**/****
directed by Wayne Ewing
by Walter Chaw Culled from what seems like B-roll of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in the months leading up to the filming and release of Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of the author’s seminal Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Breakfast with Hunter is interesting now and again for the extent to which Thompson is revered in certain circles, but feels curiously prosaic for the wicked incisiveness of its subject. The highlights of the film are Thompson’s interactions with Johnny Depp and Alex Cox, the former the actor tabbed to play him in Gilliam’s film and the latter the director Gilliam replaced on the project. A scene where Hunter serves Cox and Cox’s frequent collaborator Tod Davies fried sausage before screaming at them for minutes on end suggests with more profundity the reasons behind Cox’s eventual firing than that to which Cox’s own weblog cops. As he begins preparations for the role of Thompson, Depp, meanwhile, gets genuinely creepy. If the whole of Breakfast with Hunter is assuredly less than the sum of a few of its parts, there are enough moments of insight here to reward the curious–though it’s really just a love note for the devout.
