Riggs Anderson

American Lit.

Mrs. Hudak

1/13/15

Film Review

            Blow is a biographical story of George Jung’s life, a former drug smuggler who reportedly during the 1970s imported 85% of The United States cocaine and ultimately created the market for cocaine in the United States. It has made him one of the greatest success stories in the American drug market, working directly with Pablo Escobar for many years they created an industry for cocaine in America.

            The film starts out with young George growing up in Boston in a common blue collar community, his father a normal working man who owned his own pluming business but George’s father struggled with money and George learned from a young age that he never wanted to have the same problem as his father. By the age of 18 he had moved west with his best friend Tuna. California was a totally different word than what George was used to, everyone was smoking pot and hanging out on the beach. George meets a girl and life was pretty good for him except the fact that he doesn’t have a job until his friend Tuna says "You know how we were wondering how we were gonna get money being that we don't want to get jobs?" and that births the idea of selling pot. George and his new friends then start their new importing business and he was happy with his new fiancé, but George wasn’t making as much money as he wanted. George’s ambition for more money meant he had to import more dope, until he was caught with 660 lbs. of pot in Chicago and found out that his wife was dieing of cancer. After his wife’s death he served 2 years in prison, there he meets Diego his connection to cocaine in Columbia.   In Danbury Prison, “[he] went in with a bachelor's of marijuana and came out with a doctorate in cocaine.” and when George gets out he starts making some real money working directly with Pablo Escobar. George meets a new woman named Mirtha and falls in love with her, but George doesn’t fully see that she’s a real piece of work and at one point she gets him arrested. Although his relationship with Mirtha ended poorly, he got something good out of it and that was his daughter.

            Through-out Georges life his main focus is about being successful in his own image, but once his run is over he realizes what his father told him so long ago about the notion that ‘money wasn’t real’ happened to be very true.