Cocaine Bear

Like “Snakes on a Plane” and “We Bought a Zoo,” Elizabeth Banks's film provides exactly what the title promises. Then what?

As he points out, Cáit “says as much as she needs to say.” The camera constantly takes its cue from her darting gaze; the fact that she notices so much, and talks so little, is, for Seán, a virtue that he understands and shares. (So chronic is Heidi’s yearning for the mountains that she sleepwalks.) The home to which Cáit is sent, in contrast, seems like a genuine haven: a farmhouse owned by Seán (Andrew Bennett) and his wife, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), who takes one look at the new arrival, with her unwashed limbs, and runs her a hot bath. For the bear, I guess, except that C.G.I., despite its wondrous re-creation of flesh and fur, is less adept at pixelating a personality, and there is little here to match the appeal of Baloo, in “The Jungle Book” (1967), who consumed nothing more potent than prickly pear and pawpaw. Near the farm is a well, so clear and so still, like a magical source in a legend, that you can drink from it. Finally, you could recover with “The Quiet Girl,” which, with Oscar night just around the bend, is the last of the contenders to be released. Such was the case with “Snakes on a Plane” (2006), and it’s my forlorn duty to report that “Cocaine Bear” follows suit. It’s as if she were puzzled by her place in the modern world—shades of the dreamy kids in “Close.” (Is this a winking reference to “Little April Shower,” the daintiest scene in “Bambi”?) It’s as if Quentin Tarantino kicked off his career, in the early nineteen-nineties, with a tale of some dogs who visit an actual reservoir. This elemental sequence comes from a 1977 film, scarily titled “Day of the Animals,” and the joy of it is that the battling man is played by Leslie Nielsen, and that the movie is not—repeat, not—intended as a comedy. Why does the whole cast, including the kids, swear so freely and so loudly (“We’re fucked,” Henry cries), if not to advertise the amazingness of the main plot? As with “So I Married an Axe Murderer” (1993) and “We Bought a Zoo” (2011), “Cocaine Bear” is explained by its title. To that end, his son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), and a henchman, Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.), are dispatched to the great green wilds of Georgia.

In an age of big C-suite visions of streaming power and total global market domination, Universal Pictures has spent the first two months of 2023 seemingly ...

But most of the violence in Cocaine Bear is filmed with a perfunctory ugliness. The trick about the truly good schlock that you remember is there’s visceral joy in the viscera—a playfulness that invites audiences to indulge in bad taste. In its current diluted form, however, all I can warn is that it’s going to be a bad trip. It might not be the sign of a good movie, but it still could be solid schlock. It’s lovely that something so tasteless can still find a place in this theatrical (and social media) climate. It’s brutal, but it comes off with an air of desperation, like a salesman following you down the street insisting their product is pure. Yet rarely did the non-bear antics gain so much as a chuckle in my audience, save the bemusing energy of Henry (Christian Convery) and Dee De (Brooklynn Prince), two wide-eyed kids who discover a mountain of coke and then a bear in a sequence that plays like every 1980s anti-drugs PSA if it was… The picture should move like a black bear consumed with a Wall Street bro’s favorite vice. Liotta of course played one of cinema’s greatest coke heads in Goodfellas, who’s last day of freedom is a symphony of paranoia and kinetic madness. Yet that is how at least 70 pounds of pure Florida Snow ended up in the Georgian mountains of the Chattahoochee River and then, subsequently, in the belly of a 175-pound black bear. As aforementioned, Cocaine Bear is loosely based on the true story of Andrew C. But when about two-thirds of this grisly spectacle is populated by meat sacks who suck the oxygen out of almost every scene, even before the bear starts tearing them apart, it becomes a fatal problem.

Cocaine Bear, directed and produced by Pitch Perfect's Elizabeth Banks, is out in cinemas today (24th February) and is very loosely based on the real life story ...

