Word: depp
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...embroidered black Guyabara and jeans and has a freakishly creaseless complexion. And he has proved his ability to pull off non-Pee-wee characters over the past few years, culminating in a convincing gay '70s Los Angeles hair stylist cum drug dealer in Blow, the cocaine movie starring Johnny Depp that opens this week. "I have a four-year-old daughter, and I was introducing her to Pee-wee's Playhouse, and halfway through I was like, 'I wonder what that guy is doing?' " says director Ted Demme. "I called him, and I said, 'Man, if you could create...
Demme, who has seen GoodFellas a few times, pours pizazz all over the project to keep the 30-year saga moving. In Johnny Depp he has a star who can commandeer the camera, however flimsy George's motives are. Depp gets some smart support from Paul Reubens as the world's friendliest, queeniest middleman, and Bobcat Goldthwaite as a chemist floored by the quality of the product ("I can't feel my face!"). But painting the bigger picture is tough work. Blow works for a scene or two, then stalls. That's the nature of a story that is episodic...
...cocaine. Instead, the film is a biography of an extraordinary life, that of George Jung, the baby-faced Massachusetts native who went on to become the American connection for the infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and the movie’s chief merit is the casting of Johnny Depp as Jung. If you did blow in the late 1970s or early 1980s, there is an 85 percent chance your coke spoon held the products of Jungian pharmacology. While Depp spends altogether too much of the film hiding his expressive eyes behind sunglasses, his Jung, simultaneously ambitious and laidback, bursts...
...Director Ted Demme (Life, Beautiful Girls) answer is to use editing and camera effects to create a kind of hyperreality. As in Traffic, filtered lenses indicate time and mood, so scenes on Manhattan Beach in California appear sun-bleached, almost sepia-toned, while the sex scenes between Depp and Penelope Cruz (All About My Mother) are red-hued. (Steven Soderbergh may have started a trend in the drug-movie genre. Cheech and Chong might want take note.) Freeze frames indicate the passage of time...
...fascinating stuff from a fascinating life, and Demme coaxes strong performances out of a stellar ensemble cast. (He’s done this before: I’d be the first to admit that I find Beautiful Girls very moving.) Memories of The Ninth Gate notwithstanding, Depp is very good as always, while Cruz does her best with the flat character that is high-living Mirtha. Potente is sunshine and charm, even if her German accent does creep into one scene. Ray Liotta gives a performance of grace as Fred Jung, George’s father, a man who doesn?...