Booze News: The 1st Official Trailer for THE RUM DIARY

Greetings, fellow inebriates,

October 28th can't come soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. That's when The Rum Diary, the long-delayed film version of Hunter S. Thompson's novel of the same name, finally hits a multiplex near you (and hopefully near me). The project has been in and out of development since 2000, and the flick itself has been sitting on a shelf since filming was completed in 2009.

I guess it is only fitting that the movie version experienced delays, being that it is based on a novel that Thompson wrote in 1961 but remained unpublished until 1998. We can only hope that the film proves to be as successful and as enduring as the novel turned out to be.

Johnny Depp once again stars as a fictionalized version of Thompson. In The Rum Diary, his character is Paul Kemp, a younger and less drug-addled version of the writer than Raoul Duke of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). While Kemp is more clean cut in appearance than Duke, the newly released trailer indicates that the characters share a love of the bottle and a similar vocal tone.

The film was written and directed by Bruce Robinson of Withnail and I fame. On October 28th, it will be interesting to see how the sensibilities of Robinson and Hunter blend (or collide). In the meantime, we will have to be content with the taste provided by the first official trailer:



I think I'll watch it again, after I get a refill.

Cheers,
garv