BEFORE: I'm getting super close to Big Movie #5,000 and I suppose it was inevitable in a way, I mean if you do anything long enough or often enough you may do that thing 5,000 times, whatever it is, but you just may not be aware of it when you reach that number. I've been numbering from the start of this project in 2009, so I'm super aware it's coming up this Friday.
But it's funny because I'm finally seeing some kind of shift now that I have SO many movies watched, like I went through the lists IMDB posts every month about which movies are new to each streaming platform, and for April I have to say that there were VERY few adds, mostly the bigger ones like AmazonPrime and Netflix are now mostly adding movies that I've already seen, which suggests to me that it's either a slow time of year for them, or they're circling back to movies that were available on other platforms already, or just maybe, I've already seen the majority of everything that's out there. I mean, I still have 600 movies on deck, at all times, but it's weird that now that I've already seen the majority of what each platform is promoting each month as "new".
I was doing a word search puzzle in a magazine, and the hidden words were all 1-word movie titles that began with the letter "B". B-Movies, get it? But after I'd found all the words in the grid, I counted up how many of them I'd seen, and it was 44 out of 51, or 86% - it was a random sampling of movies, of course, but could it possibly be that I've seen over 80% of all movies everywhere? That probably can't be right.
Roger Guenveur Smith carries over from "Till". And I think these will be the links for the rest of April: Carol Sutton, Jason Davis, Tiffany Haddish, Jo Koy, Dee Bradley Baker, John Lithgow, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, James Franco, Giancarlo Esposito and Winona Ryder. This is probably going to be a VERY weird second half of April...
THE PLOT: A uniformed police officer is recruited by the DEA to infiltrate a drug smuggling ring looking to expand its operation.
AFTER: We're going all the way to 1992 for tonight's film, it wasn't really a top priority for me, but rather it's the middle of three films with Roger Guenveur Smith, kind of just filler to place the Easter movie on the right date. Sorry, but as I always say, some films are bricks and other films are mortar. Something similar happened today when I was looking for a path to Mother's Day last night, I had marked a number of films centered around motherhood ("All About My Mother", "Mixtape", "When You Finish Saving the World") and the goal was to get from my Easter film to something mother-based in 20 or 21 steps, because this year there will be 21 days between those two holidays. I linked a bunch of films together, but I kept getting there too early, like in 11 steps or 14 steps. Sure, I could take a bunch of free days, but that's not as much fun - although that would allow me to watch more films in December.
What I ended up doing today was just looking for films NOT already on my list that featured actors from my Easter film, just to see if anything else out there looked good - and I found two animated films on IMDB that I'd never heard of before, and I struck out from there. Sometimes I have to link in a completely random new direction to get where I want to go - and then in a few steps I got to "Conclave", and in a few more steps I got to a film that linked back to the chain I made last night, and now I'm good to go, the chain's good until Mother's Day, with at least three maternal-based movies in it leading up to the holiday. I've been trying to watch "Norma Rae" for years, and I think saving it for Labor Day just isn't working out, but since it is a film about a single mother, I'm going to try and reclassify it.
My top priority should really be figuring out which films have been on my list the longest, and trying to get to those. If I re-order my watchlist by "Date Added", I can see that the films that have been on it the longest are "The Grand Illusion", "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from 1941, "No Time for Sergeants", and "The Prisoner of Zenda". Man, it's going to be hard to link back to films from the 1930's to 1950's, so who knows, I may never get to these. "The Red Turtle" from 2016 has been on the list for quite some time, but that's an animated film with a French voice cast, again, not in the cards for the foreseeable future. "Holiday Inn" and "White Christmas", I don't see how I'm going to get to these either, unless there's a more modern Christmas film that uses archive footage from one of these. Then come "The Butterfly Effect 2" and the "Cube" sequels, no real excuse there except that the casts are full of obscure actors, all of those are very hard to link to.
But let's get back to "Deep Cover". It's from 1992 so cocaine is king, and a black police officer is recruited by the DEA to go, well, deep undercover for months or maybe even years, to work the streets, sell drugs and set up busts of key figures in the drug cartel who are several levels up. Putting drug dealers in jail apparently does nothing to stop the flow of cocaine, so the DEA guy wants someone to work their way up the chain and do whatever it takes to gain the trust of the mid-level dealers so they can then get access to the men on top, the importers.