(10 / 10)." [one person saying:](https://twitter.com/CinemaTweets1/status/1628966931515740161) "Thanks to a super-funny ensemble cast, a funnier script, and great direction from @ElizabethBanks, #CocaineBear is a f**king hit. [Another said:](https://twitter.com/cobtopsawyer/status/1628948843843788801) "#CocaineBear is exactly what you’d expect it to be, dumb fun! [ saying: ](https://twitter.com/geekinoutethan/status/1628912408017133568)"#CocaineBear is the most wild and f**king hilarious black comedy film! However, unlike in the film the real life bear is not known to have killed anyone. Whilst we were a little skeptical at first (it's a bear on drugs?), early viewers of Cocaine Bear have been loving the truly chaotic film.

You know the kind of movie Cocaine Bear is. It's what made films like Snakes On A Plane, Sharknado, and last years The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

Cocaine Bear delivers the goods that the trailer promised. It’s sort of film that will do well on streaming in front of a less discerning audience, just like the stoner movies of the early 2000s that became DVD blockbusters. Still, it’s too the cast’s credit that everyone seems to have understood what kind of comedy this is.

et them eat coke... In this raucous US comedy, wild bears and hooky-playing youngsters just gobble up the white stuff. If the thought of that appals you, ...

As a feminist-flavoured slice of populism it works far better than the 49-year-old’s embarrassing attempt to reboot Charlie’s Angels. Prince (devastatingly subtle in The Florida Project) was wasted The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. The smartest thing about Banks’ happily dim movie is the way it presents itself as a farce for boys (and tom-boys), then swerves in a different direction. In real life, the bear did not then go on a homicidal rampage. If the thought of that appals you, then just about everything that happens in actress An even more unfortunate black bear, in the Chattahoochee National Forest, found one of those bags.

This movie sinks way below other films where the title alone describes the only thing that happens, like “Snakes on a Plane,” “We Bought a Zoo” or ...

Set during the Reagan-era “Just Say No” period, “Cocaine Bear” hopes to remark on the demonization of drugs and it also seems to have something to say about how humans misunderstand the balance of nature. “Cocaine Bear” is like a dull butter knife against those two. “Jane,” the opening song, is an homage to “Wet Hot American Summer,” which Banks co-starred in and had the same Jefferson Starship opening tune. There’s a reference to Pines Mall, which is a little nod to “Back to the Future,” but who really cares? The best thing to say is that, even at an efficient 95 minutes, “Cocaine Bear” just snorts along. If you think it’s hysterical to see a bear do a bump off a severed leg stump, by all means, the movie theater is this way.

The new movie "Cocaine Bear" is a highly fictionalized account of a drug-smuggling drop gone wrong in September 1985. Here's the real story behind the film.

While Thornton’s loved ones guessed that he would have been proud of his infamous end — “He would have loved the concept of the warriors who fall from the sky,” his ex-wife told The Post in 1985 — others didn’t pay much mind to what Thornton might have thought in his final moments. “I hope he got a hell of a high out of that [cocaine].” Warden told The Post that the man ultimately responsible for “Cocaine Bear” is not featured after the first 10 minutes of the new movie. The ring was linked to a larger group called “The Company,” a syndicate running drugs and guns that authorities estimated in 1980 had more than 300 members and $26 million worth of boats and planes. Alonso, Georgia’s chief medical examiner, told reporters the bear was found “in a very badly decomposed state” at Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, surrounded by several plastic bags that authorities estimated had held about 75 pounds of cocaine. [2015 blog post](https://kyforky.com/blogs/journal/cocaine-bear) that the stuffed bear was once owned by country music star Waylon Jennings before it became a spectacle for shoppers. Three months later, after authorities discovered that a 175-pound bear had died of what the coroner described as a stomach “literally packed to the brim with cocaine,” the animal was given a new name in popular culture: “ When Thornton was found with a broken neck after his parachute did not open, he had on him $4,500 in cash, two pistols, two knives, ropes, food and more than 70 pounds of cocaine, according to police. “Cocaine Bear,” a dark comedy that premieres Friday in theaters nationwide, is a highly fictionalized account, in which the titular 500-pound American black bear eats a duffel bag of cocaine and goes on a killing rampage in Georgia, forcing tourists to band together to survive an apex predator hopped up on coke. 11, 1985, Fred Myers got up to shave at his home in Knoxville when he looked out his window and saw a body tangled up in a parachute. Long before he turned to drug smuggling and made a bear very famous, Thornton lived the high life. But Thornton’s life took a turn after he dropped out of college for a second time in 1966.

