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| FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998) - R
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ReviewScore: 40 out of 100
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
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One thing that Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which opens today (Friday), has in common with Godzilla: decidedly mixed reviews. David Kronke in today's Los Angeles Times calls it "a spectacular wipeout, a visionary mess that is so unrelentingly dissolute that it may prove to be impenetrable viewing. ... This movie is simply a downer." On the other hand, Eleanor Ringel in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls parts of the movie "brilliant," predicts that it is heading toward "cult status" and concludes: "Fear and Loathing can't be called a success, but it's the most glorious kind of failure -- imaginative, uncompromising, true to itself." But Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post writes that "the famous [Hunter] Thompson work, long said to be unfilmable, turns out to be something far worse: unendurable." However, Stephen Holden in the New York Times, also noting that Thompson's book had "until now seemed impossible to capture in a film," says that Gilliam has succeeded in reproducing "its splendiferous funhouse terror: the closest sensory approximation of an acid trip ever achieved by a mainstream movie and the latest example of Gilliam's visual bravura." Rod Dreher in the New York Post takes a middle ground. "It's great fun, but finally becomes too much," he writes. |
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