Based on a Book

BLOW is the unlikely story of George Jung's roller coaster ride from middle class high school football hero to the heart of Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel--the largest importer of the United States cocaine supply in the 1980's. Jung's early business of f... Read More

BLOW is the unlikely story of George Jung's roller coaster ride from middle class high school football hero to the heart of Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel--the largest importer of the United States cocaine supply in the 1980's. Jung's early business of flying marijuana into the United States from the mountains of Mexico took a dramatic turn when he met Carlos Lehder, a young Columbian car thief with connections to the then newly born cocaine operation in his native land. Together they created a new model for selling cocaine, taking it from a drug used by the entertainment elite, to a massive and unimaginably lucrative enterprise-one whose earnings, if legal, would have ranked the cocaine business as the sixth largest private enterprise in the Fortune 500. The ride came to a screeching halt when DEA agents and Florida police busted Jung with 300 kilos of coke, effectively unraveling his fortune. But George wasn't going down alone. He planned to bring down with him one of the biggest cartel figures ever caught.... A riveting insider account of the lurid world of international drug smuggling and a supercharged drama of one man's meteoric rise and desperate fall, Bruce Porter chronicles Jung's life using unprecedented eyewitness sources in this critically acclaimed true crime classic.AUTHORBIO: Bruce Porter, a former newspaper reporter and editor of Newsweek, teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Connoisseur, among other publications.

A briskly paced hybrid of Boogie Nights and Goodfellas, Blow chronicles the three-decade rise and fall of George Jung (Johnny Depp), a normal American kid who makes a personal vow against poverty, builds a marijuana empire in the '60s, multiplies his fort... Read More

A briskly paced hybrid of Boogie Nights and Goodfellas, Blow chronicles the three-decade rise and fall of George Jung (Johnny Depp), a normal American kid who makes a personal vow against poverty, builds a marijuana empire in the '60s, multiplies his fortune with the Colombian Medellín cocaine cartel, and blows it all with a series of police busts culminating in one final, long-term jail sentence. "Your dad's a loser," says this absentee father to his estranged but beloved daughter, and he's right: Blow is the story of a nice guy who made wrong choices all his life, almost single-handedly created the American cocaine trade, and got exactly what he deserved. As directed by Ted Demme, the film is vibrantly entertaining, painstakingly authentic... and utterly aimless in terms of overall purpose.

We can't sympathize with Jung's meteoric rise to wealth and the wild life, and Demme isn't suggesting that we should idolize a drug dealer. So what, exactly, is the point of Blow? Simply, it seems, to present Jung's story as the epitome of the coke-driven glory days, and to suggest, ever so subtly, that Jung isn't such a bad guy, after all. Anyone curious about his lifestyle will find this film amazing, and there's plenty of humor mixed with the constant threat of violence and paranoid anxiety. Demme has also populated the film with a fantastic supporting cast (although Penélope Cruz grows tiresome as Jung's hedonistic wife), and this is certainly a compelling look at the other side of Traffic. Still, one wishes that Blow had a more viable reason for being; like a wild party, it leaves you with a hangover and a vague feeling of regret. --Jeff Shannon