Weekly film reviews, installment #3. I am going to review certain show episodes as well, if they merit a bit of discussion.
New:
What a perfect segue into a few thoughts on last week's Breaking Bad episode: "Dead Freight."
"Amphetamines are more toxic than cocaine and, when abused, cause worse problems. The body has a great capacity to metabolize and eliminate cocaine: the liver can detoxify a lethal dose of cocaine every thirty minutes. It cannot handle amphetamines as efficiently."
Andrew Weil said it well. It's toxic. It's an impure, unholy mess. Nothing good comes of it except the 3am cleaning of an addict's apartment. I am from Washington and currently live in Oregon, two states riddled with
meth problems. Large manufactured housing businesses in the area who keep their homes up off the ground had people breaking into their lots and taking the copper piping off of the bottom of the houses to sell at metal scrapyards. A local business owned by acquaintances lost several thousand dollars worth of food when a burglar broke in and took the metal necessary for keeping the refrigerators cold for what are probably similar reasons. Finally pseudoephedrine requires a prescription (the necessary ingredient to manufacture the methylamine), but there is no doubt that the product has not fully dried up.
"Dead Freight" jumps right in on this, as it involves a young boy caught in the fray between Walter, Jesse, and Mike. Largely due to Walter's ego, he is unable to simply give up a job at the height of his power, and in so doing has found a grey area of psychological culture, in which the individual is driven to a point beyond narcissism in which the ego not only feels it is the center of everything but becomes a black hole, sucking in weaker objects and chewing them up or obliterating them. Like a fine (read: incredibly dangerous) military commander, Walter feels that his work is actually helping a majority of people.
