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DVD Talk:

A lurid true crime documentary that, occasionally, unfolds like a particularly gruesome episode of NBC’s long-running infotainment series “Dateline,” director Billy Corben’s follow-up to 2006’s salacious, totally compelling drug doc Cocaine Cowboys would seem wildly over the top and contrived were it not all so meticulously documented.

Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin’ With the Godmother, which essentially expands upon events mentioned only briefly in Corben’s first film, is even more insane — you’ll emphatically agree with the film’s protagonist, Charles Cosby, when he declares at the film’s conclusion, “I’m a lucky motherfucker”

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via Home Theater:

Billy Corben does a remarkable job of presenting this documentary. He holds the narrative together brilliantly with a flair that is not often seen in a work like this. This is a must have companion piece for his first film and if possible watch them together. He uses interviews with those that have survived this time period providing a historical vantage point that is mesmerizing to listen to. The DVD release is from Magnolia and once again they come across with an independent movie that most have most likely never heard about. This is one that will pull you in.

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via Variety:

The wild fusillade of colorful characters and incidents in “Cocaine Cowboys” gets toned down a touch in “Cocaine Cowboys II: Hustlin’ With the Godmother,” less a sequel than an extended chapter of the previous saga of how Colombian drug lords took over the U.S. cocaine trade in the early 1980s. Director Billy Corben veers from the first film’s panoramic view to a narrower focus on small-time gangbanger Charles Cosby, who has quite a story to tell — and does it extremely well. True-crime fans will make up the docu’s core aud during midsummer release through Magnolia’s new Magnet distrib arm. (more…)

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(link)

BILLY Corben talks about his new documentary Cocaine Cowboys and meeting the types of people who inspired films like Scarface and television shows like Miami Vice…

He also talks about the allure of Miami to filmmakers and games manufacturers and why it’s the new Chicago…

indieLondon’s review of Cocaine Cowboys

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leave it to The Times to reference Hogarth:

Cocaine Cowboys is a hair-raising documentary by Billy Corben about the tidal wave of cocaine that swamped Miami in the Seventies and Eighties. His access to crime lords, hit men and drug dealers is frightening. This is a who’s who of villains, a Hogarthian gallery of crooks from the MedellÍn cartel in Colombia to the pilot who flew the dope into Miami.

The haystacks of cash and coke are laughably insane – as is the head-count: thousands of people were gunned to death. This is the only state in the world where Scarface might raise a smile.

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Coming December 9th to DVD

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Inside The Sun And Gun Capital

In ‘Cocaine Cowboys,’ Miami as Drug Mart

By Stephen Hunter

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, November 10, 2006; Page C05

I won’t be the first or the last to point out that “Cocaine Cowboys” could have been called “Miami Vice: The Documentary.”

Directed and edited in blasting, coke-rush rhythms by Billy Corben, it’s the story of a few years in the life of Miami, where a perfect storm of converging elements created a hurricane of violence in the 1970s and ’80s. At half the length the film would have been twice as good; nevertheless, it stokes a nostalgia some may have for a magical period in Miami history when it was, ever so briefly, the American Casablanca.

As Corben points out, the arrival of thousands of illegal Colombian immigrants, the sudden popularity of cocaine as a middle-class drug of recreation — as well as issues of border manpower and technology that made smuggling easy — combined to turn the city on the bay into . . . well, you were expecting Dodge City, right? Actually, in comparison, as one witness testifies during the film, “Miami made Dodge City look like a Baptist Church convention.” In three years, the number of murders doubled from 300 to 600.

If you’re a fan of scene-of-crime photos, this one goes on your must-see list. It’s got about 200 images of men lying facedown in curious postures of collapse, their heads afloat in an ocean of red goo, their skulls seemingly deflated by 9mm puncture wounds. Corben uses the staccato of the execution-style murders as a kind of Greek chorus, cutting away to montages of images of the recently departed in a rhythm that seems to suggest cards shuffling, hands being dealt. And when I say “cutting away,” I do mean “cutting away.” This is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it go-fast boats, it spurts, it spray-paints.

Corben will do anything to advance the story and convince you that you’re not seeing just another talking- (or bleeding-) heads documentary. For example, he’ll cut away to a kind of stock figure of demonology, a Latino spraying MAC-10 lead all over the joint to stand for the violence of which no film exists; he loves to mix film stocks in intriguing ways, contrasting the kind of dreary overexposed tourist bureau footage with jangled newscasts reporting the night’s body count. He loves to freeze-frame on stylized portraits of various players in that long-ago, faraway world, and come back to them over and over. Or he’ll put his interviewees in “interesting” places to more or less disguise the fact that this is really just a talking-heads movie: Edna Buchanan, the great Miami Herald crime writer who rode Miami’s extravagances to a national reputation, is photographed perched under some bridge. Wow, you’re thinking, what a cool bridge.

