BEFORE: Well, this was supposed to be my Saturday movie, but my body had other ideas. I have to sleep sometimes, you see, and when you combine my work schedule with my movie-watching schedule... I'm convinced that this pace would kill a normal man, that's what I tell myself anyway. But I'm getting older, with a birthday coming up next week, and something's got to give at some point. I worked three straight days at New York Comic-Con, and that's from 9 am (OK, more like 9:30) to 8 pm (OK, more like 7:30) - still, that's 10 or 11 hours each day, and I'm just not a young man.
So you can't blame me if I come home on the third day and I just want to microwave some corn dogs - hot dogs at the Con were $6 minimum, and bulgogi dogs were $9, which is highway robbery - and have a couple beers and watch a stupid movie that I'm going to fall asleep in the middle of. One bear - sorry - one beer was a little powerful, a chocolate peanut butter porter called Sweet Baby Jesus! - and yeah, OK, I slept - but I slept WELL knowing I survived another Con and made it out the other side. Now a few shifts at the theater for NewFest, and then vacation.
But first, "Cocaine Bear" and two more movies. I worked a screening of "Cocaine Bear" back in February, which meant I couldn't WATCH it, of course - and I had no idea THEN that I'd be able to work it into my chain NOW, of course I wasn't even sure if it qualified as horror, or comedy, or nature documentary for that matter. I guess it's "comedy/horror", so sure, why not, this past week I've also covered "medical horror" and "Y/A fantasy horror", but "Creepshow" was like comic-book horror, and most of the stories had some kind of ironic, nearly comic twist to them. I think you can look at the past week and say that nobody, absolutely nobody besides me, would watch THOSE films in THAT order, because well, why would they? The uniting element, beyond the linking actors, is me, the fact that I have not seen these movies yet and also I have access to them. "Cocaine Bear" was on Peacock for a while, it may still be, but it's also on AmazonPrime now, so that's where I'll watch it, though our PlayStation which puts it on the big TV and not my tiny phone screen.
Alden Ehrenreich carries over from "Beautiful Creatures", and so does Margo Martindale, but that should come as no surprise, Ms. Martindale turns up in a lot of movies. Good for her!
THE PLOT: An oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converge on a Georgia forest where a huge black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine.
AFTER: Do I even need to say it today? This is a WEIRD movie. This is also an effed-up movie, or a WTF? movie. Like, why does this exist? How did this come to pass, and why did it choose to manifest itself in THIS form, specifically? I have no answers, except cocaine was maybe involved, Hollywood LOVES cocaine and cocaine probably fueled a number of other bad ideas over the years, some of which turned out to be incredibly profitable, and then there were films like "Showgirls" which became "cult classics" over the years, and that's code for "this movie is just plain terrible, and yet somehow I can't stop watching it."
There was (allegedly) a real incident in 1985 where a real bear in Georgia died of an overdose, and then in order to figure out how and why, somebody pieced it together after the fact that a drug trafficker flying from Colombia dropped his cargo and then jumped out of his plane, D.B. Cooper-style, only his parachute didn't open and his body was found in somebody's driveway in Knoxville, TN. The bear ATE the cocaine, which is not the most efficient way to get drugs into your bloodstream, only how would a bear even know that, and the autopsy showed its stomach was filled with coke, although they estimated that only about 3 or 4 grams would have been absorbed into its blood at the time of death, so a murderous rampage is probably NOT what happened. Let's be real for a second, OK? But yet the bear came to be known as "Cokey the Bear" (only YOU can prevent drug overdoses, kids...) or alternately "Pablo Escobear".
The body of the bear was preserved via taxidermy and given to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, but it disappeared and turned up in a pawn shop, then supposedly turned up in a mall in Lexington, Kentucky - although some people say that's not the real cocaine bear because it's in pristine condition, and the original Cokey was in a state of decomposition. And some say that the Cocaine Bear has the authority to officiate weddings thanks to the loose Kentucky laws on this point, only if you're interested in getting a dead bear to marry you, can you even really call that a wedding? Side burn - Kentucky.
But let's focus on the movie, which is, OK, a grain of truth wrapped in a nonsensical comedy with all of the jump-scares of a horror movie. But the difference is that most horror movies have a logic to them - teens who have sex in the woods are fated to die, for example, that's a staple. In "Creepshow" people who do terrible things - kill their wife's lover, ruin other people financially - they deserve to die, and they do. Here in "Cocaine Bear", bad people die, but good people also die, and what, for our amusement? I'm not comfortable with that. But then again, death comes for us all, eventually, no matter what kind of life we left, whether or not we followed the cardinal rule to "be excellent to each other".
So maybe the Cocaine Bear represents not just nature's fury or the dead-end lifestyle of doing drugs, but death itself. The Cocaine Bear comes for all of us, one day, no matter what we do to try to stave off the inevitable. Is that the lesson? So OK, eating right, exercising, nothing really matters unless you follow a few other simple rules, like don't go camping, don't go to the beach, don't drive drunk or distracted, don't cheat on your spouse - valuable lessons from this week's films. Stay home. All the time. Then you can focus more on watching movies and TV shows, and you'll live a longer, happier life, trust me on this point. And for god's sake, if you find a mysterious crate under the stairway, maybe call somebody about it and don't open it? I mean, REALLY?
