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Three Gud-Uns: Miami Blues, Factotum, and Edge of Darkness

Message Gentry L Rowsey
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Miami Blues starring Alec Baldwin, backed by the indestructible Fred Ward and Jennifer Jason Leigh, came out in 1990, and it is by far the bloodiest, simplest, and most surprising of the three movies herein disinterred. The movie assaults the viewers' sensibilities from the moment Baldwin kills a Hari Krisha in the Miami Airport, about five minutes in, to Baldwin's appropriately bloody demise at the end. Along the way, there's enough Florida cornpone, deception, gore, and shamelessness to satisfy any discerning admirer of civilian violence in movies. In fact, Fred Ward and his false teeth were enough to turn my stomach.

 

 

Factotum starring Matt Dillon is almost non-violent, despite the lead character being Charles Bukowski, a minor San Francisco writer and alcoholic who was portrayed by Mickey Rourark in the movie Barfly (1987) as a drunk who loved nothing more than a good barfight. The movie Factotum is, simply, a writer's movie, and so much so that the viewer is likely not to realize it's any more than an account of the lost wanderings of a failed human being until the last scene when Dillon's Bukowski soliloquy about writing ends with "(devoting one's life to writing) is the only good fight there is." At this point, the entire movie falls into place.

 

 

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Finally, Edge of Darkness brings the Mel Gibson of Mad Max right up to the present. It's a cliff-hanger about a radical graduate of MIT who is a policeman's daughter and gets hired by a secret Boston Beltway corporation designing nuclear weapons constructed from foreign-only materials, so when they're used by the U.S., they'll appear to have been used by other countries. This movie explodes off the screen early and keeps it up relentlessly until the very end -- when Gibson and daughter depart humanity and the hospital he's dying in, strolling past the hospital staff in joyful invisibility.  

 

 

Get any of these masterpieces at Netflix. You can thank me afterwards.


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I have a law degree (Stanford, 66') but have never practiced. Instead, from 1967 through 1977, I tried to contribute to the revolution in America. As unsuccessful as everyone else over that decade, in 1978 I went to work for the U.S. Forest (more...)
 
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