Word: jung
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...assumes its viewers already know the history of coke and how the drug took Studio 54 and Wall Street by storm, and thus steers away from dealing with the well-documented social effects of 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...
...Jung was, as they say, a character. So how do you film the life of a man larger than life and make some sense of it all? 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...
...Mass. in the 50s all the way to his present incarceration in a federal prison in Otisville, NY. (Aside: why is a 33-year-old woman, even one as talented as Rachel Griffiths, playing mother to a man five years older than her?) Everything seems to be right for Jung just after he leaves Massachusetts for California: He meets flight attendant Barbara (Franka Potente, of Run Lola Run fame) and gay hairdresser Derek Foreal (Paul Reubens, once known as Pee-Wee Herman, in full-on camp mode). Through Derek, Jung becomes a small-time pot dealer on Manhattan Beach...
...arrest of Jung in Chicago is the movie’s point of innocence lost. After his hearing, Jung learns that Barbara has cancer and skips bail to be with her, the first sign of a devotion to people that will be a constant theme in the movie. Jung is arrested after Barbara’s death and thrown into jail, where he shares a cell with a Colombian, Diego Delgado (Spanish actor Jordi Molla, making his American feature film debut). Upon Jung’s release, Diego introduces him to Pablo Escobar (Cliff Curtis). It?...
...though paralleling the shift in drug trends from mellow pot to frenetic coke, the movie pulls into high gear once Jung and Diego go into the cocaine-import business. (A second aside: Does the schizophrenic nature of the movie mean to imply “pot good, cocaine bad”?) Jung meets Mirtha, played by Cruz in thoroughly unsympathetic fashion, and the two begin a torrid relationship, all wild sex and drug binges. The money that accompanies the cocaine business causes a string of problems: betrayals occur left and right, friendships are broken and the now-married Jung...