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OT: My weekend on Netflix: Narcos, Wild Bunch, Enemy at the Gates

simons96

Well-Known Member
Feb 3, 2013
10,120
6,859
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Plano, TX
geez Netflix really knows how to hog my time before AKA Jessica Jones airs in November!

The Wild Bunch - Peckinpah's masterpiece, the anti-Vietnam Western! Even with all the forced machismo of The Expendables franchise, nothing will ever top the manliness of this cast. Holden. Borgnine. Johnson. Oates. the death march to the final, bloody battle. no PEDs or HGH in this cast, just pure unadulterated man seed. and it is a damn good movie about loyalty, friendship, man's inhumanity towards man, the brutality of "civilization", and how men fight to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. and Holden's rally speech is one for the ages. No long winded exposition, no fancy Sorkin-esque platitudes. just a lot of old fashioned acting with his eyes, then: "Let's go"

Enemy at the Gates - somehow I missed this film when it came out. From the bloody and heartless siege of Stalingrad during WWII (the Russian commanders even shooting their own troops if they fled from the Germans), this is a fantastic battle of wits . . . not just between Russia and Germany, but between the Russian sniper played by Jude Law, and the seasoned German sniper played by Ed Harris. Their cat and mouse game across the battlefields was so engrossing, where war is reduced to 2 men not really opposed in ideology. It boils down to who is the better sniper, regardless of cause and country.

"Narcos" - WOW. this 10 episode mini series about the rise and fall (sort of) of Pablo Escobar was brilliantly written, with a cross between the horrors of the beginnings of the "War on Drugs" in Colombia, and some very dark humor (one early scene that stood out was how a DEA agent with a cat is stonewalled at customs while they search for the proper documents for the cat, while drug mules are passing through with ease). Written and directed (mostly) by Jose Padilha, who directed the remake of Robocop as well as the engrossing Elite Squad films. But this is a long, bloody look at the effect of American demand of cocaine in the 1970s and 1980s and how it allowed a crafty criminal like Escobar to become a billionaire and put a brutal chokehold on the country for over a decade. And great use of intercuts of actual TV footage of the real people/incidents dramatized in the show, to ground it in the reality of the times.

My only complaint:

SPOILERS!!!!!

I've read the Mark Bowden book "Killing Pablo", so I know the full story. I guess we're going to see a Season 2. But . . .

Season 1 begins with Pablo's rise to power and ends with Pablo's escape from La Catedral, which probably covers about 20 years. most of the story takes place over a 3 year time frame from when the DEA really started working on the Colombian government to extradite Pablo to the US a la Noriega. But Pablo was killed about 18 months after he left the prison, spending most of that time on the run from the JSOC and Los Pepes. I look forward to Season 2, but I hope they don't just drag out a lot of drama to fill in 10 episodes of a relatively short time frame.
 
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