oh no, this sounds horribly depressing. I read it recently and thought how subtle it was; then I saw a poster with the tagline "Absolutely Nothing In Moderation" and figured it was going to bend the story pretty good. I'm surprised Johnny Depp agreed to it, being Hunter's pal and all. But hey, he probably figured better him than someone else.

So... Am I supposed to go see it or not?

Sounds like "Fear and Loathing" (the movie) meets "Motorcycle Diaries" (the movie)

And that's not a good thing.

Aw, boo. It has Aaron Eckhart and I really wanted it to be good.

Everything about that photo screams "2011" to me, not "1960".

Seeing this at the Uptown, where SIFF members get a $5 discount and you can get $5 off if you get a receipt that day from a local business in Lower Queen Anne nearby.

Like, say, Dick's. Or Mecca. Or wherever. Thaiger food?

Should you go see it? Well, they put a happy ending on a Hunter S. Thompson story. What does that tell you?

LSD probably would have been very hard to come by in Puerto Rico around 1960...

Not that LSD should have been in the movie, but why do you say this? What reason is there to believe that LSD would have been very hard to come by at a popular vacation spot in 1960?

Wait, a happy ending? Shit.

I loved this book in part because of all of its flaws. And loved the morose-ness of it all. Like Raymond Carver in the tropics. And they go shine all that off. Ugh. I should just go a bottle of rum instead of seeing this.

@8, Puerto Rico was not all that popular a vacation spot in 1960, and LSD was very hard to come by EVERYWHERE in 1960. Even Timothy Leary hadn't tried it yet. It was still under patent by Sandoz Labs and available almost exclusively under the supervision of a psychiatrist.

@10, I'll go halvsies with you. Actually, Leary first tried LSD in 1960, and Puerto Rico started to become popular in the 50's, soon after their Constitution was ratified and their relation with the U.S. solidified.

But even with that and Alfred Hubbard sharing the stuff with thousands of people, along with the CIA experimenting with it in ways that were hardly controlled, I can see how it strains credulity to suggest that one could just stumble upon it at the time and in that particular place. So, after some thought, it probably was hard to come by. And Bethany's point about it being obviously forced in the film is exactly right.

@11, Leary first tried psilocybin in 1960, not LSD, after a trip to Mexico to investigate the mushrooms in August of that year. Obviously acid came shortly after, but I can't find a specific reference for his first LSD trip. I also can't find precise dates for Thompson's sojourn in PR, but odds are it was before August. And the novel is set in the late 50s. Casual drug use, especially of psychedelics, was a long ways away from the mainstream.

The big break for Puerto Rican tourism was three-fold: "Operation Bootstrap", the US program to move the island economy away from agriculture into manufacturing and tourism; the advent of Pan Am's 707 flights in late 1958; and the closure of Havana after Castro's revolution. So, yeah, technically, tourism was underway. But not on anything like the mass scale that it would become. PR was an obvious destination for a journalist in 1960, but not for tourists, and the explosion had just begun. Not exactly Cancun yet (Cancun didn't yet exist).

Thompson of course was a great bullshitter. I haven't read the book -- life's far too short to read Hunter frigging Thompson's unpublished juvenilia, or anyone's really -- but it is clear from just the stills of this movie that it is yet another vehicle for Johnny Depp to play Johnny Depp, not a real look at the sixties. And Thompson himself has been forever reduced in the public eye to a meager collection of cliches.

I think that's probably about right, Fnarf @ 12 - though I haven’t seen it.

I'm more than a little disappointed when Hollywood casts celebrities that have aged well beyond the characters they portray, as is the case with this film.

Depp has done some great work in my opinion (it’s been a long while) and I do enjoy HST’s writing. But again, Fnarf has probably nailed it.

Too bad, this could’ve been a gritty film. Grit would be more suitable than gloss.

Whatever helps pay for the Botox injections, I guess.

ha! that picture kinda sums it up: squeaky clean impeccably starched white pants on a greasy motorcycle on a dusty street. I think they built a crane solely to hoist Johnny on and off that motorcycle. A crane with a built in hair salon...