Rum Diary Finally Surfaces; Smoothini is One of a Kind
T
he Ghost of Hunter Thompson, A Tame Rum Diary
By J. Hoberman
This review courtesy of the one and only Village Voice – find more at www.villagevoice.com
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, The Rum Diary is what the Brits might call a rum movie—an oddly inoffensive piece and a personal project for its disconcertingly unengaged star, Johnny Depp.
The Rum Diary
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson
Opens October 28
The movie adapts a novel Hunter S. Thompson began in the early ’60s and published, under Depp’s auspices, more than three decades later. A first-person account of the drinking life on a tropical isle in the late 1950s, its protagonists are mainly employees of an undercapitalized English-language daily in San Juan; their perpetually soused attitude is less Beat than Lost Generation, though written (or rewritten) with a heedless hedonism that anticipates the addled excesses of the high ’60s.
As the writer-director of the 1987 comedy Withnail and I (a fondly remembered cult film in which a drug-befuddled pair of upper-class degenerates stagger through Swinging London’s twilight debris), Robinson would seem uniquely suited to handle the triumphalist disorder of the Thompson worldview. Unfortunately, just as The Rum Diary was conceived too early in Thompson’s career for maximum oomph, Robinson’s long-germinating, and for several years shelved, adaptation arrives too late in the career of the filmmaker and his star—the bacchanal is weirdly elegiac, as though once meant to be a New Hollywood vehicle for the young Elliott Gould.
The party gets under way with Thompson’s alter ego Kemp (played by Thompson’s other alter ego Depp) coming to consciousness, having raped the minibar in a dark, trashed hotel room overlooking a glorious beach—his bleary disorientation accentuated by the small plane that flies by with the unfurled banner “Puerto Rico Welcomes Union Carbide.” Pave paradise—put up a parking lot! Ugly Americans infest the bowling alley; right-wing capitalists plan vulgar resorts on the unspoiled army testing range at Vieques. Newly arrived from New York, Kemp finds an ongoing, never-exactly-explained riot outside the offices of the San Juan Star and a lunatic editor within (Richard Jenkins). Soon his lowlife colleagues, the garrulous frustrated news photographer Sala (Michael Rispoli) and brain-damaged crime writer Moburg (Giovanni Ribisi), initiate him into a round of bar-hopping and cockfighting that results in an epic trip to the slammer. Still, The Rum Diary could use a shot of the mania that fueled Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As deadpan as he is, Depp could use a crazed Benicio Del Toro to complement his cool.
Although nearby Cuba, newly liberated from the imperialist yoke, is the movie’s great unmentioned, Robinson adds a dash of politics to the cocktail. Kemp is a would-be journalistic muckraker who sullenly contemplates Vice President Richard Nixon on TV. “How long can the blizzard of insult continue?!” he demands in gonzo wonderment. Turns out to be long enough for Kemp to be recruited to write a smarmy promotional brochure by smooth American ex-journalist Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), shacked up with the captivating Connecticut wild child Chenault (Amber Heard). “This place is a sea of money,” is Sanderson’s siren song, but Chenault, who charmingly goads Kemp into driving his shiny new Corvette off a dock, is the siren.
As in Thompson’s readable but hardly revelatory novel, the narrative reaches its climax at Carnival on St. Thomas with Kemp fallen off the wagon and Chenault casting her spell on a juke joint of drunken mob revelry. Unfortunately the movie soldiers on. Like an emissary from the future, Moburg shows up with an unnamed super-drug that, administered as eyedrops, gets Sala and Kemp stoned and wildly hallucinating. As though watching an outtake from Fear and Loathing, Kemp sees Sala flexing a fearsome facial appendage: “Your tongue is like an accusatory giblet!” Less convincing are Kemp’s resolution to become an honest reporter—never mind that the Star seems to be on the verge of folding—and the fake happy ending that provides a cheerful précis of Kemp and Chenault’s subsequent life back in the states.
The Rum Diary has plenty of insolent patter and pungent background clutter; Robinson is good on sweaty, sodden mise-en-scène and elaborately grubby tropical torpor, but he never quite gets the giddy velocity of a what-the-fuck bender. Truth to tell, The Rum Diary is actually more of a light morning-after hangover—it won’t leave you with a headache.