It is an incredible blast, especially if you have the benefit of seeing director Elizabeth Banks' insanely violent comedy/thriller with a packed crowd.

But while the suspense that had carried the film for the first two-thirds of its brisk running time dips as it nears its conclusion, “Cocaine Bear” still emerges as a hell of a high. Much of the joy of “Cocaine Bear” comes from the look of the creature itself, which is surprisingly high-tech for a cheesy, silly movie. (Both kids are great in a throwback way, reminiscent of the kinds of brash, profane characters you’d see in movies like “ [The Bad News Bears](/reviews/the-bad-news-bears-1976)” or “ [The Goonies](/reviews/the-goonies-1985).” The boy’s reaction to discovering one of these illegal bundles is not fear, but rather a cheerful: “Let’s sell drugs together!”) They include a pair of mismatched buddy drug dealers ( [Alden Ehrenreich](/cast-and-crew/alden-ehrenreich) and O’Shea Jackson Jr.); their humorless boss ( [Ray Liotta](/cast-and-crew/ray-liotta) in his final film role, recalling one of his signature performances in “ [Goodfellas](/reviews/great-movie-goodfellas-1991)”); and a police detective from the Kentucky town where the smuggler’s plane eventually crashed (Isiah Whitlock Jr., perfectly deadpan as ever). The few times “Cocaine Bear” injects even a meager amount of sentimentality, the pacing starts to lag. [Jimmy Warden](/cast-and-crew/jimmy-warden) has taken the basic facts—a 175-pound Georgia black bear ingested some cocaine that a drug smuggler dropped from an airplane in 1985—and imagined what might have happened if the bear hadn’t died, but rather sampled the stuff and gotten hooked.

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And now, Welsh playwright Gary Owen offers a contemporary take on Romeo and Juliet in the Dorfman. Are they no longer a threat to the public? One of the juiciest showbiz stories of the past 12 months has to be the publishing of the scathing texts Eva Green sent about an exec producer of one of her movies. Catch one of Ireland’s biggest new rock bands a week after the release of their new record, Cuts & Bruises. Don’t lose all hope, though: We Have a Ghost is at least written and directed by the brilliant horror-comedy filmmaker Christopher Landon (of Happy Death Day and Freaky fame), who has long cornered the market in camp creepiness. Makkai’s blockbuster novel The Great Believers, charting the impact of the Aids crisis on a group of young men, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. A second showing for a highly acclaimed exhibition terminated by the second lockdown. Coco Mellors’ debut novel, about the relationship between a beautiful young British artist and her older, ad agency boss husband, is a book made for binge reading. Using a limited palette of blacks and browns, the British painter’s imaginary portraits of Black subjects play brilliantly not only with the conventions of Old Master paintings, but the cultural factors governing the way we perceive the world. Hockney was involved in its creation, and the graphic and theatrical nature of his art suits this large-scale animated interpretation, with an ever-changing barrage of colour and imagery bathing not just the vast walls, but the wide-eyed audience. Whether you find yourself under a sand dune, walking in on a black mass or behind the desk in some seedy van-hire office it’s as though the original occupants have only just left the building. But that’s not all that features in this week’s Arts Agenda, The Independent’s guide to the best cultural activities each and every weekend.

