From what we hear, the movie adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary has been finished for more than a year, just sitting around waiting for a release. It’s finally set to open October 28th, and now it has a trailer. And not a moment too soon. Johnny Depp was dangerously close to becoming permanently known as “that guy from the Bruckheimer movies with all the accessories.” Anyway, it’s nice to see him back drifting towards anarchy, poverty, and craziness, trying to live a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat and all that.
Directed by Bruce Robinson, the cast is pretty insane, starring Depp as the newbie ex-pat Puerto Rican journalist Kemp, Richard Jenkins as Lotterman, Aaron Eckhardt as Sanderson, Amber Heard as Sanderson’s fianceé, and Giovanni Ribisi as Moberg (a character who gets blackout drunk and the next morning locates his car by smell — a man after my own heart), who I hear steals the show. So, from what we know, a real movie with a real cast and a real story. It’s nice to see that someone finally got around to actually releasing it between movies about explosions, aliens, and the military. The book it’s based on is quite popular, and I’m told there’s even a climactic rape scene that they reenact every year at the Puerto Rican Day Parade. What? I kid, I kid.
