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Old 01.27.2014, 03:36 PM   #17724
demonrail666
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I've seen it and I love it but, as I said, I'm fascinated with everything related to that subject so I was always going to. And compared to the book, the doc is, if anything, really toned down. A lot of it's fabricated but enough isn't for it to be a total mindfuck.

The problem for the film is that because it could never really go into some of the violence it kind of had to focus more on exotic characters like Griselda and the glamourous lifestyles. It's all in the book too but more as a backdrop to the more brutal stuff. The problem with the gun porn argument is that that's how people like Roberts saw it and pretty much lived it. Same with the glamour. To underplay it would've been to pretend that they weren't leading playboy lifestyles, which they were. For a time anyway.

Same with the issue of the cartels. The film (and the book) isn't really about them. It's really about some young American upstarts who pioneered the drug trade in Miami prior to their arrival so it's not really fair to criticise it for not dealing with a topic it's only tangentially about. There was definitely violence before the cartels got involved but its a historical fact that once the likes of Carlos Lehder got involved it escalated out of all control, but that's really when the story of people like Jon Roberts and Mickey Munday sort of ends. There's plenty of books and docs about the cartels. This tells another story where they're really not at the centre. If you want to get more into that stuff, Simon Strong's book Whitewash is far better, and there's countless docs on people like Lehder and Escobar.

There's a sequel to Cocaine Cowboys that's pretty much all about Griselda. It's not as good as the first one but obviously goes into lots more details about her. But it seems much more tailored to a kind of gangsta-rap friendly audience than the original was.

Cocaine Cowboys II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx_M3_FBUTY

Hunting Escobar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwuud6vwkhw
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