Cocaine Bear

What’s It About, Del Boy?

Cocaine Bear
USA 2023 Universal
Directed by Elizabeth Banks
UK cinema release print

To probably quote many other critics, I’m sure, Cocaine Bear is a movie which very much does what it says on the tin. It was a film I mainly got interested in from the buzz surrounding the title (I had a similar attraction to the movie Snakes On A Plane for the same reason) and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Also, I don’t really know Elisabeth Banks as an actress but I did like the previous movie she directed (and starred in), the 2019 reboot of Charlie’s Angels (reviewed here).

Okay, so call me naive (I’m sure a lot of you will call me that and worse) but I went into Cocaine Bear not realising it was an out and out comedy. I mean, I knew it was based... or in this case perhaps ‘inspired’ is a better word... on a true incident in 1985 and I knew there was never going to be a shred of reality or truth to the way the real life events were depicted. Two things are true... one is that, while dumping drugs out of a plane, a man’s parachute failed to open and he died from the fall. Two, a bear ate a quantity of the cocaine he dropped. Those are the only two things that this movie shares with the actual incident, as far as I can tell. In reality, the bear died from the consumption of the narcotics within five minutes (and is now stuffed and displayed somewhere).

This film is about the rampage of the bear as she goes to protect her two cubs from interfering humans and, mostly, tries to find more cocaine to consume. It’s also about various disconnected bunches of humans who find themselves in the forest (or park as they are in the US, from what I understand, not bearing any resemblance to UK parks so much... at least not the ones I know). Of these humans, my ‘favourite performances of the movie’ shout out go to Kerri Russell as a mother trying to find her teenage daughter, Alden (Han Solo) Ehrenreich as a grieving member of a drug cartel who has been sent to the forest to find the drugs along with his friend played by O'Shea Jackson Jr. and, last but by no means least, Scott Seiss... who I just found out is exactly the person I thought he reminded me of in only his second ever part in a movie. Seiss, it turns out, is the man who does those ‘angry retail guy’ sketches and posts them on YouTube and twitter... and yeah, this guy definitely deserves to be in more movies after his hilarious performance in this, I would say.

Lastly, Ray Liota is also in this film and he gets a dedication in the end credits (stay for two post credits scenes, by the way, if you want to catch every drop of the movie). Ray plays the nasty guy who wants his drugs back and sends his boy to get them. It was his last movie role before he died, one week after recording his ADR for this one.  

And it took a while to grow on me, truth be told. As I said, I was expecting more of a modern, retro exploitation film than a comedy and comedy certainly isn’t my favourite movie genre (unless it’s got The Marx Brothers or Woody Allen in it, you’re going to have to work hard to get me to stay). So for the initial set up, I was less than comfortable with a film that was obviously being played for laughs with some quite broad comedy but, after a while, I began to get on board with it. After all, it’s competently put together (with a caveat I’ll get to) and it’s well acted by a whole host of comic performers... it’s too long to list all of them here. For me though, I really got into it when the emergency Ambulance showed up with Scott Seiss on board as one of the paramedics, partnered up by the equally excellent  Kahyun Kim. The scenes which follow their arrival are quite funny and pulled me into things, for sure.

It is a fun movie and, yeah, I was rooting for a lot of the humans to survive it. That being said, I thought the film was edited in a peculiar manner. There are gaps where it’s implied what’s happened in scenes cross-cutting between sets of characters rather than seeing the actual things happening, making almost unnatural jumps in the narrative. Now, I really don’t mind not being shown everything and filling in the gaps for myself without being spoonfed data but, I dunno, a fast paced comedy movie seems to need those kinds of moments more, I would have thought. My first thought was that it was a level of competence, or lack of, in terms of what ended up on screen and my initial assumption as I was watching was that the crew hadn’t been able to capture all the footage they wanted. However, there’s a really odd editing decision later on where a flashback to a scene we didn’t see is suddenly cut into a conversation (leaving me completely baffled for a minute as to what I was watching) and I realised that coverage wasn’t the problem, this was an artistic decision on the part of the director. So, yeah, it’s not the way I would have gone with the movie but the film doesn’t lose much clarity from this approach and it works just fine, I guess.

All in all, after about a half an hour into the movie, I have to say that I had a pretty good time with Cocaine Bear and would certainly recommend it to my friends who like comedies. I’m still in two minds as to whether I’ll follow this up with a Blu Ray purchase a little way down the line (maybe when it hits the sales). But, a good evening at the cinema at any rate and, if drug fuelled bear rampages played for comic effect are your thing, you will definitely want to give this one a go.

Adrienne

Concerning
Unbelievable
Truths

Adrienne
USA 2021
Directed by Andy Ostroy
HBO

I never really react much when favourite film stars or composers die. I see people on Twitter proclaiming their grief and always wonder why the heck the person is so vocal and shook up about it, considering he or she’s never likely to have even met or corresponded with that person. Maybe I’m demonstrating what psychiatrists call an ‘absence of appropriate affect’ but, yeah, I never really understood it.

Except once.

I remember going on to the internet one day in 2006 on my lunch hour at the office and reading that Adrienne Shelley had been found dead in her flat, a suspected suicide. That one really hit me and I remember tearing up and trying to figure out why the heck I was reacting that way? I’d never met her and she was as distant to me as another planet in the heavens but, yeah, she was an actress I really empathised with, it turns out. I’d only seen her in three things... two films by my favourite living director Hal Hartley, called The Unbelievable Truth and Trust and also a random TV episode of a show called Early Edition. They were the first two feature length films by Hal and were also Adrienne’s first two films ever. I’d never seen a single episode of Early Edition, before or since but, I remember seeing a trailer for the show and, upon seeing Adrienne was in it, I made a point of watching it. So, yeah, something obviously clicked and I was also looking forward to a new film she’d apparently written and directed (and appeared in) called Waitress at the time. I felt grief over her passing for, I dunno, some inexplicable reason, being that it was for someone who I never knew but even more so when it was later discovered she’d been murdered (it was originally a suspected suicide but, when you see this beautiful documentary, you’ll see how ridiculous it was that anyone could ever believe it).

The actress had everything about to really come together for her. She didn’t know it yet but, a few days or so after her untimely death at the age of 40, leaving behind her loving husband and daughter, Waitress was accepted into the Sundance festival. It went on to become a hit movie and was then adapted into a very long running, successful stage musical... but she was not around to experience her success.

This documentary, Adrienne, is certainly about her life but, perhaps somewhat more so, it’s about the husband Andy Ostroy and their daughter Sophie, who were left behind and how they dealt with it. How they are continuing to deal with it. It’s directed by Mr. Ostroy and there’s much less of the ‘talking to the stars’ aspect than you might think of in this kind of movie. I mean, sure, there are various interview moments from the likes of Robert John Burke, Hal Hartley, Cheryl Hines, Kerri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Paul Rudd and various friends and family... and it all paints a wonderful picture of Adrienne. However, this documentary is also, I dunno, it’s plays as something like an exorcism of bad spirits or at least an acknowledgement of the struggle of the surviving family members.

It’s structure and focus, which then allows us to slip into a continuing look at Shelley’s personal story, is of Andy and Sophie. Andy also remembered the many difficult but heart tugging conversations he had with his daughter, who was just three when her mummy left them, and the two have reconstructed the conversations as voices in some lovely, very moving little line drawing animated sections which punctuate the movie at regular intervals. I have to say... maybe it’s more to do with me getting old but I started tearing up a little from about two minutes into the film and didn’t really let up until after it had finished.

This first two minutes or so show a Halloween party that Shelley was at (or had thrown) the night before her untimely death at the age of 40 and she looks so happy with her daughter and where she was in her life that, when you think of it, it was preposterous that the police could, for even one minute, believe this was a suicide. And so the film also starts to highlight Andy’s story of getting the police to investigate the case seriously and getting an arrest and confession very quickly (as it turns out, yeah I remember at the time it was a quick turn around on the media), due to a smart cop who spotted a feint trace of construction dust and a tell tale footprint in Shelley’s bath tub, where the killer had staged the murder to look like a suicide.

While this piece highlights the good work of The Adrienne Shelly Foundation, set up by Andy to help women filmmakers get projects made, the film builds to a moment when the killer agrees to Andy’s request to meet with him in jail, where he is about 15 years into a 25 year sentence. That’s an interesting interview and I’m not a hundred percent sure of what to make of it... so I’m not going to judge that sequence because I don’t have any real understanding of how both parties are dealing with their actions, emotions and consequences at that time but, yeah, it maybe brings a certain amount of closure to the audience, if not to the people caught up in the events.

At the end of the day, Adrienne is an absolutely wonderful tribute to one of the unsung, or at least underseen, geniuses of the art of cinema (writing, acting and directing) and, also, for me personally, as I’ve been putting off watching Waitress for the first time for years because I’m still upset about Shelley’s death... it’s a wake up call to get it out of the ‘to watch’ pile on the other side of the room where I type this. Also to explore a fair few other things she either co-starred in, wrote or directed... which I had no idea she was even involved with. So that’s something else I have to squeeze into the next couple of years, if I can find these films. Needless to say, I think Andy Ostroy has made a bold and beautiful film here and I would recommend it to anyone. I hope this one gets a Blu Ray release at some point because I’d like a proper physical edition on the shelf.