The Rum Diary

Year 13, Day 148 - 5/28/21 - Movie #3,853

BEFORE: Yep, it's Depp, one last time before I hit Memorial Day and a couple war-based movies. I'd been lagging behind since Monday, and by behind I just mean on time, unable to start my movies the night before because I had to catch that early train back to New York.  But I watched "Mortdecai" in the early afternoon Thursday and then started this one just before midnight.  Almost broke the chain, though, because when I set the schedule for May, "The Rum Diary" was definitely available on Netflix, but it is no longer.  My choices were to watch it on iTunes and pay $2.99 to keep the chain going, or watch it free on Pluto TV - whatever that is, right?  It's a new Tubi-like streaming service that shows films with commercials, ones that you can't skip over, so that increases the running time of today's film from 2 hours to 2 1/2 hours.  I'll do it, but I won't like it....

Johnny Depp carries over again from "Mortdecai". 

THE PLOT: Journalist Paul Kemp takes on a freelance newspaper job in Puerto Rico during the 1960's and struggles to find a balance between island culture and the expatriates who live there.

AFTER: I'm going to try very hard to just judge the movie here, and not the fact that I had to watch this with ADS that couldn't be skipped over, and that added a full half-hour to the running time.  Jesus, if you're loading THAT many commercials into a film on your streaming service, Pluto TV, then you just really don't care that much about the viewer.  Do me a favor, and don't pick up any other films that l want to watch after they leave Netflix, OK?  

This is another film based on a Hunter S. Thompson story, so naturally a lot of similarities to "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" are to be expected.  By that I mean there's going to be a lot of drinking and drugs and actors slurring their lines incoherently.  But this film is a lot less confusing than that Terry Gilliam film, and I suppose a lot of that can be blamed on Gilliam himself.  Still, I tried to pay attention, I really did, but at the end of things I still wasn't really sure what exactly was going on in Puerto Rico, something about building a casino and a bunch of condos on an island that was being used as a bombing target.  And how there was U.S. money coming in to that territory in the early 1960's, while the local residents were living in poverty and also being affected by the pollution from the developers.  Umm, I think.

Depp plays Paul Kemp, a novelist who can't seem to sell any books, so he takes a newspaper job in P.R., only they give him the terrible jobs like writing the horoscopes, and the editor ignores any in-depth journalism he tries to do about the plight of the natives, because that would be bad press for the island as a vacation spot for Americans, who just go there to bowl and gamble.  While avoiding everyone at a party, he takes a small paddle-boat out into the ocean and encounters a beautiful girl swimming, only to later find out that she's the girlfriend of Sanderson, a man he met at the newspaper, one who's also tied up in the criminal land development scam.

Kemp's other co-workers at the paper are Sala, who trains birds for cock-fighting, and Moberg, who dresses like a homeless man and looks like he smells bad, and he also steals used filters from the Bacardi rum factory that allow him to create a very high-proof alcohol.  So naturally Kemp feels a kinship with these men, and he moves in with them after drinking all the tiny bottles of alcohol in his hotel mini-bar.  Apparently he thought they were complimentary, and they weren't. 

Kemp hangs around in Sanderson's orbit, on the off-chance that this will bring him closer to Chenault, the skinny-dipping girl he met while avoiding that party.  Sure enough, eventually they all go to a club and she dances seductively with a bunch of locals - this causes a break-up, and when Chenault turns up days later (umm, where has she been?) Kemp's there to console her and also make his move. 

Meanwhile, the newspaper that's always on the verge of going out of business finally goes out of business, but after taking some LSD provided by Moberg, Kemp has the inspiration to take over the newspaper, hire the scabs picketing outside the offices and print one last edition to expose the shady real-estate scam for the shady scam that it is.  He needs the money to hire the printers for this, so naturally he needs Sala to win the big cock-fighting tournament to get the cash, and this also means they need a voodoo priestess to bless their rooster so he'll beat all his opponents.  Man, that's a long way to go just to print a damn newspaper. 

The trivia section tells me that Johnny Depp waived his sobriety rules in order to make this film, to properly understand the constant intoxication his character displayed.  Yeah, that's not a good plan.  Another trivia point is that the screenwriter did the same process, drinking a bottle of wine a day while working on the script and then resuming sobriety after he was done.  That's not a good sign, either - was everyone working on this film drunk the entire time?  It's possible.  

This film also provided the setting for Johnny Depp to meet his wife, Amber Heard, in 2011.  They became a couple in 2012 after Depp separated from Vanessa Paradis. Depp and Heard were married in 2015, separated in 2016 and got divorced in 2017.  There were lawsuits and allegations of abuse and then libel suits against the newspapers who reported on those allegations, but Depp LOST his libel suits, because the courts claimed that the reports of wife-beating were most likely correct, therefore THIS film, in a very roundabout way, led to Johnny Depp becoming a confirmed wife-beater.  The couple's lawsuits started up another round in 2019, and they're still active to this day, I believe. 

(Also, in 2015 Depp and Heard violated Australia's bio-security laws by sneaking their dogs into that country without properly quarantining them first, while Depp was filming something there, and this was back before breaking quarantine was even trendy.  Amber Heard was fined $1,000 for falsifying a customs quarantine document, and the couple was forced to record a public-service video about the importance of following international quarantine laws - to date this video may contain the best acting work either one has done in their careers.)

The best thing I can say about this film is that we all find out just how fast a Corvette could go in 1960, and how long it took to brake.  Also that the first rule of Cock-Fight club is NOT to not talk about Cock-Fight Club, it's to make sure your cock has voodoo on his side.  And that true wisdom about life comes from gazing at lobsters in a tank while coming down from an acid trip. OK, so to say this movie is very disjointed and all-over-the-place is a bit of an understatement.  It's a bit easier to understand than "Fear and Loathing..." but not by much.   I suppose since Hunter S. Thompson was really all of his characters, Paul Kemp and Raoul Duke among them, you could consider this a prequel to that other film, as long as you accept that Kemp changed his name, lost his hair and became that other guy in Vegas somehow.  Hey, both seem to have an affinity for destroying hotel rooms...

Also starring Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "Love Happens"), Michael Rispoli (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Amber Heard (last seen in "Aquaman"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "A Million Little Pieces"), Amaury Nolasco (last seen in "Criminal"), Marshall Bell (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Julian Holloway, Bruno Irizarry, Enzo Cilenti (last seen in "Greed"), Aaron Lustig (last seen in "War Dogs"), Tisuby Gonzalez, Karen Austin, Karimah Westbrook (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Javier Grajeda (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), with archive footage of John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth") and the voice of Adolf Hitler (ditto)

RATING: 4 out of 10 Nazi propaganda record albums