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Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas

 
 
akira
11:22 / 09.04.02
Best line.
'Get yourself some fuckin golf shoes man, we'll never get outta here alive'
 
 
rizla mission
12:41 / 09.04.02
I'm rather partial to

"oh, that's nice. The guy remembered me.."

"Great, they'll probably have a big fucking net waiting.."
 
 
priya narma
12:45 / 09.04.02
To the hitchiker:

"We're not like the others...we're your friends."

or something to that effect =)
 
 
wembley can change in 28 days
13:02 / 09.04.02
To the carnival man:

"Nothing. I want nothing."
 
 
Bear
13:16 / 09.04.02
I kinda like

"No point in mentioning these bats, I thought. Poor bastard will see them soon enough."

I've not seen this film in a long time, its another one getting added to the list of movies I have to buy on DVD !
 
 
gozer the destructor
15:21 / 09.04.02
Damn, i was gonna say:

Acosta: Let's give the boy a lift.
Raoul Duke: What? No! We can't stop here! This is bat country!

I also like:

Raoul Duke: Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow.
 
 
Cherry Bomb
16:24 / 09.04.02
"I think I'm getting the fear.."
 
 
Baz Auckland
21:14 / 09.04.02
"With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know."
 
 
Margin Walker
03:19 / 10.04.02
Speaking of which, do any of you know where I can find the origional draft of the script? The one that Alex Cox worked on?

And for anyone wanting to see Terry Gilliam's latest dirctorial effort, here it is: a friggin' Nike commercial.

And seeing as we're talking about ol' Duke, which do you think is funnier: "Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas" or "Where The Buffalo Roam"? Although I haven't seen either for a long time, I'm going with the latter because, to paraphrase Cherry, "Anyone who doesn't like Bill Murray isn't worth a damn".
 
 
fluid_state
04:30 / 10.04.02
I'd have to see "Where the Buffalo..." again, but from memory, it's a little sweeter. Human, nice wrap up with the attorney, a little more (seemingly) true to life. "Fear and Loathing" is just pain good crazy fun, and has an undertone of sheer futility.

"You can almost see the point where the wave broke, and rolled back"
 
 
rizla mission
10:37 / 10.04.02

And for anyone wanting to see Terry Gilliam's latest dirctorial effort, here it is: a friggin' Nike commercial.


Well, eh, i suppose he has to earn a bit of cash back after fucking around for years on an excessively budgeted fantasy film that never got made..

..still, apparently his next film's gonna be an adaption of Good Omens! That should be fun for all the family!
 
 
Cherry Bomb
15:52 / 10.04.02
I forgot to mention the description of Las Vegas: "This is what the world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war..."
 
 
cusm
20:24 / 10.04.02
I know my favorites:

'There's nothing more depraived than a man in the depths of an ether binge.'

'Oh God, Did you eat all that acid? There better be some thorizine in that bag you fat bastard or youre in big trouble'

'He was some kind of high powered mutant...'
 
 
Mister Sun
02:33 / 11.04.02
This is actually from "Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" by HST, of course. It just makes me so happy every time i read it.

"The ego is the crucial factor here. A man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare--any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it. The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year; his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him... but when the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.

"The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous system of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.

"A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can't handle personally he will hire out--or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician."




Lovely.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
10:19 / 11.04.02
Er - could we limit discussion to the film, and not HST's other works?

I enjoyed Gilliam's film - for the first half. By the end, I thought it became a bit too mired down in self-absorption and a certain element of self-pity; it lost all of its charge for me after that. It was great to see Depp obviously enjoying himself in the role - fuck, who wouldn't? - but after I read the book (post-screening) I realised that it's the sort of thing that's probably doomed to failure as a filmic adaptation anyway. It's so much about the prose, which is hard to replicate without lots of voiceover. And while it was used occasionally, it just seemed... well, I don't know. The film in my head seemed much more successful.

But I guess this is the inherent problem with moving books to film anyway...
 
 
gozer the destructor
10:56 / 11.04.02
I read the book before watching the film and enjoyed it more after hearing the prose rather than reading it, Depp was amazingly good as Hunter and apparently the scene with the coconuts on the bonnet of the car was originally supposed to be in the book but got mis-placed, Depp allegedly found it whilst diggin around in Hunters basement and Gilliam decided to stick it in the film, not an amazing scene but cool trivia, fact fans...
 
 
rizla mission
11:35 / 12.04.02
I think it's a fantastic film. Not a patch on the book, obviously, but as good an adaption as yr. ever gonna get..

The whole opening sequence where they're driving through the desert has to rank as one of the funniest pieces of film I've ever seen, all yr. other favourite scenes are perfectly dramatised, and a great soundtrack too.. it's on the verge of self-parody in places, but then HST always is..
 
 
Knight's Move
12:22 / 16.04.02
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert, when the drugs finally began to take hold.

What an opening.

But there was no point in looking back. Fuck no, not today thankyou kindly. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger. A man on the move and just sick enough to be totally confident.

What a close.

Also nice:

As you're attourney a) I recommend you drive at topspeed. It'll be a miracle if we can check in before you turn into some kind of goddam raving animal. [30 minutes. It was going to be very close.]

b) you take a hit out of the brown bottle in my shaving bag.

More attourneys should give you drugs and then demand you drive at ridiculous speeds.

And who can forget the joy of:
We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of Mescaline, 5 sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicoloured screamers downers, laughers and uppers. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beers, 2 dozen amyls, and a pint of raw ether.

And then the line that makes it:

Not that we needed all that for the trip, but when you get locked into a serious drug collection the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
 
 
The Monkey
16:30 / 16.04.02
Have I ever mention how pleased I am that Hunter S Thompson is from Lexington, Kentucky?

I think Fear and Loathing is the best book-to-film adaptation out there (although arguments could be made for The Princess Bride), capturing both the up and down of the original. The disturbing and self-pitying tone of the second half is really the point of the book, a contemplation of how the Sixties failed to rise to the occasion....
 
 
The Monkey
16:32 / 16.04.02
"...you should never, ever trust a drug...especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eye."

PS There's a Velvet Acid Christ track called "Fun with Drugs" that samples the film.
 
 
Tim Tempest
18:25 / 06.03.07
We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of Mescaline, 5 sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicoloured screamers downers, laughers and uppers. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beers, 2 dozen amyls, and a pint of raw ether.

And then the line that makes it:

Not that we needed all that for the trip, but when you get locked into a serious drug collection the tendency is to push it as far as you can.


I just bought this sweet poster of these lines at a poster sale at my college.

Yep, its still my favorite movie.
 
 
This Sunday
18:38 / 06.03.07
Just (re)watched two-thirds of this last night before collapsing into a deep coma for several too-short hours, and wondering why there isnt more general love for the film, even among Gilliam buffs. And then, this reappears.

Really, this should be (one of) the primary examples of excellence in acting, just for the two main roles. What you might call actual cohesive character perpetuation. True grit.

And we are chock full of that.

(Dogs fuck the pope; no fault of mine - still a lovely line that gets me every time.)
 
 
akira
08:53 / 07.03.07
"Finish the fucking story! What happened next? What about the glands?"

Gets me every time that one.
 
  
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