Thompson as an impression of a place and time a state of mind. The film also borrowed heavily from the imagery of the book’s illustrator, Ralph Steadman. It creates, literally, a visual translation (with voice-over’s straight from the book being delivered by Depp) of the drug-charged visions of the place the American dream has come to die, Las Vegas. Both Gilliam’s and Thompson’s work constantly bend reality both for fun and effect. Reviews of the film talked about the film’s “fidelity to the author’s hallucinatory imagery” (Stephen Holden, New York Times) and we know Gilliam’s body of work is easily described as “rich, explosively imaginative fantasies. Having grown up on the book and earlier Gilliam works, like Time Bandits and Brazil, I expected this pairing to have been a slam dunk. What I would rather discuss is my dislike for this film–a film I believe I should like. Pecorini has served as Gilliam’s DP since. Or we could discuss that this was the first time that cinematographer Nicola Pecorini was to work with Gilliam. Thompson off during a meeting and was thus replaced by Gilliam. Cox ( Sid & Nancy and Repo Man – pictured left) had been hired for the project but apparently he pissed Hunter S. First, there was the whole mess of who was to direct the film: Alex Cox vs. There are so many things we could explore here. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray) Average Rating: stars. ![]()
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