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Smoothini, the Ghetto Houdini, aims to amaze and amuse
The magician wants to make magic hip and edgy.
By Shermakaye Bass
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Note: Smoothini’s schedule may be somewhat erratic – be sure to check before you go
Tomas Bernardo De La Cruz Jr. calls himself Smoothini, the Ghetto Houdini. He offers a bawdy, edgy, funny Vegas magic show. (Smoothini, the Ghetto Houdini)
The text message was from Smoothini, the Ghetto Houdini.
“Abracadabra,” it said. Presumably, this was code for “I’m awake, and I’m ready for the interview.”
That was the case. But as Las Vegas illusionist-magician-trickster Tomas de la Cruz (a.k.a. “Smoothini”) said on the phone a few minutes later, “I have to use that word some time. I don’t use it on stage, so I find ways to make ‘abracadabra’ cool.”
He chuckles, but it’s clear he’s also serious about making abracadabra — or magic — cool. That’s a longstanding goal of Smoothini, a 30-year-old hipster bar magician and former Marine who performs at the Hard Rock Cafe, Pour 24 bar in New York New York and Zingers karaoke bar. He’s an underground sleight-of-hander, a sophisticated but bawdy conjuror whose one desire, he says, is to make people laugh and ooh and ah.
He is the antithesis of Vegas’ “big show.”
Working for tips in clubs on the Strip and performing fully staged magic shows in a private New York New York suite (20-person capacity; $69 for show and snacks), Smoothini communes with the dead, makes common items disappear and reappear, pulls sex toys out of women’s cleavage, does classic card tricks with new twists, indulges in mind reading and prediction, and occasionally digresses into the karaoke Kodak moment.
“He did kind of blow my mind,” said Michaeleanne McCarthy, who saw the magician at Zingers in late April while visiting from Austin, Texas. “I didn’t have any expectations; I had only heard about him through some friends. But I wanted to see him because I liked the sound of his name…. He is slick, not so much ghetto. He was doing this one trick for us at our table, and sometime during that trick, he mysteriously got this cuff bracelet off my arm and started pulling it out of my bra.”
McCarthy points out that when Smoothini approaches a table while doing bar magic, one of the first things he asks is if the observers mind him reaching into their cleavage during his act. McCarthy had granted permission. “Next thing I know, he’s pulling stuff out of my shirt left and right. He was great. I would definitely see him again, no doubt — but I might wear a turtleneck next time.”
Since he began practicing sleight-of-hand as a teenager in Brooklyn, the Dominican-born performer has tried to open up magic to younger, edgier audiences. And as evidenced by his regulars around Vegas, he’s developed that niche — a 20ish to 50ish crowd with a tawdry since of humor.
De La Cruz, who joined the Marine Corps right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and passed much of his spare time in Iraq performing magic for Iraqi children and his fellow troops (he finished his final tour in 2006 and headed to L.A. and Vegas to perform), notes that magicians are an odd lot.
“Magicians love to cater to as large a market as possible,” he said. “Comedians are specific to their own demographic, and every other level of performing arts is like that. But with magic it’s different. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, magicians still wore top hats and tuxes, going back as far as the 1880s. They didn’t progress with the times.
“But I don’t like to take it all that seriously. It’s better to laugh about things. That’s the point…. If you really believe someone can pull a rabbit out of a hat, then either your education system has failed you or somebody has failed you.
“I’m not Houdini. I’m Ghetto Houdini.”
Which is why it’s so funny that De La Cruz-cum-Smoothini sometimes texts or emails a simple “abracadabra.” He’s owning magic’s past while poking fun at its true believers.
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Planning your trip
Smoothini, the Ghetto Houdini, performs Wednesdays through Sundays. You can find him 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. at Zingers, 3743 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; before that, he can usually be seen at the Hard Rock Cafe second-floor bar from 8 to 10:30 p.m.; and after 2 a.m. at New York New York’s Pour 24. For more information, see his website, http://www.smoothini.com, or find him on Facebook.
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