Product: Blow [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 5.0
Watch Georgie ride that white line right into a cell
"Blow" is the kind of movie about drugs I can respect in one sense: it neither glorifies it nor condemns it, does not for one second pull a DARE moment on us, and yet allows us to see the essentially destructive nature of the indisputable scumbag George Jung's lifestyle.Johnny Depp did a great job portraying Jung, and I'm sure if Jung had somehow slipped out of his cell and played himself the movie would have gone nowhere--keep in mind while watching Jung go from being a twenty year old with money on the brain to middle aged wreck, to the ultimate b**ch, that this is JOHNNY DEPP, not George Jung. I'm sure it was quite a bit less glamorous and charming in actuality.Jung was moving weight. Serious weight. Weight enough to get him screwed over by his equally strung out friends and land in jail till 2014. He had his good times, but they were all predicated on fear and paranoia: you can practically sense the impending doom from every wonderfully hedonistic moment in this film.Ray Liotta, as Jung's father is touching. His subtlety and seemingly endless empathy for Jung's skewed plight in life strikes a moving contrast to his mother, who after awhile simply wants nothing to do with Jung. He sticks (in a sense) with Depp's Jung right till the very end. The last few scenes are chilling and disturbing:Jung is betrayed by his friends in a cinematic moment few will forget.My only problem with this movie is that it generates actually sympathy for George Jung as a man (the last picture of him flashed as Depp is hallucinating that his daughter is speaking with him is grotesque and shows the very real nature of the toll the use and decades of hustling took on him) and one wonders if this is appropriate at all. I tend to doubt that Jung cared that much about his daughter. If he did, maybe he wouldn't have wasted the best years of his life slinging coke. Plus, no major drugdealer would ever behave like this. During the course of the movie he is screwed over a billion times by just about everyone and seems pretty friendly about it afterwards. If Jung in fact conducted his "business" this way,he was either really looped out on his own product or simply a stupid kid who was in the right time at the right place to sell tons of cocaine and had no basic idea of what he was doing.This movie is a work of art, though, for all the moral ambiguity involved. Penelope Cruz is a delight to watch as his really nutty temporary wife. However it may be judged ethically, this is better than "Traffic" or "Requiem For a Dream".