The greatest joke of this blood-spattered horror-comedy from Elizabeth Banks is that it exists.

That “Cocaine Bear” is cautious about touching on this theme is understandable, maybe even preferable. And the script becomes dutifully sentimental at the end with characters forced to say things like “You’re more than a drug dealer. At one point, Cocaine Bear sniffs a hint of white powder and emerges with renewed strength. Early in the movie there’s a clip of the old “This is your brain on drugs” ad, a reminder that the story takes place against the backdrop of the drug war of the 1980s, a catastrophic policy failure with severe human ramifications that we are still living with. At its best, “Cocaine Bear” has the feel of an inside joke. Inspired by the slasher films of the 1980s, not to mention great horror-comedies from that era like the “Evil Dead” films, Banks grasps the comic potential of the gross-out. Banks doesn’t always dole out the viscera artfully (better to follow a leg with an arm, not another leg) but she commits to the too-muchness necessary for comedy. In fact, “Cocaine Bear” too often feels like a one-joke movie, stretched thin. After a pratfall in a plane leads a smuggler to drop a ton of drugs on the mountains of Georgia, a bear discovers it, snorts it up and turns into a mix of Tony Montana and Jason Voorhees. The plot twists can seem irrelevant, including a betrayal that has the impact of a soft sneeze. While it beats out “M3gan” in levels of gruesomeness, “Cocaine Bear” doesn’t have that film’s mean streak or moments of acid weirdness. Whereas “M3gan” steered clear of too much onscreen violence, angling for a PG-13 rating, “Cocaine Bear” wallows in it.

From Pusha T to Jefferson Starship, here's every song in the Cocaine Bear soundtrack to fulfil your drug-fuelled playlist needs.

Later, a drug dealer duo (played by Solo‘s Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson Jr.) join the fray, desperate to track down more of the bags that have been strewn across the Georgia countryside. You can see a list of every track that plays in Cocaine Bear below: These innocent bystanders include two schoolchildren playing truant in the woods – and the search party that goes to find them (led by outdoorsy mum Sari, played by Keri Russell).

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The movie seems destined for internet infamy, but doesn't live up to the promise of its viral trailer.

The stage is set, then, for a cast of wacky characters to descend on Blood Mountain to retrieve the gear. Following the incident, the bear was stuffed and displayed in the wonderfully named Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington. In the heat of the maulings, the film shifts from comic to disturbing: Intestines are exposed; heads roll. The story goes that a police officer-turned-drug smuggler hurled several duffle bags of cocaine from a plane and then met his own demise while trying to parachute from the craft himself. The film just doesn’t land right, and you can’t help but feel that it was manufactured just to be chopped up for a viral YouTube trailer. And [who wouldn’t want to see](https://twitter.com/SamuelAAdams/status/1628378464431620096?s=20) a bear on a drug-fueled rampage?

Movie Review: Directed by Elizabeth Banks, 'Cocaine Bear' is a loosely based-on-fact account of a bear that eats a mountain of cocaine and then goes on a ...

VHS is a thing of the past, and so is the late show and maybe even the whole concept of discovering things. They have to fail first and then get reclaimed by us through random discovery, preferably by popping in a dusty VHS cassette out of curiosity or turning on the late show. The mid-’80s was the height of Spielbergian kids’ adventures, but it was also the height of a particularly baggy and brutal period of slasher flicks, and Cocaine Bear carries whiffs of both. We’re here for the bear and the cocaine, and the film doesn’t skimp on that front either. appear to have set out to make a cult movie on purpose. Like the characters, it wanders around a bit too aimlessly, but by the end you feel like you’ve actually been somewhere. Sometimes the bear sneaks up on our characters like a grim woodland menace. By doing in one of the bigger names in the cast with their opening scene, Banks and writer Jimmy Warden slyly place us in a state of uncertainty over who will make it intact and who will not. Or the two low-level hoodlums, Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), sent off by their boss (Ray Liotta) to retrieve the missing cocaine from Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia? Then he buckles in his parachute, puts on his sunglasses, kisses off the empty cockpit, and promptly hits his head and drops lifelessly into the clouds. It also takes a few cues from its time period, not just in the vintage anti-drug PSAs that open the picture but in pace and style. Elizabeth Banks’s action-comedy-thriller is loosely based on a 1985 incident when an American black bear ingested a massive amount of cocaine and was found dead soon thereafter.

