Product: Blow [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 2.0
mildly entertaining, but then just plain irritating
I bought this the other day on a whim at a garage sale.First off, a technical matter: where the hell is the closed captioning on this DVD? I have a hard time understanding what's being said unless I can also read someone's lips. On a 14" TV, that's not always possible. Thus, I appreciate closed captioning. I am sure deaf people do too. This is the first DVD I've seen in a long time that does not include it in the standard features, or if it does, I sure as hell couldn't find it.Second, the movie itself: at a certain point I lost all sympathy for George Jung. You can root for a small-time pot dealer who is in cahoots with a stewardess to smuggle marijuana cross-country. Even as his greed gets the best of him, nobody's getting killed, nobody's dying of overdoses. But it's hard to have much sympathy for a character who works for a drug lord who shot a man in cold blood at the "job interview."Jung knew firsthand the damage cocaine was doing to his friends' and wife's health. He saw with his own eyes the damage it was doing to innocent people in Columbia. He wasn't just an addict without the willpower to stop himself from doing another line. He was running the largest drug-smuggling ring in the country.Boo hoo. He lost his daughter's trust when he didn't show up to take her to California. That trip wasn't meant to make Kristina Jung happy, it was to prove to himself that he was at heart a good dad.This is one of those movies that irritates me precisely because it could have been excellent. I don't mean that it should have become an anti-drug screed (few things are more tiresome than those), but it could have been vastly improved by the director and screenwriter having more emotional distance from Jung. The problem is not that Jung believes the things he tells himself about himself, it is that Ted Demme does too.Also, I have yet to see a movie with Penelope Cruz in it in which she does not completely annoy me.