Heaven with Cate Blanchett & Giovanni Ribisi

Heaven with Cate Blanchett & Giovanni Ribisi

The movie starts off with helicopter flight simulation, someone is training to fly a helicopter. The sequence ends with the instructor telling the student that you can't just fly straight up forever, which reminds me of a film I saw a long time ago that ends with a helicopter taking off vertically and flying straight up until it disappears, but that couldn't be this movie, because nothing else is familiar, except, wait a minute, haven't we seen that guy before? Why, yes we have. That guy turns out to be Giovanni Ribisi and he has been in a bunch of films (86 according to IMDB) and we have seen a bunch of them, like:

• Public Enemies (Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger)
• Flight of the Phoenix (the remake)
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (the best movie ever!)
• Gone in 60 Seconds (the remake with Nicholas Cage)
• Boiler Room (where he goes from his own little gambling house to sleazy stock dealing)
• Saving Private Ryan (where he says "Hey, think about the poor bastard's mother.")

Back to the movie. Cate is angry because her deceased husband's friend is a major drug dealer who supplied him with the dope that he overdosed on, and the Carabinieri have not done anything about it, so she takes matters into her own hands and plants a bomb in the drug dealer's office. You know that saying about the best laid plans of mice and men? Well, things go a-rye, four innocent people are killed, and the target escapes. Master criminal that Cate isn't, she is quickly apprehended. The stenographer (Giovanni) falls in love at first sight of Cate. We quickly learn that one of the high ranking Carabinieri is in cahoots with the drug dealer. We are a quarter of the way into the movie and I still don't remember anything about it, other than having seen the two stars before.

There is a very clever escape, and now I am beginning to catch a glimmer of having seen this movie before. There is revenge, flight, and then penance. They both get all their hair cut off. No big deal for Giovanni, he's a man, men wear their hair as short as they want, but Cate! OMG! All your hair! It is an affecting scene, even for a tough guy like me.

By now I know we have seen it before and it ends exactly as I foretold. I just didn't expect this to be the movie.

But what about the drugs that started this whole thing? I don't think drugs should be illegal, mostly because I think that making drugs illegal creates more problems than it solves. Sometimes I wonder what society would be like if drugs were legal. Would we have a nation of stoners? Dope fiends? What we would do for plots for our movies? I know alcoholics can become so addicted that they will drink themselves to death. Can the same thing happen with heroin? Of course, not everybody who drinks becomes an alcoholic. Not everyone who tries an an addictive drug like heroin, crack or meth becomes an addict. I imagine that some people are more susceptible than others. It would be nice if there were some kind of simple test, like a blood test, that could tell you how susceptible you were to becoming addicted. But maybe it's not a physical thing at all, maybe it's entirely mental, and we are a long way from figuring out peoples brains work. We might know the generalities, but how an individual's brain actually functions, I don't see that happening for a long, long time. Maybe not ever.

Update: One of the sites in this movie was Orvieto which I recognized because I was looking at it a little over a year ago. I don't remember why, probably because it was referenced in something I was reading. Anyway, I collected a several photos or the place, and here they are:

Orvieto

Update April 2019 replace Picasa slideshow with single image and link Google Drive album.
Update September 2021 replaced Google Drive link with Google Photos link.

Update January 2024 replaced missing image.