Midweek Update: The Refreshing Realism of 'Cocaine Bear'

Cocaine Bear is a very silly movie. It does exactly what it says on the tin: there’s a bear, and it does cocaine. The film is basically a comedy-slasher where the slasher is a bear on cocaine. That’s it. That’s the movie. And yet while the bear is clearly CGI (real enough to be convincing, not so real that you feel empathy for a wild animal), the rest of the movie is actors in the same space acting against each other. This may seem like a small thing, but apparently not!

COVID supercharged a lot of problems with Hollywood’s over reliance on CGI. On the one hand, CGI has it uses. CGI functions as the new matte paintings, which gives directors the ability to shoot on closed locations. One of the more impressive examples of this are the works of David Fincher, who uses CGI to recreate real locations because he doesn’t want to lose any time to weather conditions or some passerby ruining a take. But when COVID created travel restrictions, it exacerbated certain issues like trying to get actors all in the same location, and making that a physical location. This leads to a bunch of compositing where an actor on a green screen in Atlanta and an actor on a green screen in London can be put in the same scene. Elizabeth Olsen was surprised to learn that she’s in the same movie as John Krasinski, a man she’s never met.

While editing has always been able to play with some of these tricks (one of the reasons Season 4 of Arrested Development is such a pain to watch is you can tell how reliant it is on body doubles), CGI warps it all together in a stew where there isn’t a real thing to cling to. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania feels like the apotheosis of this trend with VFX artists noting how rushed and under-resourced they felt while also having to fix certain things in post.

So I found it oddly refreshing that Cocaine Bear is mostly just actors being funny together in a forest somewhere in Georgia. While there was probably a ball on a stick or something to denote the Cocaine Bear they needed to react to, that doesn’t bother me. That’s Godzilla acting, especially since it’s not like Cocaine Bear has dialogue or a personality beyond “Do cocaine, rip people apart.” Instead, you’ve got a great collection of performers in an outlandish situation and a savvy director in Elizabeth Banks who knows how to mine the scenes for maximum comedy.

In a previous Substack, I bemoaned the lack of comedies in theaters, and Cocaine Bear was one of the more joyous experiences I’ve had lately at a movie. The guy in the row behind me was literally stomping his feet he was laughing so hard. It’s not because the audiences thought that any part of this story was “real” (even though it’s based on true events) or that it had the most convincing VFX in the world. It’s because the premise is simple, sound, and you’ve got good actors playing against each other in a real setting and in the same location. Sure, it’s funny when Cocaine Bear shreds some hapless folks, but I also wouldn’t lose a scene of Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson Jr. and their terrific chemistry.

Is Cocaine Bear going to make a billion dollars? No, but neither is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and it didn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make Cocaine Bear.

What I’m Watching

I’ve started watching The Bear, and that pilot is fantastic. It grabs you right from the start and eschews labored exposition to root everything in visuals and character interactions. In some ways, its premise is very old-school sitcom (A successful person comes back home and interacts with a zany cast of characters) but now in the mold of prestige TV where there’s a lot more creative freedom than you’d ever have on network television.

The Mandalorian is back for Season 3, and it remains a very dumb and very watchable show. I’m grateful we had Andor so we now know what a genuinely great Star Wars TV series would look like, and now we’re back to the adventures of Mando and Baby Yoda going on quests, which is fine. The character motivations make zero sense, but that doesn’t seem to really matter as long as Mando is cool and Baby Yoda is adorable. That’s the show, and I know what I’m in for.

What I’m Reading

I finished reading Beloved last night, and it was excellent, but I need to take a break from hard reads for a bit. To recap, so far this year I’ve read (or re-read) To Kill a Mockingbird, Ducks, Night, All Quiet on the Western Front, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and now Beloved. These are all rightfully acclaimed works of literature, but I need to give my brain a rest, which is why I’m starting Oscar Wars! I’m sure Michael Schulman’s book is good (at least from what I’ve heard), but at the very least, I don’t think I’ll find it mentally and emotionally taxing because the Oscars are very silly.

In other reads:

• I found this article from Vox by Claire Porter Robbins about right-wing Israeli youth fascinating. Youth movements tend to lean left, but in Israel, they’re all about the right-wing, and the author posits some reasons that may be. Either way, it’s an important reminder that it’s impossible to simply lump all Jews together and say we all support whatever Israel is doing. It’s also a reminder of how easily the oppressed (Jews for most of their history) can become oppressors (the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians is abhorrent and it’s a mockery of everything Judaism claims to stand for).

• The Documentary World’s Identity Crisis by Reeves Wiedeman [Vulture] - As streamers ramped up their need for content (and thankfully seem to be backing off a bit to save money), documentaries started being funneled more in the direction of Reality TV, which may seem like a minor distinction, but there’s a big difference between concocting conflict between contestants and trying to massage true crime cases or societal ills into satisfying narratives that fit a predetermined structure. Speaking personally, I now look at docuseries with a lot more skepticism simply because I know the incentive of a streaming platform is to keep me tuned in as long as possible rather than pursue complicated truths.

What I’m Hearing

If Books Could Kill dropped a new Patreon-only episode today, but you can get the summed-up version below from the main feed. I don’t mean to keep harping on the New York Times’ poor journalism about trans kids, but the paper of record is clearly on the wrong side of history, and I’ve seen this play out before. We saw it in the run-up and aftermath of the Iraq War (lots of hand-wringing about whether or not Islam can exist if there are extremist Muslims in the world, a standard the Times didn’t seem to apply to any other religion despite all religions having extremists), and people older than me saw it in the 1980s and 90s with how the Times treated gay people. The difference now is that it’s a lot easier to push back and call out the Times for their bad articles.

What I’m Playing

I don’t know if Hogwarts Legacy is a “good” game in that it doesn’t seem to do anything groundbreaking, the writing is a bit flat (my dialogue options seem to be that I’m either the nicest guy or kind of a jerk), and there are some odd lighting quirks in dialogue scenes. But it’s also doing exactly the, “Here are quests in the Wizarding World and you need to complete them,” thing that I wanted, and honestly if I didn’t give myself a cutoff time, I would be playing the game into the wee hours.