Bedtime for Gonzo  

Salon has an interesting review of a new movie on HST called "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson".

Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson and documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney don't seem like the most natural pairing, at least at first. Gibney's films, including the Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side" (which has produced an ugly dispute between Gibney and the film's distributor) and the Oscar-nominated "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," essentially present old-school investigative journalism, filtered through a pop sensibility. Gibney himself has compared his research-intensive work to archaeology, and I doubt anyone has ever described Thompson's work in those terms.

Without question one of the most influential journalists of the past 50 years, Thompson was both immensely talented and immensely undisciplined. His bookend masterpieces "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," permanently changed the relationship between the reporter, the self and the subject in American journalism. Even in his best work, Thompson walked a thin line between honesty and fatal self-indulgence, and over the last 30 years of his life he gradually slid into booze-hound, gun-crazed, paranoid self-caricature, closer to the Uncle Duke of "Doonesbury" than to the lacerating wit who ripped through the mendacious superficiality of American political and civic life.

Gibney's immensely funny and sad new motion picture "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" -- the "Dr." was a mail-order divinity degree -- is principally intended to rehabilitate Thompson and introduce his work to a new audience. The primary focus of Gibney's mixture of interviews, archival footage and imaginative re-creation is the years from 1965 to 1975, when Thompson rose from obscurity to become a highly paid Rolling Stone correspondent and counterculture hero and wrote almost all his best stuff. Yet even at the end of his life, as Gibney reminds us, Uncle Duke had his moments of seeing through the charade and glimpsing the machinery grinding away beneath it.