New to DVD

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The Criterion Collection, $39.95 It was sometime around the third straight viewing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that the brilliance began to take hold. Strange memories of that desolate day: once through it cold, twice more with audio hallucinations -- Terry Gilliam on an ether binge, and Thompson himself, screeching like a stuck pig. Dr. Johnny S. Depp and the Raging Bull -- Benicio Del Toro -- accompanied by their 300-pound-balls producer Laila Nabulsi, remembering a third savage journey to the broken heart and twisted head of America 1971. Terrible visions of a Chicano activist/lawyer/ese, Oscar "Dr. Gonzo" Acosta, reading his own account of fear and loathing in Los Angeles, and that swine Thompson, torturing Ralph Steadman and the BBC for 60 minutes in 1978. Col. Depp reading on-camera his Kentucky correspondence with Woody Creek's Southern statesman in exile. Unseen (unscene) beginnings and endings, audio madness, storyboards, trailers, and a lucid journalist unrambled in the booklet. The second tab of DVD makes the first kick in, and consider the Wave. In 1998, Clinton and the rest of the country were getting blow jobs. "Now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Rolled back to reveal Nixon, McNamara, et al. napalming the Viet Cong back to Kingdom Come. Strange and terrible times when Dean and Brando, both with a head full of Gilliam, can take a Big Red Shark to Vegas, wallow in depravity and adrenochrome, and make sense of 2003. You can turn your back on a drug, but never turn your back on Criterion Collection DVD #175, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, an "eerie trumpet call over a lost battlefield."