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On Sunday night, Tres Generaciones Tequila hosted the All-Star Weekend Wrap Party in Salt Lake City, featuring a performance by 2 Chainz. Thirty filmmakers were shortlisted across six categories with six winners announced on the night, receiving a range of cash prizes and Sony Digital Imaging equipment. Aniplex of America and Crunchyroll held a L.A. On Saturday, Netflix hosted Poguelandia, an immersive event in Huntington Beach to celebrate the upcoming third season of Outer Banks. In the student filmmaker section, Mateo Salas (Colombia, Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia), The Sun of the River won the fiction category and Seonghoon Eric Park (Republic of Korea, Boston University), In Cod We Trust won non-fiction; Pan Tianhong (China Mainland), Homework for Winter Vacation won the Future Format competition. carpet for the season two premiere of their Peacock show on Wednesday. On Thursday, Tribeca co-founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal and The New Yorker editor David Remnick hosted a screening at the Tribeca Screening Room in NYC for Oscar-nominated short films Stranger at the Gate and Night Ride. on Wednesday, with new castmembers Jennifer Garner, James Marsden, Zoë Chao and Tyrel Jackson Williams. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted a special private screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary on Wednesday, followed by a Q&A with director Laura Poitras and film subject Nan Goldin. Jabari Banks, Adrian Holmes, Cassandra Freeman, Olly Sholotan, Coco Jones, Akira Akbar, Jimmy Akingbola, Jordan L. Creo announced the winners for the first edition of the Sony Future Filmmaker Awards during a black-tie awards ceremony on Wednesday on the Sony Pictures Studio lot. Here’s a look at this week’s biggest premieres, parties and openings in Los Angeles and New York, including red carpets for Daisy Jones and the Six,

"You don't know how weird it is to do interviews all day, and people on the news are like, 'So, O'Shea, tell us about this bear on cocaine.

What a country." He's a giant dude from New Zealand dude decked out in black spandex and a bear head," Jackson Jr. "He's a great dude and made my job as an actor way easier. "I heard about it via a tweet," he explained. I'm very pleased with how people are receiving the news that there's a movie about a bear on cocaine," he added. "There are popcorn movies, but then there's cinema, as they say, and I want to be taken seriously in both. " She's a player-coach who knows what it is to be in your shoes and what she wouldn't want a director to tell her. "The online presence of Cocaine Bear is something that, as an actor, as a creator, that's what you want. "When I found out she was directing, it was like, 'She knows what this needs. It has already grossed $2 million in previews and looks set to secure an opening weekend in the region of $15 million. and Cocaine Bear, one of the most talked about films of 2023 so far.

'Cocaine Bear', starring Ray Liotta, is Elizabeth Banks' ridiculous comedy-horror film about a black bear in a cocaine-fuelled frenzy. Read our review here.

And yet, beneath the primary motivators of being able to put up with (and admittedly enjoy) a film about a charged-up bear, Banks manages to squeeze in at least a few moments of family and friendship-driven poignancy too. I would argue that Cocaine Bear is, at heart, a comedy, with the other half of its comedy-horror genre coming primarily in moments of homage, pastiche and parody (even at one point to the bloody westerns of yore). It tasted, as you can imagine, but I felt it was representative of a film not taking itself too seriously, and I obligingly drank the lot. Cocaine Bear tells of an American black bear who comes across several brown packages stuffed to the brim with the drug of choice of the 1980s, scoffs the lot, and tears through a Georgia national state park. and the late Ray Liotta in one of his final roles, does not hide from what it is: a film about a bear on cocaine. In 1985, an American black bear consumed more than 30kg of cocaine that had fallen from a drug smuggler’s light aircraft over the Tennessee wilderness.

