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BLOW

Reviewed by: Christopher J. Jarmick
Genre: Drama
Video: Anamorphic 2.35:1 Widescreen
Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital 2.0
Language: English
Subtitle: English (Captions Only)
Length: 128 minutes
Rating: R
Release Date: 09/11/01
Studio: New Line Home Video
Commentary: Feature length commentaries by Director Ted Demme and George Jung.
Documentaries: The 25-minute documentary "Lost Paradise: Cocaine's Impact on Columbia is an unflinching and disturbing mostly Spanish language with English subtitles documentary.
Featurettes:

Addiction--Body and Soul is a short six-minute featurette, which covers the psychological and physical aspects of addiction.

The Production Diary chronicles the 63-day production shoot of the film in 12 segments and lasts 17 minutes. Director Ted Demme is our guide.

Filmography/Biography: Standard type of filmography for main cast and crew.
Interviews: Interviews with George Jung. About fifteen minutes' worth of interview segments with the real George Jung- who is an upstate New York prison is featured.
Trailers/TV Spots: The theatrical full length and teaser trailers for BLOW are presented in wide screen format.
Alternate/Deleted Scenes: Extensive collection of 10 deleted scenes that can be viewed with or without director commentary.
Music Video: The four-minute music video for Nikki Costa's Push and Pull song is in this section.
Other: The FACT TRACK feature can be switched on as you view the movie and subtitles will appear with interesting facts about history, the characters, the filmmaking etc. The DVD ROM features include the ability to switch back and forth to the screenplay of the film with direct scene access, you visit the original theatrical website of the film and you can also print out the screenplay of the film.
Cast and Crew: Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Franka Potente, Rachel Griffiths, Paul Reubens, Jordi Mollà, Cliff Curtis, Miguel Sandoval, Ethan Suplee, Ray Liotta Kevin Gage, Max Perlich, Bob Goldthwait, Michael Tucci
Screenplay by: Written by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes based on the book by Bruce Porter
Produced by: Michael De Luca, Ted Demme, Georgia Kacandes, Denis Leary, Joel Stillerman
Directed By: Ted Demme
Music: Graeme Revell original music
The Review: I actually enjoyed the DVD extras more than the actual film itself. This is another in the Infini-film line of special DVD's from New Line. Like 13 Days DVD, the features add great value to the disc and film. (I didn't think the film 15 minutes deserved the Infini-film treatment). * * * * It is understandable to me why someone would try to bring the true story of George Jung to the screen. Jung was one of the most influential drug dealers of all time. He was involved with the Columbian Cartel and in getting Cocaine into the Entertainment Industry throughout the 1970's. He was probably responsible directly and indirectly for the majority of all the cocaine smuggled into the U.S. during the 70's..* * * * * * George Jung however wasn't your typical drug smuggler, he started as a naïve pot-head in the late 60's with a burning desire to be rich (because he saw his father struggle to make ends meet as he was growing up). By the early 80's he was depositing 30 million dollars in a Panama bank account and spending tens of millions on fancy cars, real estate, jewelry and anything else his wife wanted him to spend it on. He really wasn't obsessed with things, he just wanted enough money to never worry about being poor. His rise and crash is the focus of BLOW. * * * * * * * A character's fast rise to riches and fame is a familiar story that's been featured in dozens of movies, hundreds of books and thousands of magazine articles. There might be an original and fresh approach to the material, but it isn't to be found in BLOW. * * * * The film is utterly focused on George Jung from start to finish. It covers Jung's entire life with special attention to Jung's most late 1960's through the 70's period. The film zips into gear by utilizing every cliché' you have ever seen in any film or TV show that's covered a character's rapid rise to power and fame. The flash and pizzazz the film uses has been ripped off from other film-makers' bag of tricks and the film screams out… I'm a well produced cable TV movie. We get lots of warmed over Goodfellas (and Ray Liotta's in both films too) and some (Goodfellas' influenced) Boogie Nights too. * * * * * * * * For all the flash we get no sense of who George Jung might be. According to the film he's a rather bland guy who was in the right place at the right time to become an incredibly successful drug dealer and then got real unlucky and got caught. We never know who this guy is. Oh we get an excellent imitation of Jung's mannerisms from Johnny Depp (and we can see he's really remarkable good at imitating Jung's mannerism because we see footage of the real Jung in the supplemental material). Through a lot of the film Depp looks and acts a lot like David Cassidy from the Partridge family. Yet still we never get under Jung's skin or very deep inside his head. So that makes the film not just familiar and a retread of films we've already seen but also utterly pointless. * * * * * * * * * * * We are left with the window dressing that makes the 60's look hip,cool, rather naïve, fancy-free and innocent until it changes into something more serious, more dangerous and then into a bad greedy 80's kind of scene. Sound like anything you've never seen before? * * * * * * * It was a bit surprising to see a late 60's version of Boston, Mass. Area's Logan Airport in the film. I suspect we will be seeing locations and hearing lines of dialogue in films for the rest of our lives that (unintentionally at this point on the filmmakers part) will remind us of the September 11th terrorist attacks. * * * * * * * Ted Demme's direction of a screenplay written by him and Nick Cassavetes creates what amounts to a frat boys notion of how to produce a slickly well made film about the life and times of a drug dealer who lived through some exciting interesting times. We barely get a sense of danger, violence, or sleaziness in any of this. Even in Columbia when he sees Escobar shoot an associate in the head, the nervousness is temporary and within a few minutes he and Escobar are business partners and smiling and laughing. At one point he's double crossed, gets angry and is severely beaten….but all of it happens in about 5 minutes and has very little impact. Jung perhaps did avoid most of the ugliness and brutality of the business or maybe the film-makers didn't want the movie to be too much a downer for the audience. * * * * * * The most stirring emotional parts of the film are when George Jung decides that the most important thing in his life is his young daughter Christina and his need to be a good father. We know he can't possibly succeed at this because the only way George has ever earned a living is by dealing drugs. So he has a plan to make one last big drug deal to make everything right somehow. Gee… guess what happens. The pathos is delivered in the most unabashedly obvious ways, or steals the viewers' sympathy by utilizing a cheap fantasy/reality trick that is hollow and cheesy. The attempts left me groaning. It's a filmmaker desperately trying to cover