Movie Review: Cocaine Bear

 

 

June 1975 saw the release of Jaws, the film that sky rocketed Steven Spielberg into directorial superstardom and launched a slew of imitators as animals of all types terrorized small communities as defiant individuals stood against the local corruption and greed to save lives and defeat the beasts.

Most of these movies are terrible, torturous to watch, and were taken by their creators far too seriously.

Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks, written, by Jimmy Warden, and produced by Lord and Miller, understood exactly what they needed to make. Little screentime is devoted to deep character study, traumatic backstory, or insane reasons for not ‘closing the beaches’ but rather movie’s 95-minute running time is focused on what was promised in the trailer; a rampaging, coke-fueled bear killing in gruesome and exaggerated manner an eclectic mix of victims.

 There is a bit of character development and backstory, just enough to hang a little flesh on the people but no more than that. Some things are left unexplained, such as the reason the character in the opening decided or was forced to dump the cocaine from the plane. The audience doesn’t need to know. We all came to see the bear, high as the sky, and on a rampage. Once you’ve given us the narcotics from the sky, we have no further need for exposition. This is the brilliance of Cocaine Bear. Just enough to set characters and events in motion then let it play out in all its farcical and gory fun.

And this is a gory film. Mauled to death by a bear in reality would be a bloody affair but Banks walked the line with the violence and blood just cartoonish enough that it provokes excitement rather than horror.

Cocaine Bear is a movie to watch in a crowded theater or with a noisy room with friends, not alone and contemplative. Go see it.

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Variations on a Theme

 

Spoilers for The Menu

I thoroughly enjoyed the feature film The Menu. Recently I discovered that there was a rumored to be a deleted scene where the critic Lillian Bloom is waterboarded with the broken emulsion Searchlight Picturesshe clocked during the breadless bread course. I couldn’t quite work out where in the film such a scene would fit, and I searched out the script online.

It was easily located and a very good read. (For screenwriters it is always wise to remember that a script must first be a good read before it can become a good movie.) Rather than search out the waterboarding scene I simply enjoyed the script from front to back.

I would hazard to guess that 90 percent of the script is up there on the screen. There are minor tweaks here and there, a few lines cut short in the final edit and a couple of beats dropped. I do miss that there are a couple moments that would have clued the audience in faster on Margot’s and Tyler’s relationship. In particular there’s a bit where Tyle is concerned that Chef is mad and won’t like him and Margot points out that Tyler is paying for Chef to serve him, and it doesn’t matter if Chef likes Tyler or not. There’s a beat where it’s clear Tyler then puts together two and two and wonders just how much Margot likes him since ‘ding dong’ he’s paying her to be there.

The waterboarding scene took place in the third act while Margot had been dispatched to retrieve the large barrel. During her absence Lillian is tortured with the broken emulsion and the nameless famous actor player by John Leguizamo is force fed nuts by his assistant Felicity, coerced by the staff, activating his allergy.

Frankly, I agree with this sequence being cut from the final film. First and foremost, it’s a level of barbaric cruelty that feels at odd the cultured cruelty Chef Slowik engrained for the rest of the evening. Thematically it doesn’t fit. Secondly it violates the film’s point of view. The entire film we are with Margot as she experiences the horrors of the strange sadistic diner. To witness the explicit torture required violating that POV on a very serious level.

Reading the script is a wonderful exercise in understanding the necessity of editing. Ideas that felt so right and proper when written have a very different feel when filmed or show or even read in context in the final draft.

Reading the script enhanced my appreciation of the film and the talented people behind it.

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Every Novel is Written Differently

 

 

I do not mean that novels between novelist are written differently but rather that my own works each one takes a new path from conception to execution.

Some I have a great deal of the plot details already in my skull when I sit down to draft an outline, and I always outline, while others it’s much more of a character study that the outline is generated from.

My newest novel, which hasn’t yet reached the outline stage, has found a new path. It has started with the world-building. (Sorry Steven King, that’s a perfectly acceptable word and I simply do not understand your rejection of it.)