The problem that the DEA did not foresee, however, was that by putting a police officer in a position to buy drugs, sell drugs, commit crimes up to murder, they would by putting him a position where he would come to question his very essence. Is he a cop pretending to be a drug dealer, or a drug dealer pretending to be a cop? You'd think he might be able to keep that straight, but here he goes by another name for so long, pretends to be someone else for so long, apparently he's no longer capable of remembering where he started?
OK, so maybe some of that's a bit weird - but then things get weirder because the drug dealer who's also a cop and the drug supplier who's also a lawyer can't really make a move on the top guys like they really want to - because they saw what he did to the other drug dealer who talked to the cops, the drug kingpin beat his whole face in. And when they do manage to get one drug kingpin killed, then an even worse one moves in on his territory and he says the other guy owed him $1,800,000 so since he can't collect it, the guys who killed that guy now owe him that money. Well, OK, I guess that's how things work in that world, but that dead guy did NOT owe him a million eight, he owed him just a million. Besides, where are our central characters going to come up with that kind of money? The D.E.A. doesn't have that kind of cash lying around, so now since they can't pay the new drug kingpin, do they have to kill him too? Wouldn't it be easier just to have him arrested?
Then the drug dealer who's also a cop and the drug supplier who's also a lawyer come up with a really crazy idea, they want to come up with a new form of cocaine, but one without all the side effects like addiction, and without all the fun of getting high, you know, something that just makes you feel all good and energetic, but also able to really focus on stuff. So, umm, ritalin? Adderall? We already HAVE drugs that will do this, plus the addictive nature of cocaine is what keeps your customers coming back, time and again, so this is probably a really bad idea. Was this some screenwriter's weird fantasy about the way to end the cocaine wars of the 1990's? It's just wishful thinking, right? I mean, if there had been New Coke in the 1990's I'm sure we would have heard about it - unless people just didn't like New Coke and it was marketed poorly and everybody just decided to go back to selling Coke Classic. Is that what happened?
Well, like I said, it was the 1990's, a lot of crazy stuff happened, in L.A. probably doubly so. People pretended to collect African tribal masks in order to launder all their drug money, and dealers had beautiful women driving them around the hood, like they were in a music video or something. People stored their money in vans that they kept on ships in the harbor, because nobody trusted banks, I guess. And don't even get me started about leaving your kid in the car while robbing a liquor store on Christmas. Oh, I guess that last part happened in 1972, not the 1990's. Still, it was a crazy time.
Directed by Bill Duke (director of "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit")
Also starring Lawrence Fishburne (last seen in "Ride Along"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Yvette Heyden, Charles Martin Smith (last seen in "Lucky You"), Victoria Dillard (last seen in "Ricochet"), Gregory Sierra (last seen in "The Other Side of the Wind"), David Weixelbaum, Glynn Turman (last seen in "Rustin"), Arthur Mendoza, Clarence Williams III (last seen in "52 Pick-Up"), James T. Morris, Alisa Christensen (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Roberto Luis Santana (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Kamala Lopez (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Lira Angel, Rene Assa (last seen in "Postcards from the Edge"), Alex Colon (last seen in "The Mighty Quinn"), Jaime Cardriche (last seen in "Freaked"), Sandra Gould (last seen in "Airport"), Sydney Lassick (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), John Boyd West, Julio Oscar Mechoso (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Paunita Nichols, Clifton Powell (last seen in "Street Kings"), Lionel Matthews, Bilal Bashir, Anna Berger (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan"), Donald Bishop (last seen in "The China Syndrome"), Cory Curtis, Joseph Ferro, Def Jef, Harry Frazier (last seen in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"), Revalyn T. Golde, Nick LaTour (Last seen in "Don Juan DeMarco"), Shannon Macpherson, Tony Perez, Vicellous Shannon (last seen in "The Humanity Bureau"), Lisa Thayer, Ron Thompson
RATING: 5 out of 10 briefcases full of money
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