all the bases but not doing so with an ounce of originality or fresh imagination. * * * * * * The acting in the film is sometimes quite good. Most of the time we're looking at people who have been cast well to look the part in very thinly written roles. Some make impressive impressions in spite of not being given much to do and others make strong enough impressions they warrant a quick nod of appreciation. * * * * * * Depp is good as Jung. However, Depp is too likeable for the audience to focus on the reality of the actions Jung took and what resulted from them. We don't know who Jung is, even though he's the entire focus of the movie. Depp is in almost every scene of the film. Most scenes last 1 to 3 minutes with some of these scenes covering one to even five years of Jung's life. We don't get enough from the film to know who this guy is. You'll get a deeper look at Jung in the 15 minutes of interviews that are on the DVD than you do from the whole 2 hour movie. * * * * * Depp is in almost every scene in the film. Most scenes last between 1 to 3 minutes. Some of these short scenes cover a year or even five years of Jung's life. Depp does what he's asked to do very well. * * * * * I can not tell you I gained any insight, learned anything new or was inspired in any fashion by viewing this film. Maybe it won't be the total waste of time for you that it was for me, but I wouldn't count on it * * * * *. There are some decent performances in the film that are worth mentioning. * * * * * * Paul Reubens (formerly PeeWee) plays the colorful drug dealing, gay hairdresser that becomes Jung's almost life-long business partner. Potente (from Run Lola Run) remarkably makes a favorable impression by taking an almost nothing role of a girlfriend and turning it into something slightly interesting. The dramatic arc of her story is rushed through, robbing the audience of any potential emotional impact. * * * * * * * Ray Liotta manages to give an excellent performance as Jung's influential father. Rachel Griffiths as George Jung's mom is never allowed to get beyond what the script calls on her to do. And the way in which the script leap frogs from event to event really prevents a lot of the characters from appearing as anything but mere caricatures and archetypes anyway. The aging of the parents via make-up is pretty awful. There's an almost 20 year jump where the parents don't seem to age at all and then Liotta's character seems to age much more than Griffiths. Liotta's portrayal however almost convinces us despite the mediocre make-up that he has become a world-weary older man. Then his wife appears and we are reminded how poor the make-up is and the illusion is ruined. * * * * * * * * * The real life Carlos Ledher, becomes Diego Delgado in the movie and he is well played by Jordi Molla. Delgado like Ledher was in jail for car theft but was a Colombian involved with Pablo Escobar. He introduces Jung to the idea of dealing cocaine and becomes Jung's introduction to Pablo Escobar after Jung is released from prison. * * * * * Penelope Cruz plays the Colombian woman, Jung marries partly out of love/lust but also to become related to the cartel by blood. A notion that winds up meaning nothing to either Escobar or his associates in the long run. Cruz has to do quite a lot of emoting but none of it has any impact or represents a character with any depth or that we can connect to. The character goes from being sexy to being a selfish cokehead. How many times have we seen this before? There's absolutely nothing in the performance or what we see of the character that we haven't seen many times before. * * * * * * The two most memorable performances in this film are by Cliff Curtis and Franka Potente. * * * * * * Cliff Curtis plays Escobar in the film. Curtis does a wonderful job in his all too brief appearance as Escobar in the film. You get to see more of his performance in the deleted scenes. In his short scene however, Curtis nails a believable portrayal of Escobar finding the right balance of charisma, menace, power and likeability to be convincing. * * * * * Franka Potente (the Run Lola Run star making her American feature film debut here) plays George Jung's girl friend/ fiancée in the first part of the film. She connects to the audience as a real person because of how well she is able to project her charisma through the camera. The script doesn't give her any help, and she's only given a few seconds of quieter screen time to work her magic in a few scenes. But she does. She makes an impression with a role that would have allowed her to do very little and be a glorified extra. * * * * * * The screenplay by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes (son of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands) tries to cram a man's life adventures in a film lasting just slightly more than two hours. They don't manage to write a screenplay that has any depth , insight or finds any way to approach the overly familiar material in any interesting way whatsoever. * * * * * If the script did have any scenes of particular value within it, Director Ted Demme (nephew of director Jonathan Demme - Something Wild, Stop Making Sense, Silence of the Lambs), didn't let any of those scenes survive. He seems intent on making an extremely slick film that hits every button it needs to hit as quickly and as hard as possible. There's no time for the film to slow down and offer any genuine emotions. The film is cast well, it's got a fast pace, but there's no one in the film we get to know or care about or even genuinely understand. If you think you do it's only because the film is so familiar you're relating to how similar characters in other films were portrayed.* * * * * * * Demme's worked a lot in his career with comedian Denis Leary (and he one of the producers of Blow by the way), directing Leary's concert movies and theatrical features such as The Ref, and Monument Avenue. Demme also directed the Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence prison comedy film: Life. Blow proves without a doubt that Ted Demme obviously can make a very slick professional film. Now he needs to work on making a good and original one. * * * * * If you want to see a watered down, overly slick, overly familiar based on a true story film about the rise and fall of a famous drug dealer, BLOW is going to be your kind of movie. If you're curious about the subject matter, have read the source book, are big fans of the stars, you'll find the movie is exactly what your impression of the film probably were from the theatrical trailer. It's a film that truly did not have to be made because similar and better movies have already been made. However, there are some very impressive extras on the DVD that are worth taking a look at.