Maybe a deadly beast hopped up on nose candy is exactly what the climate movement needs.

(Congrats for composting, the planet is still on fire!) In the hyper-dilated eyes of our rampaging ursine, though, drug peddlers and tree-huggers are one and the same. In fact, the literary critic Fredric Jameson has argued that seemingly lowbrow works of “genre fiction”—like detective novels or space operas—are able to introduce their readers to serious topics precisely because they are low-brow. But in an atmosphere in which it is all too easy to feel suffocated by climate anxiety, Elizabeth Banks’ film cuts through our ecological malaise. Though if I learned anything from Cocaine Bear, it is that squaring up with a coked-out Ursus americanus is not a good idea.) My classrooms are mostly populated by bright-eyed Environmental Studies majors who want to save the world, and yet watching films and documentaries about ecological catastrophes often seems to dampen their enthusiasm for activism. What is most interesting about the film is its off-kilter environmentalism. Almost all environmental discourse in America is predicated on the old enlightenment idea that knowledge is power: that if we simply know more about humanity’s impact on the environment, we’ll change our behaviors and attitudes. Indeed, if Cocaine Bear violates our expectations about what environmentalism looks like, it is because American consumers are accustomed to environmental discourse that is characterized by piety and a dash of mournfulness. But the thing about Frank was that if you lined up 20 dudes off the street and were told “one of these guys feeds cocaine to pigeons for a living,” you would have picked Frank 10 out of 10 times. And in a nation populated by hucksters and con artists, it is refreshing to have someone sell you exactly what you were promised. The bear turns the mountain red in pursuit of more cocaine. Of course, there is really only one reason to see Cocaine Bear, and that is because you would like to see what happens when a bear does cocaine.

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The real-life backstory concerns an American black bear who, in 1985, was found dead in Georgia woodland after ingesting a cache of smuggler’s cocaine. This hour-long immersive art show at Lightroom, a new venue in King’s Cross, showcases the best of the Yorkshire artist’s 50-year career with a specially commissioned musical score. In the movie, however, we’re immediately immersed into the “killer animal” genre (especially the

Now in cinemas, Cocaine Bear has quickly become one of this year's most talked about films. Directed by Elizabeth Banks, the film tells the tale of a ...

And I loved that idea of telling this underdog story, with the big hook of the rampaging bear." It's an incredible sense of power that I get to take the audience on this journey, on this ride. "I really enjoyed the power that directing this kind of visceral, tense, exciting, funny movie allowed me to have with the audience. In real life, "Pablo Escobear" has now gained something of a cult status in certain areas in the US - and inevitably wider now following the release of the film. "Ray is a legend in the industry," says Jackson Jr (Just Mercy, Straight Outta Compton). He plays drug kingpin Syd, who is trying to retrieve Thornton's stash with the help of his son Eddie (Ehrenreich) and fixer Daveed (Jackson Jr). "We also were able to get the police reports from when Andrew's body was found and we use a lot of information from various sources and put it into the movie," she says. "And I thought, wow, this script is actually an incredible redemption story for that bear, who was collateral damage in this crazy war on drugs." "A bear dying of a drug overdose is really sad," says writer Jimmy Warden. Officials said the animal, which had been dead for about four weeks by the time it was discovered, ended up eating several million dollars' worth of the drug and that its stomach was "packed to the brim". I read this script and thought, well, there's no greater metaphor for chaos than a bear that's high on cocaine." It is not for the faint-hearted: there's blood and guts and very grisly ends (pun intended), and a bear snorting cocaine wherever it can get it, including severed limbs.