Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Colleen Kenny's Thoughts:
Gonzo: The life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo from now on) was not the documentary I was the most anxious and eager to see but it turns out that it should have been. There has been a lot of hype this year about Man on Wire, which hopefully I will get to reviewing later, and in all likelihood it will win the Oscar for best documentary. If this happens it will be yet another time that the Oscars get it wrong.
I am not well versed in the discourse or language I should be using when discussing documentaries but I will do my best to try and explain why this documentary was, in my opinion, the best documentary of 2008.
The documentary is directed by Alex Gibney who won an oscar for the documentary Taxi to the Darkside last year. Gonzo is far superior to Taxi (which in my opinion did not deserve the Oscar).
Gonzo was an extremely well done documentary on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson the inventor of Gonzo Journalism and of Fear and Loathing fame. Thompson was truly a brilliant writer gifted with words. He framed and saw history in a unique but honest and captivating way. The documentary does an excellent job of showing the talent that Thompson had by reading from his texts and showing many clips of Thompson at political events and talking about his work. Thompson has come to be an iconic figure in American culture and it would have been easy for the documentary to slip into showing Thompson as a lovable goofy loon that the country has come to know and love. It however, does not do this. Instead, the documentary is an honest look at Thompson the man, a great writer, a lover of sports and politics, but also a gun and drug obsessed manic person. He would have significant bouts of rage and depression and was not, from what his son says, by any stretch a good father or husband.
The many clips of Thompson and the people he was close to are so captivating; he was a fascinating person and left an impression (good or bad) wherever he went. It is no surprise that his persona got the best of him for much of his later life and that this really affected Thompson who wanted to be seen as a serious writer.
The documentary is excellent; worth seeing for all Dolphins even if they aren't participating in a best documentary category.

Drew Dahle's Thoughts:
Thanks to Colleen's thorough going over, I can keep my thoughts short and simple. Alex Gibney's film is effortlessly captivating even for a 2 hour run time which is on the long side for documentaries. Obviously, picking Thompson as a topic, Gibney knew that footage of Thompson would fascinate and entertain the audience with ease. To his credit, Gibney doesn't create a tribute piece. Almost as a rebuke of everything that has portrayed Thompson only as the Gonzo persona, the documentary is very multifaceted in the way Thompson also was. It covers the excitement when the nation first became aware of Thompson's manically elegant writing to his coverage during the '72 presidential campaign when many American people looked to him as the only honest voice emanating from the campaign trail. The film covers Thompson's "fall" as well, when his celebrity and excessive lifestyle (which marked his entire life) took over, consequentially discouraging Thompson when he realized he was no longer the writer he wanted to be. This is a film everyone should watch because it's an engaging, relatively complex look at one of the most unique, talented and irreverent figures in American history and the best documentary I've seen so far this year.