movie: The Rum Diary

This weekend we watched The Rum Diary, which is based on a Hunter Thompson novel.

Here’s a quickie description from IMDB: “American journalist Paul Kemp takes on a freelance job in Puerto Rico for a local newspaper during the 1950s and struggles to find a balance between island culture and the expatriates who live there.”

This movie is pretty crazy. Kemp loves the drink and other buzzes, and that love tends to get him in big trouble.

There’s so much about this movie I like that I’m just going to save some time and rattle it off on a list.

1.       Hard ass partying in Puerto Rico. It looks gritty and wild. The drunken antics, primarily of Kemp and his two friends are quite entertaining.

2.       There was glamour, too. Amber Heard’s character looks straight-up old Hollywood. Her boyfriend’s house is almost painfully “modern” 60s. The house is very cool and clean.

3.       Complex dialog. There were a few parts, especially at the beginning, that I was sitting here thinking that the dialog between some of the characters was too well written to seem real. However, that makes it no less awesome.

4.       Giovanni Ribisi. I really think he is undervalued as an actor. His character, Moberg, is just so far out there. Disheveled. Often drunk (or messed up in some other creative fashion), but quite ingenious.  

5.       Hunter Thompson brand weirdness.  

My only complaint was that the movie was slow in a few places, most notably at the beginning.

The Rum Diary gets a B+.