Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 110 - Cocaine Bear

On this combustible episode, Barry and I ingest heroic amounts of cocaine and then incoherently yell at each other about the comedy/horror movie Cocaine Bear. Topics discussed include guilty pleasures, bad taste and the perils of living with bears. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 110 - Cocaine Bear

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Cocaine Bear: A Review - This Unfunny Bear Shits in the Woods and on Itself

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A golden opportunity for comedy is wasted in this poorly directed, dull movie. Not even remotely amusing.

Cocaine Bear is definitely a great title for a movie, but unfortunately is not a great movie.

The horror comedy, which originally hit theatres on February 24th and is now streaming on Peacock, is loosely based on a true story about a black bear that goes berserk after ingesting 34 kilograms of cocaine that was thrown from a drug runner’s plane into the Tennessee wilds in 1985.

Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks, should have been terrific as all the elements are there for a cavalcade of comedy. The absurdity of a bear high on cocaine in the heartland of America at the height of the Reagan-led War on Drugs in the always bizarre 1980’s is a comedy goldmine. And yet, the film is a flaccid affair that never embraces the 80’s comedy, the bear comedy, the drug comedy, or any other form of comedy for that matter.

Instead of focusing on a man vs nature duel of wits (or mid-wits as the case may be) between a coked-up black bear and some desperate drug dealers or even some over-zealous cops, the movie instead uses a large, unconnected and entirely uninteresting cast to try and tell an unnecessarily sprawling and rather boring tale.

Yes, there are drug dealers, and some park rangers, but there’s also some Icelandic hikers, some kids skipping school, a concerned single mom, some EMTs, a cop and his dog, and another cop taking care of the first cop’s dog, and these characters don’t have any meaningful interaction.

None of these characters are remotely interesting and none of the performances are remotely funny. Some of the performances, like useless nepo baby O’Shea Jackson Jr./Li’l Ice Cube as drug dealer Daveed, are actively awful. Others, like Keri Russell’s single mom Sari, are just boring. Some are heartbreaking…like Ray Liotta as a drug dealer. Liotta is heartbreaking for no other reason than this is his last movie (he died last year) and goddamn it's not fair for Liotta to go out like this.

The biggest issue with Cocaine Bear though is the directing. Elizabeth Banks simply is not even an average director. Banks inability to bring coherence to this story, or to exploit the cavalcade of potential visual gags a bear high on cocaine in the 1980s presents, is a crime against comedy and cinema, and displays a lack of talent, skill and imagination that is astonishing.

Banks is a charming actress but her filmmaking abilities are none existent. Like fellow actress-turned-director Olivia Wilde, Banks has been held up by Hollywood, ever desperate for fashionable female filmmaking talent, as some sort of serious and skilled craftswoman behind the camera.

But Banks’ directing filmography, which consists of a shitty Pitch Perfect sequel and an even shittier remake of Charlie’s Angels, reveals a woman who, like Olivia Wilde, was elevated in Hollywood through a “leg up” diversity program but has absolutely no business helming a major motion picture.

That Banks waits until the end credits of Cocaine Bear to utilize the 1983 song “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” is cinematic malpractice, as is the fact that she never uses Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” at all.

Banks will get more chances to direct because she’s a woman and Hollywood is stupid, but make no mistake, she has no idea what she’s doing.

Cocaine Bear doesn’t just fail as a comedy, it fails as a horror picture too. The horror aspect of the movie is mostly just gore, and yes there is some of that but none of it is particularly clever or shocking or even interesting. It all feels perfunctory and rather cheap and not in a “this is a fun B Movie” way. It also doesn’t help that the CGI bear used throughout is so abysmal as to be embarrassing.

The most telling thing about how flaccid, unfunny and non-entertaining I found Cocaine Bear is the fact that it only runs 95 minutes but I found myself checking how much time was left in the movie from the 12-minute mark on.

If you were thinking about checking out Cocaine Bear just for shits and giggles in the hopes of finding a crisp comedy to tickle your funny bone…think again. Cocaine Bear is a grin and bear it movie without the grin and with a shitty CGI bear, that will put your sense of humor deep into hibernation. You’d have a considerably better time freebasing cocaine with a bearskin rug than watching this lifeless piece of dreck.

So, to answer the eternal question…does a bear shit in the woods? The answer is “yes”…and the steaming pile it leaves behind is less odious than Cocaine Bear.  

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie's Angels Box Office Bomb

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 28 seconds

WOKE HOLLYWOOD GETS BURNED BY CHARLIE’S ANGELS BOX OFFICE BOMB

The new Charlie’s Angels movie is more proof that woke feminist films are box office poison.

