Author: Dennis

Cocaine Cowboys [2006]

Director: Billy Corben
Score: Jan Hammer

This is a really great, very comprehensive documentary on the rise and fall of the cocaine-trade in south Florida. It’s very stylishly done, with interviews, footage and images, all set – probably not coincidentally – against soundtrack done by Jan Hammer. The primary people interviewed are two smugglers, who were there from start to finish, and the prime enforcer for Griselda Blanco, the Cocaine Queen of Miami. There were also interviews of prominent law-enforcers en reporters of the time. It gives you a complete view of the impact that the cocaine trade had on southern Florida, its economy, the mindset and behaviour of the people, as well as the development of organised crime in the United States and South America.

It’s long (close to two hours), but if you’re interested in stuff like this, it’s well worth it.

Overnight [2003]

Director: Tony Montana, Mark Brian Smith
Actor: Troy Duffy

This is kind of like an alternate version of “The Making of…” The making of The Boondock Saints. Well, it’s not, really. It’s more the rise and fall of its spiritual father; Troy Duffy. He was a poor guy from Boston who went out to L.A. to make it in the music business. He and his band The Brood, later renamed The Boondock Saints, were trying to break through and get a record deal when he was working at a bar. One night he sees a deceased drug addict being wheeled out of an apartment adjacent to his and he gets the idea for the film. He writes it, works on it, and shops it around, and one day, Harvey Weinstein, boss of Miramax who had at that year’s Oscars scooped up every possible category and he promises him that he will finance the movie, give him creative control and buy the bar Duffy works at, and let Duffy co-own it with him.

From that moment on he becomes an Overnight celebrity and he and his band rise to stardom even before he’s done anything. He’s the quintessential example of The American Dream.

…until Miramax pulls the deal and do a complete “turnaround.” Which mean, in movie-land, that they don’t want to have anything to do with the film. At that point Duffy’s ego has ballooned to a massive, uncontrollable size, and he obsessively tries to get the movie made, burning bridges and upsetting everyone, including his friends in the process. And this documentary deals with that. The train-wreck journey of The Boondock Saints and the career of Troy Duffy from start to finish.

Enjoyable watch.

The Boondock Saints [1999]

Director: Troy Duffy
Actor: Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, Willem Dafoe, David Della Rocco, Billy Connolly

This is a fantastic, but unpolished gem of a film about two Irish brothers, Murphy and Connor, living in Boston, attending church as much as they can, and working out of a meatpacking plant, drinking at the local pub, yet being fluently multi-lingual (English, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, German.) One particular St. Paddy’s day, they’re having a drink at their local pub, with all of their friends, when the local Vory thug decides to throw his weight around. What ensues is a bar-fight in which the twins and their friends kick the asses of the Vory and his men. The men find the boys in their condemned apartment building the following morning and decides to teach them a lesson. This sets off a long chain of events in which the two, together with their low-life mafia friend Rocco, decide to kill all the scum that’s running the streets in true vigilante style. Meanwhile, Smecker (Dafoe), an FBI agent who is in town to investigate the murders of all these mobsters, has a crisis of conscience about whether or not he should persecute these men, or join them.

The opening scenes are fantastic, especially the one during the sermon at church. Truly awesome. Yet, even with that scene, the directing and cinematography is a bit sloppy. And not in that Resevoir Dogs sort of way, where it just adds that much more to the depth of the film, no, it’s truly sloppy. The film remains fantastic, yet flawed, and perhaps it was always meant to be that way. Perhaps it could never be better than it is now.

Simple, straight-forward, with a few thin patches in the otherwise solid storyline. Very funny. Lots of gratuitous violence and sexy slow-motion shots, which eventually got the film from getting an actual cinematic release in the U.S. because at the time of its release, Columbine had just happened, and President Clinton was doing the Hollywood rounds trying to appeal to the good senses of filmmakers regarding violence in the media. It opened in five theatres for only one week, which is why this movie is probably the first example of large-scale viral communication by way of the Internet and Word of Mouth.