This new book is set on Mars, and I already had social forces that will be pushing the characters around. (That’s the thematic focus of the work, how the system we create trap and corral us all.) And I have the McGuffin that’s going to be driving the plot along with a pretty strong sense of the ending along with a possible final line, but right now the vast center of the book is in a deep fog to me.

So, I have started with the world around the characters, the corporations, associations, cloques, and social movements the character swim in. With hose elements in place, I have moved onto the characters themselves and as I sketch them out, they grow their flesh, their tastes and distastes, their dreams and nightmares, which lead to their choices, their mistakes, and slowly emerging from that fog, the actual book itself.

It’s almost as organic as a pantser just writing from a blank page but not quite.

Every book is different and therein lies the thrill and the terror of writing.

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Movie: Review M3gan

When the trailers for M3gan dropped I was far from impressed and planned not to see the movie. However, as reports came in from both the horror community and non-horror community that this was actually an entertaining film, I became curious enough to see it. I held my expectations in check though, having remembered that the horror community lost its mind over X, and I found that slasher far from coherent.

M3gan worked and I quite enjoyed myself at last night’s screening. Instead of pursuing a serious realistic tone this screenplay and movie leaned more into camp and irony, leaping to playfulness rather than seriousness to achieve its entertainment.

Cady (Violet McGraw) after becoming orphaned goes to live with her Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) who is a genius at artificial intelligence and robots creating robotic toys. Gemma, thrust suddenly into the role of parent, and utterly at a loss as to how to help Cady process her grief, adapts her robot toy project M3gan to assist, imprinting the android on Cady with the directive to protect Cady from harm. Harm having a wide definition and M3gan with a capacity to learn, adapt, and self-program leads to the expected horrific outcomes.

M3gan can be closely compared to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina another film that deals with the complexities of artificial intelligence and androids that develop their own agendas. Where Garland’s film is a serious mediation on the subject, and quite excellent, M3gan utilizes a far less serious tenor to achieve a similar story. Of course, both stories owe a deep debt to Shelly’s Frankenstein as both ex-Machina and M3gan explore in their own manner the responsibility that creators owe their creations.

A quite pleasant surprise in the movie was Ronnie Chang as Gemma’s boss playing a role that while it had comedic elements was not principally devoted to laughter.

Director Gerard Johnstone and writer Akela Cooper managed to violate a few screenplay ‘rules’ about who and what you can kill in a film and not lose the audience, displaying a confidence and skill that elevated the project.

M3gan is fun, campy, and entertaining and is currently still in theaters and available on VOD at ‘theater at home’ pricing.

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GOP: The Dine and Dash Party

 

 

Dine and Dash for those who are not aware is the underhanded trick of ordering and eating the food at a dine in restaurant and then leaving without paying the check.

It is also an excellent metaphor concerning the Republican Party and the Debit Limit.

Raising the debt limit is borrowing money, because the United States does not have it on hand, to pay for spending already done.

The spending is the meal at the nice restaurant, good food, a bread plate with bread, and even a dessert that doesn’t involved flambéing your diners. However, when the check arrives it is the GOP, who ordered food and happily ate it, insisting you do all their chores at home, or they will not pay the bill.

Except of course that not raising the debt limit, defaulting on our creditors, is not a minor irritating powerplay by an ass but rather a move that will ignite a global economic crisis.

The US Dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Anyone anywhere will take US Dollars for payment but that won’t be true if we crash the US and the world’s economy. People will turn elsewhere. The Pound’s time in the sum has passed, the Ruble won’t ascend to that perch, but the Yuan could.

The GOP’s idiocy could not only unleash hell on the US and its citizen’s it could launch the Communist Chinese Century. All because some Baby Boomer Bigots can’t seem to grasp the domination of the WASPs is ending.

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Movie Review: Top Gun: Maverick

Late to the party I watched Top Gun: Maverick the sequel to 1986’s Top Gun. I did not rush out to see this acclaimed piece of cinema last year because I had watched the original in 1986 and found it lacking. I can say that the sequel is better, with a more defined arc and plot but hardly the sort of the movie that leaves a lasting positive impression.