Charlie’s Angels, a reboot of the old 70’s tv show and the early 2000’s movies that stars Kristen Stewart, of Twilight fame, along with relative unknowns Naomi Scott and Ella Balinski, hit theaters last weekend with blockbuster ambitions and a defiant “girl power” message. Not surprisingly, the film opened with a resounding thud and fell decidedly flat as evidenced by its paltry $8.6 million box office.

Elizabeth Banks, who wrote and directed the movie, unabashedly declared it to be a feminist enterprise filled with “sneaky feminist ideas”. 

Banks says of Charlie’s Angels,

“One of the statements this movie makes is that you should probably believe women.”

The films star, Kristen Stewart, said of the movie, “It’s kind of like a ‘woke’ version.”

Charlie’s Angels’ failure is just the most recent evidence that woke feminist films are box office poison. The film’s financial floundering comes on the heels of the cataclysmic, franchise-destroying performance of another big budget piece of pro-feminist propaganda, Terminator: Dark Fate, which sank at the box office like an Austrian-accented cybernetic android into a vat of molten steel. Hasta la vista, woke baby.

There have been a plethora of like-minded girl power movies released in 2019 that have produced similarly dismal results at the box office.

One issue with many of these ill-fated woke films is that, like previous feminist flops Ghostbusters(2016) and Ocean’s 8, they are little more than remakes of male movies with females swapped in. These derivative films are the product of a craven corporatism entirely devoid of any originality or creative thought.

For example, the social justice geniuses in Hollywood decided this year it would be a good idea to remake two movies that no one wanted remade, Mel Gibson’s What Women Want (2000) and Steve Martin and Michael Caine’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1998), except this time with female leads. To the shock of no one with half a brain in their head, What Men Want with Taraji P. Henson, and The Hustle, with Rebel Wilson And Ann Hathaway, resoundingly flopped.

This year’s Book Smart, directed by Olivia Wilde, was little more than a rehash of the 2007 Jonah Hill and Micheal Cera smash-hit Superbad. Replacing Hill and Cera with two teenage girls as the protagonists in the formulaic film did not inspire audiences, as indicated by the film’s anemic domestic box office of $22 million.

Original movies with feminist themes fared no better than their re-engineered woke cinematic sisters. Late Night, a feminist comedy/drama starring Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling, made a paltry $15 million domestically, while the painfully politically correct Charlize Theron vehicle, Long Shot, raked in a flaccid $30 million.

As evidenced by these failures, audiences of both sexes are obviously turned off by Hollywood’s ham-handed attempts at woke preaching and social justice pandering. The movie-going public is keenly aware that these woke films are not about entertainment or even artistic expressions, but rather virtue signaling and posing within the Hollywood bubble.

The female stars involved in these failing feminist projects, in front of and behind the camera, have a built in delusional defense though that immunizes them from their cinematic failures…they can always blame misogyny!

The woke in Hollywood are forever on the search for a scapegoat to relieve them of accountability, as it is never their fault that their movies fail. In the case of these female-led movies, the women involved never have to own their failures because they reflexively point their fingers in horror at the angry, knuckle-dragging men, who out of misogynist spite don’t shell out beaucoup bucks to go see their abysmally awful girl power movies.

Elizabeth Banks got an early start in the men-blaming game even before Charlie’s Angels came out when she told Australia’s Herald Sun,

“Look, people have to buy tickets to this movie, too. This movie has to make money. If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”

Of course, men will go see women in action movies, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel being two prime examples of highly successful female action movies, but fear not, Elizabeth Banks dropped some feminist knowledge to counter that uncomfortable fact when she said,  

“They (men) will go and see a comic book movie with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel because that’s a male genre.”

So even when men go see a female led action film, they are only doing so because it is a “male genre”, got that?  What a convenient way to avoid responsibility…with Elizabeth Banks it is heads, she wins, and tails, men lose.

Banks preemptively blaming men for not being interested in seeing Charlie’s Angels is also odd because she has also openly stated that “women…are the audience for this film” and that she wanted to “make something that felt important to women and especially young girls”. And yet it isn’t just men staying away from Charlie’s Angels in droves, but everybody…including women!

What the feminists in woke Hollywood need to understand is that men and women will go see quality female-led movies, but they need to be good movies first and feminist movies a very distant second.

The problem with Charlie’s Angels, and the rest of these feminist films, is that their woke politics is their only priority, and entertainment value and artistic merit are at best just an after thought, if a thought at all.

My hope is that Hollywood will learn from the critical and financial failure of Charlie’s Angels and the rest of 2019’s feminist flops and in the future will refrain from making vacuous and vapid woke films and instead focus more on quality and originality and less on political correctness and pandering. Considering the continuous cavalcade of Hollywood’s atrociously dreadful girl power movies this year, I am not optimistic.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019