Word: gibney
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...this despite my admiration for Alex Gibney's very thorough documentary account of the writer's disheveled life and career, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Aside from a first wife who became totally fed up with Thompson, it collects a lot of tolerant - if often head-shaking - comments on the good doctor's rattling passage through the history of recent American life...
...lived, publicly and privately, in a very troubled time. The downside of their efforts - especially in Thompson's case - was a highly unreliable subjectivity. It was covered over by Thompson's stylishness and eventually subsumed by the cult of personality that accreted around him. Eventually, Gibney's documentary concludes, it was celebrity that did Thompson in; his personality, more than any event he was covering, became the story, which was not as interesting as he and his acolytes thought...
...followed his Fear and Loathing books about Las Vegas and the political campaign of 1972. These books had their moments, of course, but there was something hysterical about the expression of his loves and hates in them as well - and there is something winking and indulgent in the comments Gibney has collected from those who eye-witnessed Thompson at work during those years. He remained likable - and readable - but he was not really taken seriously by the people he was covering. He was well on his way to being a "character...
...This seems to me a very sad story about an essentially minor figure. Thompson's was not a life to celebrate (and Gibney, to his credit, does not do so). But there is an implicit approval in this film that makes me uneasy. But then, irrationality always make me uneasy. All artists - and nominally, Thompson was an artist - need a touch of the lunatic about them. But only a touch. In the end they are obliged to produce. And they are obliged not to succumb to, or to excessively encourage, their own myths. Thanks in part to Thompson's example...
About his father, Frank Gibney My father was a journalist, but before he was a journalist, he was a Navy interrogator in World War II in the pacific theater. He interrogated Japanese prisoners on Okinawa, which was one of the bloodiest battles of the war. He was horrified at the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib, and even more so when he began to learn that this may have represented the kind of policy,that we were torturing people by choice, not by accident, and by direction, not by occasional rage. My father believed, in World...