36 years following the events of Top Gun, hotshot pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, whose career has stalled at the rank of captain, is called to train and select a team for a daring nigh impossible mission to destroy an enemy Uranium enriching facility before it can come online Paramount Picturesand disrupt the delicate balance of nuclear power in the region. Complicating his task is that one of the pilots is Bradley Bradshaw the son of the man Maverick got killed in a training accident. Faced with a nearly unachievable mission and the deep personal resentment of his dead friend’s son, Maverick must find a way to seize success and get all the pilot home alive.

Unlike the first film, this movie presents us with a clear plot objective, destroy the enrichment facility, and a clear story objective, heal the rift between Maverick and Bradshaw. It’s easy to see why this move was such a hit in the theater. The aerial cinematography is fantastic and thrilling. On a massive screen it undoubtedly induced motion sickness for some of the audience. The writers, including long time Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, avoid anything that might offend any member of the audience or close a foreign market. The enemy state is never named, the pilots are concealed under full-face black flight gear, and even the region is left unspecified. The enemy exists only conceptually.

Top Gun Maverick is a perfectly acceptable ‘popcorn’ flick with enough action to be thrilling and just enough character to have some emotional weight but hardly deserving of the industry’s top accolades for writing or Best Picture.

The rest of this review contains spoilers for the movie.

Many people have pointed the similarities between the mission in this movie with the climatic attack on the Death Star in Star Wars; a high-speed run down a narrow valley/trench to hit a small precise target. My mind went to a classic WWII film that inspired George Lucas, The Dam Busters, based on an actual mission that had those requirements. (Undoubtedly Top Gun: Maverick upset Peter Jackson because if he gets his remake of The Dam Buster produced, he will seem to be derivative rather than the other way around.)

I was bothered by some of the logical lapses in the story. There is a nearby enemy airfield that the US Navy kindly puts out of commission with a number of cruise missile strikes. That’s all well and good, but the SAM (Surface to Air) missile sites along the rim of the valley/trench, a very serious threat to the mission, are left utterly untouched. Once the cruise missiles hit the runway the Navy fails to fly any sorties to distract or confuse any enemy CAP (Combat Air Patrol) as cover for the real mission.

Thew entire third act, with Maverick and Bradshaw shot down and trying to escape the incognito enemy is far too fantastic to be believed. I had really hoped that they had killed Maverick when he used his own plane and its countermeasures to save Bradshaw. That would have a nice symmetry to it, Maverick got Bradshaw’s killed by being reckless but died saving Bradshaw. I wonder if Cruise’s ego refused such an ending.

Top Gun: Maverick while superior to the original remains essentially a brainless film well suited for popcorn and fun.

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The Dangerous Decade Dead Ahead

 

 

I believe that we are witnessing the death of the currently constituted ‘conservative’ Republican Party, but that death may take a decade to come into effect and until then we are in grave danger.

There is an old saying that if you are not a liberal when you are twenty you have no heart and not a conversative with you are fifty you have no brain. Now, the saying itself is hogwash, implying that liberalism is for the unintelligent and unwise instead of recognizing that both political philosophies have something to offer and have solutions for pressing problems. That said, there is some truth to it. As people age, they begin to drift away from the politics that utilize higher taxes, care less for educational matters, and have a more ‘good old days’ orientation to social change. This is not the same has today’s GOP with its passion for strongmen, its adoration of violence, its callous disregard for the slaughtered, and its hateful attitudes those not of its ethnic/sexual/social identity. None of this is conservative any more than the Holodomor was liberal.

Political science has identified that the generations aging into their full political are drifting far less to the ‘right’ than their parents and grandparents. The American right is poisoning future voters and leaders turning them away in significant numbers. People who were repeatedly traumatized as children, not only by school shootings on the news, but in practice drills against their own potential massacre, have little patience for the ‘thoughts and prayers’ crowd of the baby boomers. People for whom non-traditional sexual lives, roles, and loves are simply a fact of their friend group have no tolerance for the bigoted hated wielded as a political club. People who entered their careers as the world’s economy burned have no use for the ‘capitalists’ that worshiped ‘greed is good’ and stole their children’s and grandchildren’s wealth. As the grim reaper removes the older generation from its perch of political power conservatism and the GOP will change.

