I made some interesting friends, had enough money to get around, and learned a lot about the world that I could never have learned in any other way.” It was a greedy life and I was good at it. I was a consultant for the cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt high-end restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a routine victim of police brutality. “In a sense I was one of them - more competent than some and more stable than others - and in the years that I carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed … I wrote ad copy for new casinos and bowling alleys. “Puerto Rico was a backwater and the Daily News was staffed mainly by ill-tempered wandering rabble,” Thompson writes in an essay accompanying the book. (MORE: See Withnail and I in the Top 10 Sloppiest Movie Drunks) The star saw an Alcoholics Enormous kinship in Robinson and Thompson, and produced The Rum Diary, with Robinson directing, in Puerto Rico in early 2009. Over the years Withnail has been deeply cherished-Depply cherished, too. The Englishman Bruce Robinson began as an actor (Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet, the dashing Lieutenant Isabelle Adjani is mad for in François Truffaut’s 1975 The Story of Adele H), then a decade later put part of his own life on film with Withnail & I, a memoir of himself and a sublimely inebriated flatmate played to haughty-pathetic perfection by Richard E. (Depp arranged the cannon that shot Thompson’s ashes into the Pacific.) The actor bought the rights and convinced a character nearly as eccentric as Thompson to adapt and direct it. He found his respite from Jack Sparrow in an early novel by his old pal Thompson, who died in 2005. Depp needed some offbeat project, if only so he could radiate something besides mad or weary brio in G or PG-rated pre-tween fare. But Brad Pitt, who like Depp lives with a famous actress and has some kids, took career risks with Babel, Burn After Reading, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Tree of Life. All right, Clooney is a serial bachelor, with no responsibility to amuse his spawn on screen as well as at home. Over this same span, George Clooney, another dreamboat star, fronted grownup movies, the kind he’d like to see. Nothing against some of these films, but they denied Depp his lingering musk of danger. Since then he’s made movies mostly for his kids: the four Pirates of the Caribbean megahits, Finding Neverland, Alice in Wonderland, Rango. All in all, an imposing résumé, boasting its fair share of daring.Īround this time Depp settled down in France with actress Vanessa Paradis and raised their two children. He capstoned his Weird Phase by playing Hunter Thompson’s alter ego (and libido) Raoul Duke in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In 1997 Depp directed himself and Marlon Brando in The Brave, a gorgeous, suicidally obscure modern-day Western sadly unavailable on Region 1 DVD. Count the ways: after a bit in Platoon, Depp starred as the greaser in John Waters’ Cry-Baby, the fish-tagger in Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s Arizona Dream, the Buster Keaton wannabe in Benny & Joon, Leonard DiCaprio’s protective brother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, the shear-fingered or blithely demented Eds of Tim Burton ( Scissorhands, Wood), the hapless bookkeeper in Jim Jarmusch’s black-and-white “acid Western” Dead Men, the gypsy horsemen in Sally Potter’s The Man Who Cried and cocaine king George Jung in Blow. Graduating early from entertainment’s mean Streets (TV’s 21 Jump, Wes Craven’s first Nightmare on Elm), he flew in early manhood toward the weird and the serious. The young Depp was as wayward as he was beautiful. The trajectory of Johnny Depp’s career could be both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for Hollywood rebels. The movie is, after all, called The Rum Diary. But the locals don’t figure nearly as importantly in Kemp’s adventures as booze does. San Juan in 1960, when Kemp arrives, is a territory pining for statehood (which Hawaii and Alaska had just achieved) and shivering at the recent Communist takeover of Cuba, 1,100 miles across the Caribbean. Calibrating his liquor consumption as “at the upper end of social,” Kemp hitches an occasional ride on the wagon, then gets off and brags, “I finally beat my will power.” When he goes on a toot at a bowling alley, the tenpins morph into rum bottles. Actually, he tends to avoid not drinking. Follow tend to avoid alcohol when I can,” says Kemp (Johnny Depp), a reporter who has just joined an English-language newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |