Many of Hollywood\’s cameras have made their way in and out of Las Vegas, portraying a pocket of American culture that is only possible around the city\’s numerous multi-hued and some not so flamboyant hotels and casinos. Most published Vegas film reviews go for the Top-10 approach, which in many ways is like pulling teeth; there are hardly any critics in the world who can say which films top the Vegas charts based on each film\’s appeal; and since most modern journalists are plain PR people, receiving free dinners from studios executives, let us not invest a whole lot of trust in their depraved pitches.

To any literature loving, film fanatic, there seems to be one film that makes its rounds at every dinner, barbeque and bar conversation conversations that are almost always accompanied by profuse drinking; conversations that always go together with someone imitating a trudging, mumbling character as he delves into America\’s putrid gut. The film is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

No other movie before its release, or after for that matter, has portrayed the famous gambling town quite like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Adapted from arguably America\’s greatest writer and journalist Hunter S. Thompsons\’ novel, the film lassoes the viewer into the torments, profound philosophies and disparagements of a sports journalist and his lawyer friend as they lunge into the west to disprove America\’s greatest fallacy: The American Dream. Aided by an inventory of psychedelic drugs, these characters narrate the rapid nose-dive of a once extraordinary culture, a culture on the cusp of debauchery, laboriously incoming to crash-land from a few short-lived golden decades that only a few can attest to.

It seems like most critics and reviewers do not give the film the credit it deserves. Most condemn the film\’s lack of development and its portrayal of an excessive drug culture but what they fail to get is that the film embodies Thompson\’s \”Gonzo\” just the same as the protagonist\’s modus operandi. Instead of a standard classical narrative, the film becomes a whirlpool of psychedelia mixed with speckles of America\’s unfortunate reality, much like the precariousness of the human mind.

The film starts comically as we witness antihero Raoul Duke swinging a flyswatter at imaginary flying bats somewhere in the middle of the great American dessert; but the story quickly progresses to a regression of social reality, whilst its confused characters try to make sense of it all. Through Terry Gilliam\’s eyepiece and with the help of Italian-born cinematographer Nicola Pecorini\’s compositions Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fuses to important visual dimensions: the cinematic world of Oliver Stone\’s Natural Born Killers (the trick of filming live projections) and the canvasses of Robert Yarber, giving viewers the sensation of urban sterility mixed with lucrative swagger.

Although slap-bang in the middle of the jumble the lights, money, cars and famous people and under the influence of some of the world\’s most terrible substances, Raoul Duke never quite steps over Event Horizon, containing a grip of what is important. To him the rut of America\’s mediocrity, the failing to ask the right questions and the aberration of family life is all pinned on its leaders, and the movie, like the book, makes certain that nobody leaves unscathed.

For film fanatics who dread propaganda and who believe that thinking for one\’s self is the most important of virtues, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is not only the best Vegas film of all time, but perhaps one of the few post-90\’s films that will beat the Hollywood-created psychosis out of you.

Rating 9/10

Author Bio: By Derek @ Golden Riviera. For a drug-free gambling experience, visit Golden Riviera online casino.

Category: Recreation
Keywords: fear and loathing in las vegas, movies, casino movies, vegas movies