That change is however slow and the wounded dying animal that is the neo-fascist movement of the current GOP will not die peacefully. It will lash out, it will thrash, and we must fight it at every level. There are better political times on the horizon, but we cannot dream of those better days, we must fight and survive to see them. It is said that the long arc of human history bends to justice, that is not correct. Not by itself, we must bend it to justice by the force of our actions, our morals, and our will.

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Watching Common Knowledge Morph into History

 

As I have mentioned before one of the things I like doing on YouTube is watching younger people reacting to films that they have never seen before. It’s always interesting to see which scene and moments are commonly and sometimes universally selected for their review videos.

A side-effect I has not anticipated when I discovered these videos is the bluntness with which I would come to understand just how much the world has changed in my lifetime.

My 50s are behind me and a lot of these films that are reacted to come from the 70s and 80s containing references that were understood my nearly everyone in the audience but are now strange cryptic moments to younger viewers.

For example, in the 1973’s The Exorcist Father Merrin, Max von Sydow under fantastic old-age make-up by Dick Smith, frequently with shaky hands opens a tiny tin and take a small white tablet. People of the time and well into the 80s and 90s understood with any expositions that this was medication for a heart condition. Merrin has server heart disease and is in poor health. Younger viewers have no comprehension of this and Merrin’s heart attack, which is not called out as one on-screen, comes as an inexplicable surprise.

The Legal Framework for South Africa’s Apartheid was passed into law in 1948 and remained enforced until the 1990’s creating as oppressive, racist, regime the disenfranchised, abused, and subjugated the majority population of that country by the white Europeans. The 1980s saw significant outrage and international protest about the South African government and its racist rule. This naturally bled into entertainment and 1989 the sequel to the hit Lethal Weapons utilized this wide-spread disgust at Apartheid to craft villainous South African diplomats as their antagonists.

And this intuitive understanding of the evils of Apartheid has sublimated away from morning dew. A millennial watching Lethal Weapon 2 was confounded by the inclusion of racism into these already despicable foreign diplomats. (Undoubtedly had they been from the American South wearing the ‘stars and bars’ it would have failed to be shocking. The Confederate Flag is an internationalsymbol of racism appearing in Icelandic Television as that signifier.) The widespread knowledge, disgust, and repulsion to South Africa’s apartheid is a subject for history textbooks and not popular media.

The world is forever changing and what is something that ‘everybody knows’ is tomorrow’s obscure trivia.

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My Favorite and Least Favorite Horror Genres

 

My earliest memories are of horror film playing at a drive-in theater. Fragments of the film, vivid color, brains in jars, stay with me to this day so many decades later. It is not surprising I grew up with a taste for horror movies. Over the long years those tastes focused and resolved into my best-loved types of horror cinema.

Ghost stories are without a doubt the horror I love best. I can’t explain why this genre appeals so strongly to me but from classic cinema and literature such as The Haunting/The Haunting of Hill House to more recent fare like The Night House, or Last Night in Soho, ghosts have fascinated and occasionally terrified me. Ghosts hold no terror for me in reality. I do not believe in ghosts and spirits. Life is a bio-chemical reaction and once the reaction stops, we are gone from this Earth. The emergent properties from out brain that we call ourselves vanishes with the cessation of life. But despite this firm, mechanistic view of reality and life, it is the ghost story that fascinates and compels me.

At the other end of my horror preferences lies the genre of Slashers.

What makes it strange that slashers so often are uninteresting or laughable to me is that they bear a close evolutionary relation to a genre I do very much care for the giallo. What differentiates the giallo from the slasher, at least to me, is that the Italian films are more centered on the mystery, the macabre, and flamboyant cinematic style while the latter is more focused on the kills, the more gruesome and outlandish the better. This is not to denigrate or belittle those who love, adore, and flock to the slasher movies. The beauty of the arts is in their diversity. We should always love what we love with shame or apology.

It is my apathy towards slashers that made films such as X difficult for me to suspend that vital disbelief that transforms a movie from something you watch to something you experience.

Each of us has the stories and genres to speak to something deep inside each of us and it the artists that bring us these fantastic fantasies I am continually in awe of.

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