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Touches You

Simply A Masterpiece

Fantastic!

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The Miami that we know of today was built with drug money. Just reading that sentence can be downright depressing, but the story behind it is one that is oddly (maybe perversely) fascinating.Directed by Billy Corben, "Cocaine Cowboys" examines Miami's turbulent transition from a sleepy vacation town to a beachside Metropolis, financed by cocaine revenues and victims of a truly nasty drug war. At the forefront of the war was Griselda Blanco (whose death made recent headlines), crime family godmother who ordered the deaths of countless rivals. Using testimonials from several key figures in the importing of drugs, we get a detailed depiction of the violence that spilled onto Miami streets. What's staggering about the late 1970s (when the go-go party scene was in full swing in South Florida) is that while the rest of the United States was slogging through hard economic times, Miami was flourishing, due to the incredible infusion of cash into the city's economy. Key importers had so much money, they had no idea where to stash it, and actually buried it in piles in their backyards. Luxury cars were flying off the lots, and the scads of loose cash were eventually funneled into real estate, leading to the construction of Miami's brand-new glittering skyline. The insane materialistic excess of the time is part of what makes "Cocaine Cowboys" so seductive. But the party couldn't last forever, and the movie now moves into its downer of a second half. The nonstop nightlife gives way to violent shootouts, bloody mob hits, and a staggering pileup of bodies. Dade County had reportedly the highest murder rate in the United States. The situation would prove dire enough to demand presidential attention, and a new ramped-up brand of law enforcement was born, taking the fight back to Blanco and the Colombians."Cocaine Cowboys" is one big thrill, aided (in no small part) by flashy imagery and editing, and even a score by Jan Hammer that keeps us reminded of the coastal paradise patrolled by Crockett and Tubbs. To see the insane wealth of some of these guys is both intoxicating and worrisome, and Corben never lets that sinister sense of foreboding ebb, keeping just far enough away from glamorizing these lifestyles. A compulsively watchable documentary. 8/10

Prohibit a substance and its price will rise; with big profits available beyond the protection of the law, violence will follow. Concentrate the trade for an entire country through one city and an economic boom will combine with a murder epidemic. This was what happened to Miami with cocaine in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a story told exhilaratingly in Billy Corbern's fast-moving documentary 'Cocaine Cowboys'. It's a gripping tale, and the sheer quantity of money and death in it is truly horrifying. And yet, there's also a sense in which this film leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth, as essentially it's a platform for a pair of major smugglers and one psychopathic killer to wax lyrical about the good old days, relatively free of moral condemnation. Still, it's an amazing story, one that seems more fit to video games than to real life, and its epilogue was the construction of much of the modern city with the proceeds from the trade.

Cocaine Cowboys is narrowly focused on how Miami became the drug capital and the most dangerous city in the United States during the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The film is lasciviously fascinated with the lavish lifestyle and the grotesque violence generated by the drug trade. Many obviously find such material quite fascinating. There's no denying that several anecdotes shared by dealers, smugglers, cops and veteran reporter Edna Buchanan are very amusing. Fans of TV's Miami Vice and Brian de Palma's Scarface are advised to rush to a theatre playing this film. They'll find that the real-life models of the fictional villains are even more flamboyant and vicious (the life of Griselda "the godmother" Blanco could be turned into a nifty fiction film). CocaineCowboys combines talking-head interviews with old TV footage in rat-tat-tat editing style. Shots of piles of cash and large stashes of cocaine are used as would-be punctuation marks; and there are more snapshots of bloody, perforated bodies than you've ever seen in your life.Cocaine Cowboys is documentary film-making as tabloid journalism. Its cheap thrills provide a measure of entertainment but its reportage is devoid of context and thoughtful commentary. Director Billy Corben is a native, but as one born in 1979 his view of the material is decidedly second-hand. Towards the latter stages, Cocaine Cowboys strains to present Miami as "the city that cocaine built" by hyperbolically describing late-70s Miami as a "sleepy hamlet". There is some truth to the argument but it is a self-serving and simplistic one. Moreover, the content as presented here is likely to perpetuate certain ethnic stereotypes about the Colombian community and Cuban "marielitos" (Cubans who arrived when Castro allowed migration to the US through the port of Mariel in 1980).

Although I had the opportunity to see the unfinished version of what is sure to be an award-winning film, I was thoroughly impressed by Cocaine Cowboys. Without giving anything away, let me just say that this film refrains from the type of overly preachy or overly glorified view of the cocaine business in the late 1970's and 1980's. A nice balance of character analysis mixed with an abundance of archival data kept my interest throughout the experience...and I walked out of the theater feeling as though I really learned a great deal, not only about historical occurrences, and their impact on a few central characters or society as a whole; rather, I left the cinema with a grasp of the time period from many different perspectives: Columbian drug lords, Cocaine transporters and dealers, special task force members assigned to find the aforementioned groups, local media then and now, land developers, vacationers, car salesmen, and your average Miamian. Perspectives offered were not limited in scope. I highly recommend this film.