But the movie is really about its voices. Primarily it follows three, all from, as Sonny Crockett used to say, the wrong side of the tracks. One is Jon Roberts, a sleek former New York nightclub owner who got to Miami with $650 in his pocket in the late ’70s, saw what was happening and got into cocaine distribution on the ground floor. Hmm, far from looking wasted from his life of crime and his years in prison, he looks today prosperous, amused, capable and witty. What was that about crime not paying? Then there’s Mickey Munday, who owned a small aviation service. Again, the physics of right place/right time put him in the big money, flying the hops from Medell?n to Miami’s many unpatrolled small airports. He was a fugitive or a prisoner for 12 years but looks none the worse for wear. Nice ponytail.

Finally, the big catch would be Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, a distinguished-looking fellow with a square, handsome tan face which nicely sets off his shock of gray hair, his white teeth and his khaki prison uniform. He is doing concurrent life sentences for murder; he was the center of the perfect storm, the professional killer.

It is through the abundantly charming Rivi that we get into “Cocaine Cowboys’ ” most interesting story, the one about “the Godmother” of the cocaine trade, Griselda Blanco, a portly but not unattractive mom of three who was pretty much the Attila the Hun of the cocaine wars. This Colombian woman ran a smuggling operation and just killed and killed and killed. The contrast between her plump, almost matronly visage and those poor punks slopping in their own blood in the crime scene photos couldn’t be more marked or more fascinating.

The movie would have been much more interesting if it focused more tightly on Blanco, her rise and semi-fall (she did time, but not much); as it is, it doesn’t get to her until the halfway point.

And “Cocaine Cowboys” fails to make enough of or report with enough rigor on the extraordinary blast of attention accorded the city in the popular culture — the countless magazine covers and feature stories, as well as “Scarface,” the big Al Pacino movie, and the TV phenom that was “Miami Vice.”

Cocaine Cowboys (119 minutes, at Landmark’s E Street) is rated R for pervasive drug content, gruesome, violent imagery and profanity.

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Dramatic documentary recalls South Florida’s bad old days

Rene Rodriguez

Miami Herald

Published: Friday, October 27, 2006

Cocaine Cowboys, the second feature-length documentary by Miami filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman (Raw Deal: A Question of Consent), is an exercise in blood-soaked nostalgia, a look back at an era (the late 1970s and early 1980s) when Miami was a bad and dangerous place to live. Although the movie doesn’t exactly romanticize the period, the film still generates a twinge of pride in viewers who lived in South Florida during that time — and lived to tell about it.

Corben, who directed Cocaine Cowboys, and Spellman, who produced it, have built the movie around the recollections of the drug traffickers, dealers, assassins, police officers and reporters who chased after each other during those madcap, coke-fueled days. Intercutting talking-head interviews with loads of archival footage, vintage TV news reports and crime-scene photographs, the movie attempts to deliver a panoramic history of the rise of the cocaine trade in South Florida as told by the people who lived it.

Some of this stuff is undeniably interesting, like the claims by former dealer Jon Roberts and smuggler Mickey Munday that in the 1970s, authorities were so preoccupied with busting marijuana dealers that they practically ignored cocaine traffickers, which allowed the drug to gain a foothold in the States.

But Cocaine Cowboys becomes genuinely engrossing — and horrifying — in its second half, once the drug cartels had entrenched themselves within South Florida and war broke out between rival factions. Using the infamous daylight shootout at Dadeland Mall in July 1979 as a prime example, Cocaine Cowboys illustrates the brazenness of drug dealers who struck at their enemies with utter disregard for the consequences their actions had on the people and city around them.

This kind of above-the-law sentiment is best embodied by Jorge ”Rivi” Ayala, a charming, intelligent and thoroughly unrepentant hit man, now serving consecutive life sentences. Interviewed in prison, Ayala’s tales of carrying out executions for his boss, the Colombian ”Godmother” Griselda Blanco, make even Tony Montana’s antics in Scarface seem like kiddie fodder.

Cocaine Cowboys would have benefited from a voiceover narrator to sharpen its ambitious scope and give the movie some narrative focus. Occasionally, Corben’s hyper-kinetic editing (which is often racing to keep the beat with the synth-pop score by Miami Vice’s Jan Hammer) gets in the way of the movie. But the film does provide some fascinating perspective on the beneficial effects of the cocaine boom on Miami’s economy, arguing that without the copious violence and bloodshed that went on in that era, the city wouldn’t be what it is today — just like the Wild West.

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