Drake Attacks Carter example essay topic

337 words
The movie Pacific Heights' basic plot fits easily in a nutshell: After buying a multi-unit house they cant afford, Patty (Melanie Griffith) and Drake (Matthew Moline) become landlords (novice landlords to say the least!) and are toyed with & tormented by tenant-from-hell Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton), a man of many aliases who has made a career out of pillaging real-estate properties for profit. The movie begins when Patty and Drake fall in love with a multi-apartment house in the prestigious, but pricey, Pacific Heights neighborhood. They lie on their loan application and do receive their loan... but it costs them their savings to make a down payment and stretches their credit to the limit. Luckily, shortly after they acquire tenants for the house's two rental units.

Patty and Drake have no troubles with the quiet Japanese-American tenants, but from the onset their trouble starts with the other tenant... Carter Hayes - beginning with his failure to pay the rent. Due to the delinquency of Carter, Patty and Drake come close to defaulting on their mortgage. They decide they must evict Carter before they lose everything... BUT when they find out he's protected by hopelessly complex eviction laws, they decide to turn-off his utilities in hopes of driving him out... well... believe it or not they end-up in court and are ordered to lower Carters' rent for violating State eviction laws! Then a plague of roaches, spilling over from Carters' apartment, drives the Japanese-American couple out of their rental.

With frustration overtaking his already-minimal common sense, Drake attacks Carter and is rewarded with a restraining order that bars him from his own property! Adding insult to injury, Carter files a civil lawsuit calculated to force Drake to give up ownership of the property! This is the point in the movie where the tables start to turn; Patty learns the rules of Carters game, giving him a heavy dose of his own medicine, precipitating the film's climax.