Image and Sound The film is presented in anamorphic widescreen in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1. (If you have a regularly shaped television set, you will not benefit from watching the film in all it's anamorphic glory and can watch it as a widescreen film). The film's colors are bright and contrast levels are handled well. Black levels and color saturation levels seem to be at their most optimum level. Unintentional film grain is held to a bare minimum throughout the film (in several scenes intentionally grain is present as a stylistic flourish). There are some compression-related artifacts that might be the result of trying to cram so much onto one DVD. Only very trained eyes will notice the artifacts and it is not serious enough to be considered distracting. * * * * * * * The films audio is also very strong in both the 2.0 Surround and 5.1 mixes. Perhaps the addition of foreign language soundtracks or something like DTS would have used too much space on the disc when combined with all the extras. At any rate, the full width and breath of dynamic range and speaker channels are utilized pretty effectively. Some punched up sound effects are fun, the music blares as it needs to in appropriate fashion and the dialogue is always easy to hear and usually even with heavy accents in some cases, easy to understand.
The Extras This film has more extra features than most two-disc sets that are released. I enjoyed the extras on the disc much more than the actual film itself. * * * * * The film is presented as a special Infini-film DVD presentation from New Line. This is a brand new feature that allows the viewer to instantly access snippets of extra material, which will provide some additional background on the historical context of the film or unique insight to how the film was made. * * * * * * You can also access all of the extra features without having the extras integrated in the film. By integrated into the film I mean that while you are watching the film, if you selected the INFINI-FILM option from the menu you will see prompts during the film that allowing you to click on your remote control to pause the film and play an extra feature (a piece of a documentary, interview, or fact), usually under 3 minutes in length, and then return you to the exact spot of the film you were watching before the extra played. * * * * * * You do not have to access the extras while you are watching the film however. You can access all of the extra material via the menus as separate features. The extras however are broken up into several segments because of how they are used by the Infini-film program. However with each extra you can PLAY all, so you don't have to continually be sent back to the menu, click a new selection and move down the list.* * * * * There are also question marks on the various DVD menus that you can click on to bring up definitions for several terms (such as anamorphic). * * * * * The features are divided into two sections on one special features screen Beyond the Movie and All Access Pass. * * * * * Under the BEYOND THE MOVIE section you will find the following: * * * * Interviews with George Jung. Ted Demme conducts a fifteen-minute interview with George Jung who is in jail in upstate New York until 2015. The interview is shot in an odd fashion with a fish eye type camera lens that makes it look like we are watching the interview through a door peephole. The interview is split up into eight short segments but all eight can be played one right after the other. The last and longest segment is with the director talking on camera with George about the film and about what George Jung's experiences mean to him. Jung is clearly embarrassed by some of what Demme says. * * * * * The short 25 minute documentary "Lost Paradise -- Cocaine's Impact on Columbia." Is a Spanish language (produced by American Susan Ricketts) documentary about Columbia. A brief history of the region that concentrates on the devastating impact drugs have had on the culture. There are numerous interviews with politicians and journalists and lots of disturbing news reel footage showing people who have been massacred, footage of political assassinations and more. It's at times a very graphic and disturbing short film. Nothing in the film BLOW touches upon any of what this documentary covers. * * * * * Addiction--Body and Soul is a short six minute featurette which asks doctors and psychologists, recovering addicts and rehab counselors to talk about the physical and psychological addiction of drugs and mainly cocaine. Its low-key informative approach is particularly interesting when coupled with film. The film does not take the time to concentrate on the problems or even the effects of cocaine addiction. An early nosebleed by one of the characters in the film, which we originally think is because of drug abuse, turns out to be something completely different. * * * * * The FACT TRACK feature is a great feature that you turn on before viewing the film. During the film subtitles appear below the picture itself which have interesting facts, and snippets about the film's production as you watch. It works like the annotated version of a classic novel. I enjoy this particular feature very much. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The ALL ACCESS PASS section contains several features related directly to the film itself. * * * * This is where you will find the commentary track with director Ted Demme and George Jung. (See below for details) * * * * The Production Diary is a video shot by Demme or one of his assistants that gives us glimpses behind the scenes of the 63 day shoot. The feature totals 17 minutes and is divided into 12 snippets which can viewed one right after the other. They are interesting but do not provide much insight or information into the making of the film. They function as a sort of Journal of record of the making of the film putting a face to several people who worked on the production (we briefly meet the production supervisor, make-up person, assistant director, etc.). * * * * * There are TEN deleted scenes that can be viewed with or without director's commentary. The most interesting of which is the alternate beginning scene. There is also a long version of the initial encounter and a cut scene between Pablo Escobar and George Jung which while not utterly necessary for the film does give us much time with The wonderful performance of as Escobar. * * * * * Character Outtakes is an odd feature in which 6 of the actors in character talk about how much they trust and like George Jung. It's different. * * * * * The four-minute music video for Nikki Costa's Push and Pull song is in this section. * * * * * There is also the Theatrical and Teaser Trailers for Blow. * * * * There is also the Cast and Crew Filmographies for the main talent involved with the film. * * * * The DVD ROM features include the ability to switch back and forth to the screenplay of the film with direct scene access, you visit the original theatrical website of the film and you can also print out the screenplay of the film. * * * * * * All of this I might remind you are on ONE disc. A pretty amazing accomplishment when you consider there are two disc sets out there that contain less than this.
Commentary Ted Demme and the real life George Jung provide a fairly worthwhile feature length commentary that runs the length of the film. Director Demme loves himself a great deal and loves being able to make film. He covers all aspects of the film's production pretty thoroughly. * * * * * * Interspersed are separately recorded and fairly compelling comments from George Jung who is watching his life told pretty chronologically flash across the screen. We know he was happy with Johnny Depp's portrayal of him and at times he's having a difficult time keeping his emotions in check. He doesn't provide remarkable insights but it is interesting to hear his comments about the film.
Final Words:

