Where the Buffalo Roam

Several stretches of the journalist Hunter S. Thompson's life in the seventies. With his lawyer and friend Carl Lazlo, a sequence of events running from a courtroom to the Super Bowl to a campaign bus. Thompson is sent to write and never writes. Art Linson directs. Bill Murray plays Thompson and Peter Boyle plays Lazlo. Lazlo is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, Thompson's actual lawyer and friend, a Chicano movement attorney who disappeared in Mexico in 1974. The source is not a single text; passages were assembled from Thompson's Rolling Stone pieces and books. That became the most criticised thing about it: the narrative is a series of disconnected scenes going nowhere. Bill Murray lived with Thompson for a long period to prepare and took his speech, his walk and the way he held a cigarette. By the accounts given he could not get out of the character for months after shooting, and it showed in his work on Saturday Night Live at the time. Neil Young wrote the music and adapted Home on the Range as its theme. Thompson himself disliked the film and wrote so repeatedly. Who it is for: anyone interested in Hunter S. Thompson and seventies America. Who it is not for: the film is scattered and the comedy does not land. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in 1998, builds the same world far better.