But I'm probably reading too much into "Cocaine Bear", and thus giving it too much credence - overall it just feels like it was slapped together, the different stories do eventually come together, but late, late in the film. So for the majority of the time we're toggling between three separate stories - the one about the mother looking for her daughter, the one about the drug dealers looking for the cocaine (and the cops looking for the dealers), and the one about the park ranger and bear expert and the EMTs - oh, and the opening one about the foreign couple hiking up the mountain. The Cocaine Bear weaves the stories together, I'll admit, but the Cocaine Bear thus appears to be everywhere at once, it goes wherever is needed, as long as its appearance is unexpected and ironic. There are plenty of those "it's right behind me, isn't it?" moments.
Yeah, I get it, death is often quick and frequently messy, but I'm not sure that's it's always ironic and bordering on comic. We hear so many stories that qualify for the "Darwin Awards", however, that we may come to think that those deaths are the norm, and they're just not, except in the movies. A lot of people die in bed, surrounded by friends and family, having made their peace with the world, but I guess that just isn't very cinematic, is it? Sometimes death is a tender moment, after a long illness or a very long life that was well-lived, but again, you can't really make a movie out of that, so by all means, let's focus on people who are strapped to gurneys and fall out of ambulances face first and become long red stains on the pavement.
I just wish it looked like a real bear AT ANY POINT - maybe it's just me, because I know too much about movies and how they're made, so, like obviously this was a CGI bear or a puppet bear or some combination of the two, and no bears were harmed in the production of this movie. Also no bears were given cocaine at any point, but you know, it's Hollywood so cocaine was probably in the mix, at least during the writing of the screenplay - assuming there WAS a screenplay. Feels like 50/50 odds that there wasn't. OK, maybe the final shot of the bear was a bit believable, but for the rest of the movie, no, I was always aware that it wasn't a real bear, where if you watched a movie like "The Revenant", you could allow yourself to believe in the bear. Here, not so much.
NITPICK POINT: The film opens with the song "Jane" by Jefferson Starship, which personally, I love - the song totally rocks. And sure, it might be chronologically appropriate - but not thematically. Was "Cocaine" from Eric Clapton too expensive? Surely there must have been another song written during the 1980's that might be about drugs - they run "White Lines" over the closing credits, which makes perfect sense. But "Jane" was used in the opening sequence of another comedy, "Wet Hot American Summer", which director Elizabeth Banks should have known, because she was IN that movie. Or did she just get lazy and fall back on what she was familiar with? "Find Your Way Back" and "No Way Out" are other great songs by the same band that could have worked, without being repetitive. Just saying. "Snowblind" by Styx, "Cocaine" by Jackson Browne, there were other options.
Almost a Nitpick Point - I realize that the casting of Ray Liotta as the mid-level drug kingpin was an inspired choice, as a reference to "Goodfellas" if nothing else. Hey, if you can get Ray Liotta, you get Ray Liotta, sure. But then watching his character die in the film now, given that he died IRL nine months before this movie came out, well now that's just looking like a bit of bad taste. Was it worth it to have him in the film now that his scenes just make us a bit sad? What was a good idea became also very ironic. Seeing a PSA in the beginning of the movie with Pee-Wee Herman in it, telling kids to not do drugs, is also now a bit sad. It's just too soon, it still stings that we lost these actors this year, and it will for a while.
Sure, I realize this movie was not meant to be taken seriously, not on any level. It's beyond ridiculous, but many comedies are that, and also many horror films are that, too. BEAR in mind that nobody ever really saw the real Cokey the Bear after it had eaten cocaine, so we don't really know if it would have gone on a murderous rampage - it might have just gone to the club and partied all night, or it might have stayed up for three days straight and worked on its screenplay. Which again, calls into question that somebody manifested THIS exact storyline into the world for some reason, and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what that reason was. Blood and circuses still dominate the market, I guess, and it's been that way at least since the height of the Roman Empire.
Grasping for some kind of moral lesson here, I guess it's got to suffice that not everybody dies from the bear's actions, and those that live maybe learn how precious life is, and to maybe be better people in the future? This seems like something of a stretch, however. This movie was profitable, and got a LOT of attention in February this year, but of course, by the time I get to watch it, simply nobody is talking about it any more. I guess that's the thing about good buzz, it wears off and next time, you're going to need a stronger dose to get the same reaction.
Also starring Keri Russell (last seen in "Adrienne"), O'Shea Jackson Jr. (last seen in "Ingrid Goes West"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "Better Living Through Chemistry"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last seen in "Person to Person"), Brooklynn Prince (last heard in "The One and Only Ivan"), Christian Convery (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Margo Martindale (also carrying over from "Beautiful Creatures"), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (last seen in "Untraceable"), Kristofer Hivju (last seen in "Downhill"), Hannah Hoekstra (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Ayoola Smart (last seen in "Juliet, Naked"), Aaron Holliday (last seen in "Moxie"), J.B. Moore, Leo Hanna, Kahyun Kim (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), Scott Seiss, Matthew Rhys (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Shane Connellan, Conor Lambert (last seen in "My Left Foot"), George Kerslake, Oisin Nolan. with archive footage of Nancy Reagan (last seen in "Air"), Paul Reubens (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer").
RATING: 4 out of 10 red duffel bags
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