Touches You

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely the worst movie.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is probably one of the best documentaries I have seen. No one is pulling at your heartstrings; political agendas are absent; PC is non-existent - it is just a story about a very important and distressing period of history. I remember witnessing the drug culture during that time frame. I remember my moment of enlightenment was when some kid was popped in my high school for selling drugs his brother had brought back from Vietnam. It was amazing to watch this movie and marry the story to what I saw in my youth. I remember about when the drug of choice switched from a relatively harmless weed (debatable I agree) to such a destructive choice as cocaine, but I did not know the all the reasons. I know there were other drugs out there, but during this time-frame - these were the two recreational drugs. Anyways, after seeing this flick I was pretty much feeling speechless. To think that this kind of activity could have gone unchallenged, if so much violence was involved is a scary notion. Awesome depiction, I will watch it again...I am addicted.....ahhhhhh

I never could have guessed how intricate the cocaine industry was at this time. I was born post the cocaine era so I did not know how incredibly different the laws were during that time. This documentary gives so much insight into this high-speed world of drugs. I loved how the director allowed the members involved to tell their stories; however I wish that he had let them tell all of their stories & it was kind of jumpy when moving a narration when moving from one involved member to another would help the transition to be better understood. But now I'm hooked I wished that some of the involved members had not passed away because I have got to know more the system was so complex I want to know how it all works.

Life was good in Miami in the 70s. You could blow into town with $500 dollars in your pocket, and the next things you know, you are burying millions in your bag yard, driving the hottest cars, have two or three cigarette boats, a string of race horse, and land all the way up to horse country in Marion County. You didn't think twice about dropping $20,000 on food and drink because you had so much. The Miami skyline was booming with two dozen construction cranes operating, cars were selling like hotcakes, and there was no trace of the recession that was occurring elsewhere in the US.But, then came the 80s and there were 100,000 illegal Colombians in Miami and Castro had just flushed Cuba's toilet and dumped his criminals into the city in the Mariel boat lift. War began between the drug dealers on these two sides, and it came to the attention of Reagan and Bush that there was a problem in Miami that affected the whole country.Long before I got attracted to Carl Hiaasen's fiction, I was reading his columns from the Miami Herald. Forget Scarface, this was the real thing. Shootouts with shotguns and automatic weapons on the streets in broad daylight. Miami had become Dodge City and Chicago during Prohibition to the tenth power.This is the story of those two decades in Miami and the results today - a booming international city built on cocaine. The truth really is more exciting than what you see on Miami Vice.

I wanted to like Cocaine Cowboys a more intriguing documentary than I did. It lacks no influence in terms of its information in the world of big-stakes crime of a period that seems long ago within a thirty-year time frame. I liked hearing details in the stories, like the car towing company the dealers had as their back-up when driving around the cocaine shipments. And the scenes involving- and properly invoking- the years of Noriega and Panama, as well as the small Mafia statistics that carry a lot of weight (no pun intended on the actual boss, more powerful than Escobar) all out of Columbia. And some of the interviews and clips shown are absorbing in their 'been-there-done-that' quality. But there's an oppressive side to how Billy Corben shoots, edits and puts the music to the film. I don't mind in the theory of it how one goes into a cocaine documentary making it a fast-pace story. But it veers more into being in a TV scope- think E! True Hollywood story more than anything- than more traditional documentaries. This may be fine for some wanting a messy rush. However it's repetitive and lacking in any creative flow, not just in how it jumps and pivots through its images of people talking or in what's going on as if it were a theatrical trailer, but to hear the same Scarface-like music over and over behind people talking who shouldn't have music going on in some of their answers. And the one guy who's interviewed most (I forget his name, he's the ex-big time Miami coke dealer with the mustache) adds to the annoyance factor after a while; somehow one might find the guy more interesting in smaller doses, not as the one blabbering and bragging for 45 minutes of the film until it gets to the gun-blazing Columbians.It might be worth a little bit of time if on TV, where it has more of a tabloid edge on things (if whatever edge I can't say for certain). But I'd much rather take on a book two or re-watch Blow or good parts of Scarface or Miami Vice to get a better dramatized take on the facts than see it all the way through again.