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Reviews
Eagle's Wing (1979)
Hard to forget this movie
I saw this as a teenager. Now I'm 47 years old. It is a testimony to fine film making that I'd want to watch it again and that I'm researching how it had been filmed and by whom.
Some movies stick with you. In this case, the story is so strong, if simple, and the setting is so scenic and visually distinctive that images and fragments of storyline are still in my mind...more than 30 years later. It's weird how movies sometimes haunt us.
One of the best attributes here is that 'Eagle's Wing; was so unconventional. It basically stars a beautiful horse (which would have been both a practical animal and a status symbol in the Wild West), one of the main characters does not speak at all, and the quest portrayed here has little to do with "normal' Westerns that usually focus on bandits, gold, gunslingers and colorful characters on the frontier.
To my eyes, it attempted to convey the clash of worldviews and cultures, before the southwestern deserts in the US would have been properly "colonized' and overrun by white people.
A British director made this, a fact often brought up by North Americans...it is a different vision, for sure, and the result is more of an art film than a straightforward morality tale. Sometimes, you have to be more distant to portray a historical subject in imaginative ways.
Bad Blood (2017)
Enjoyable thriller but not realistic
This is a good, well-paced drama, powered by a cast of memorable characters. Ken Coates does a decent job of acting the role of a fictionalized gangster, a lone wolf operator.
But this is where problems start. First off, in a realistic portrayal of the Montreal drug mafia, you wouldn't have a lone, enigmatic figure emerging on top of the hierarchy; it would be one 'family' replacing another family. Or a new alliance of families.
Second, the 'Irish' who control the Montreal port and the bikers are the ones truly running the show in actual Quebec because they have the access, the organization and the numbers (and lots of guns). An Italian-Canadian crime family are basically a link to the larger world but once the 'product' hits the market, it would be the bad dudes on motorbikes who ensure distribution and can also set prices.
Third, there are some issues with the portrayal of the RCMP surveillance work and the turning of a key mafia guy as a witness. It sure makes for good TV but it would have been nearly impossible in the 'real world'. There are other instances of pure fiction...cooking up fentanyl in a lab, in an abandoned church in the middle of Hamilton, etc.
So, basically, if you're watching this series as a character-driven dark drama with a uniquely Canadian twist, it's perfectly good. If you're wanting to also learn about the organized crime and Italian crime syndicates, you won't be learning much from this.