Awesome / Traffic (2000)

• Montel's masterful bugging of Carlos Ayala's office after he's been unjustly freed. He walks right in and appears to flip out at the Smug Snake, but uses the short struggle with his bodyguards to plant a microphone under the desk... where Ayala makes a lot of incriminating phone-calls. Despite the Bittersweet Ending, the quietly confident look he has on his face as he walks away seems to promise that Carlos won't be free for long (Helena, too, given the fact she's now as deep in the drug trade as her husband).
• Kind of a dark one, but Helena finally getting tired of Frankie Flowers' bullshit and ordering him to "just shoot him [a witness] in the head!" is pretty badass, considering a few weeks before she was just another clueless socialite.
  • In the same vein, her sit down with Juan Obregon and standing her ground when he tries to pressure her into snorting cocaine (she's heavily pregnant) is impressive. Only a few weeks into the "traffic", and she has the stones to stare down one of the most dangerous drug lords in Mexico. Not only that, but she brokers a deal to become sole distributor of his cocaine and have the chief witness against her husband killed in a move that would have made Carlos jealous.
• Wakefield showing more balls than most in his position by truthfully telling reporters that the War on Drugs is not simply a matter of locking up dealers and burning drug fields: it will involve targeting friends and family, "and I don't know how you wage war on your own family."
• Seth really shouldn't be pushing Wakefield's buttons after Caroline falls into addiction, but when they're searching for her in a crime-infested ghetto, he makes a good point about why people there sell drugs in the first place.
  Wakefield: (bitterly) I can't believe you brought my daughter to this place...
  Seth: Whoa, why don't you just back the fuck up, man. To this place? What is that shit? Okay, right now, all over this great nation of ours, a hundred thousand white people from the suburbs are cruisin' around downtown asking every black person they see, "You got any drugs? You know where I can score some drugs?" Think about the effect that that has on the psyche of a black person! On their possibilities! I guarantee you bring a hundred thousand black people into your neighborhood, into fuckin' Indian Hills, and they're asking every white person they see, "You got any drugs? You know where I can score some drugs?", within a day everyone would be selling. Your friends. Their kids. Here's why: it's an unbeatable market force, man. It's a three-hundred percent markup value. You can go out on the street and make five-hundred dollars in two hours, come back and do whatever you want to do with the rest of your day and, I'm sorry, you're telling me that...you're telling me that white people would still be going to law school?
• Real Life example: after filming one day, actor James Brolin returned to his car to find two youths attempting to break in. Still in his general's uniform, he frightened away the would-be thieves, who mistook him for a real military officer.
• Another Real Life one: during filming in Cincinnati, Michael Douglas chased down a purse snatcher and held him until police officers got there to arrest him.

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