MOVIE REVIEWS

I love movies, but I especially love documentaries and movies that make you think. "The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson" and "Tell No One" are two such movies.  I admit, I was never a huge fan Thompson fan, but Johnny Depp's depiction is tantalizing.  "Tell No One" is eclectic and makes you think, a sort of euro-who-done-it type of film.


Stalking Hunter

A new documentary traces the wild life of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson

by Richard von Busack metroctive.com, July 2, 2008
 

ALEX GIBNEY'S Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson documents the success and heartbreak of one of the most influential writers of the 1970s. Thompson's own influences are easy to trace. He died with a photo of Hemingway in his office; Papa's ghost bade Thompson to make a horse's ass out of himself, just like the master. Thompson's biographer Douglas Brinkley recalls that HST used to type and retype The Great Gatsby to understand the music of Fitzgerald's sentences. (Brinkley adds something incisive: Fitzgerald gazed through the window at the rich; Thompson preferred to smash the glass.) He starved as a freelancer, starting his most serious work following the Hell's Angels on their rounds. One of the many tidbits presented in the film is that Thompson risked his life for The Nation, so any writer can guess how little money he made for that assignment. Given workaday jobs covering the Mint 300 motorcycle race in Las Vegas and the Kentucky Derby, Thompson turned the tables for drug- and bourbon-fueled hell-rants against the ugliness of late 1960s American society. This, then, was Gonzo. Others tried it, but Thompson remained the champion of the style. He mixed the gilded invective of the British Augustan age with sweaty pulp-fiction horror. >>Read More

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Beyond the Multiplex

A murdered wife who isn't dead

by Andrew O’Hehir, salon.com, June 30, 2008

 

ADAPTED FROM A NOVEL BY BEST-SELLING American mystery writer Harlan Coben, Guillaume Canet's hit French thriller "Tell No One" has a certain mid-Atlantic hardness about it, an undercurrent of profound psychological or spiritual disturbance that doesn't quite seem French but isn't exactly American either. Canet, a 35-year-old acting-writing-directing phenom, has transposed the book's upscale and downscale New York locations to Paris and environs, packed the cast with top-notch Gallic acting talent, and made a film that clicks along efficiently from one hair-raising discovery to the next (although at two hours-plus, it's both longer and denser than most Hollywood genre pictures these days).  >>Read More