Word: soderburgh
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With the appearance of "Traffic," the tangled drug-war mosaic from director Steven Soderburgh (late of "Out of Sight" and "Erin Brockovich"), America has a rare opportunity to observe the way that movie-making ought to be, stripped of the star wattage and special effects, the hackneyed scripts and Left Coast cant. "Traffic" is not the finest movie ever made, admittedly, nor even perhaps the best of the year. But it accomplishes something rare, something that Hollywood finds difficult to manage these days--it tells the truth about a pressing contemporary issue...
With the appearance of "Traffic," a movie about the drug trade (one of Hollywood's favorite trades--just ask Robert Downey Jr.), one might have expected that a similar hack job was in the offing. And it would have been easy for Soderburgh to pull one off. He could have given us an out-of-touch drug czar, a bunch of thuggish DEA types and a few innocent teens (preferably black teens) who get busted for doing a little weed and end up the victims of our brutal, racist criminal justice system. It would have been perfect--a movie whose...
...goes on, and the audience accepts that it goes on, because Soderburgh shows us the alternative--not a happy-go-lucky bunch of youngsters smoking up and getting the munchies, but the descent of the drug czar's teenage daughter into a cocaine/heroine hell. He shows us the people who profit from selling self-destruction to a bored, insensate American upper class, but he also shows us that those people are ruthless and evil, and that someone--even the woefully weak agents of our criminal justice system--needs to stand against them...
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