Based on the book: Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made 100 million with the Medllin Cocaine Cartel and Lost is All' by Bruce Porter, Blow is an overly familiar, overly slick, docu-drama of real life legendary drug dealer George Jung's life. It's a second rate cable movie with Johnny Depp added to upgrade the package. The few opportunities the film sets up are squandered beneath the stylistic re-treads and multiple montages that we've seen used much more effective in films like: Scorcese's Good Fellas and Casino; in De Palma's Scarface and in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights. * * * * * If the subject matter , the rise and fall of drug dealer holds any interest, the extras on the disc are definitely worth seeing. In fact the extras are far more interesting and compelling than the film is itself. You can watch the extras integrated into the film via the Infini-film gimmick (previously used in the 13 Weeks, and 15 minutes DVD's) or Separately accessible via the menu options. HINT: Make the film more interesting by making sure you turn on the Fact File feature which will give you subtitles full of interesting stuff throughout the film. * * * * * *

* * * * * Christopher Jarmick,is the author of The Glass Cocoon with Serena F. Holder a critically acclaimed, steamy suspense thriller. For information on Author readings/signings or availability of special autographed editions of the novel email: glasscocoon@hotmail for details. * * * * * * Original portions of this review Copyright© Christopher J. Jarmick 2001. The above work is protected by international copyright law.


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 September 28, 2001