cocaine

Cocaine Bear (2023)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

I’m not sure how I didn’t recognize from promotional materials that Scott Seiss, best known online for his character of a retail employee who responds to F.A.C.s (that’s an acronym I just made up for “Frequent Asshole Comments”) the way that every retail employee wishes that they could, was the male paramedic in Cocaine Bear. He’s in pretty much every trailer! Further, I have no idea how I still didn’t put that together after seeing this video, in which he hypes Cocaine Bear in the same manner, noting that you don’t have to have done homework before seeing the movie and that there won’t be a dozen thinkpieces exploring the possible meanings behind the film’s ending. There’s no long-beloved intellectual property of which this is an adaptation (unless you count the actual 1985 events which very loosely inspired the plot), no secret clues about who’s going to be the villain in the next MCU feature, nothing to inspire a MatPat Film Theory video. Cocaine Bear is just a comedy-horror-thriller about a bear who does cocaine, and the people who find themselves caught in its freakout. And it’s a delight. 

Multiple story threads find themselves woven together from their disparate origins in the opening act of the film, as disparate parties are drawn together to Blood Mountain, a Georgia peak located in the Chattahoochee National Forest. After a drug drop goes south due to the delivery man bashing his skull on an airplane bulkhead while attempting to exit and parachute, a number of interested people become invested in trying to find the drugs that are missing on the mountain, as well as the law enforcement in pursuit of the traffickers. Kingpin Syd (Ray Liotta) sends his lieutenant Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) to the national park to find and recover the duffel bags, and tells him to bring along Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), Syd’s son who left the family business at the urging of his recently deceased wife Joanie, which the sociopathic Syd thinks means that his boy will be ready to get back into the trade. In Tennessee where the dead parachuter’s body has landed, Detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr. of The Wire) leaves his new dog with Deputy Reba (Ayoola Smart) as he travels across state lines and out of his jurisdiction in pursuit of Syd, who he’s been chasing for years. Local middle schooler Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friend Henry (Christian Convery) skip school so that she can paint a picture of the park’s Secret Falls, an outing she was supposed to take with her mother Sari (Keri Russell) but which has been postponed due to Sari’s boyfriend inviting the two of them to Nashville for the weekend instead. At the park itself, Ranger Liz (character actress Margo Martindale) is preparing for a park inspection by Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), on whom she has a crush. And, of course, deep in the woods, there’s a mama bear who’s developing a taste for nose candy. 

As I was leaving the auditorium after the screening, a woman behind me declared, “Well, that sucked.” My viewing companion was also less than enthused on our drive away from the theater, although he was bemused by my passionate defense of the film. I’ve seen and heard criticism of the story, and while I wouldn’t exactly call the film’s composition an elegant puzzle box, it was very fun and moved at a great pace; I was never bored, and there was never a prolonged period of time between laughs. Not every joke landed for everyone in the audience, but there were some jokes that didn’t provoke a laugh from me while others produced a laugh only from me, and that’s a good balance for a comedy to strike. Maybe in future viewings I’ll find that some of the punchlines that didn’t land this time will land the next time, and I can say definitively that this is a comedy that I will watch again, which isn’t something that I say very often. I’ve long been a fan of campy, self-aware horror comedies, and long been opposed to movies that attempt to ape that specific genre and do it poorly; Cocaine Bear manages to walk that tightrope deftly, mostly by not calling attention to itself. 

I’ve lost count of how many movies and TV shows of the past decade attempted to cash in on nostalgia for the 1980s, but this film manages to capture the quintessence of movies from that era and combine it with the modern cinematic eye in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. With a 1985 setting, a lazier filmmaker would fill the soundtrack with songs from that year specifically and exclusively, but there’s greater verisimilitude in the text by including music that was recent and not just current. The film starts out with the Jefferson Starship track “Jane” (1979) and includes the 1984 track “The Warrior” by Scandal and featuring Patty Smyth, 1978’s “Too Hot ta Trot” by the Commodores, and even “On the Wings of Love” by Jeffrey Osborne (1982), which is plot-relevant in the scene in which it appears. It’s a small thing, but I appreciate it and the way that it evokes and inscribes its time period without worshipping it, like IT or Stranger Things. We’re not presented with an endless parade of 1980s pop culture or media—Remember Ghostbusters? Remember Nightmare on Elm Street? Remember G.I. Joe?—and, in fact, there’s very little reference to the media of the time at all. Outside of the use of actual contemporary media footage taken when Andrew Thornton landed, parachute undeployed, in an old man’s driveway and the appearance of a few of the era’s anti-drug PSAs, the only material reference to contemporary events comes in the form of the delivery of a new-and-improved Smokey the Bear stand-up to the ranger station. You’re not taken out of the reality of the moment because the period elements draw attention to themselves; you just exist there. There’s something that’s just so true about Keri Russell’s pink jumpsuit and the way that her purse strap has a big knot tied in it to shorten it; I don’t know what’s not to love. It’s grisly, fun, and campy, and I loved it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

White Girl (2016)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

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Is White Girl a smartly pointed indictment of white privilege or an exploitative morality tale built around teenage hedonism and unwarranted sexual shaming in which a young woman is blamed for ruining a man’s life with her feminine wiles?  Does it help ease the film’s leering misogyny to know that it was written, directed, and produced by a woman? Are the characters & plot developed enough beyond 2D devices so that answering these questions could lead to anything more than eyerolling boredom? White Girl is such an obvious, clumsy button pusher that I’m mostly just annoyed that I allowed it to push my buttons. Somewhere out there a young college student is about to find their favorite movie in this cheap indie provocation, but I couldn’t get past the fact that it was participating in the very thing it was supposedly condemning. Every generation needs their version of Kids, I guess. The trick is catching yours when you’re still young enough to gasp instead of yawn.

Two white college students move into a predominately POC neighborhood and make fast friends & lovers out of the young, small fry drug dealers who work the corner outside of their apartment. Coming from a world of unpaid internships, liberal arts colleges, and money-filled care packages from naïve parents, they’re ill prepared for the real-life consequences of their actions and treat the lives of the men they fuck like playgrounds, a silly summertime indulgence. Luring their newfound cohorts outside their comfort zones, the girls push them into the dangerous territory of moving large quantities of product in wealthier, whiter circles. They also attract an obnoxious amount of attention to themselves & urge their beaus to start dipping into their own product (mostly cocaine, or, in the movie’s vernacular, “white girl”) instead of sticking to their normal routine of blunts & bong rips. This, of course, leads to a world of legal troubles, addiction, and clashes with bigger fish dealers in much bigger ponds. The film believes the tragedy it inevitably generates is a revelation of the way the white & wealthy are treated differently in a heartless system that targets POC. Mostly it just delivers the exact clichés you’d expect from miles away, revealing nothing that wasn’t already obvious from the start.

The main problem with White Girl is that it gleefully participates in the very evils it intends to expose. The film takes aim at a world of men who have a predatory sexual eye for young women’s bodies, but it leers slack jawed at them in the very same way. It wants to humanize the disenfranchised kid on the corner, but does so by making them the most blatant & ham-fisted dealer with a heart of gold cliché imaginable. It strives so hard to call out wealthy white woman privilege that it slips backwards into an old-fashioned mode of misogyny where women are to blame for men’s downfalls because they’re too sexually desirable to resist. Worse yet, the film often plays directly into the fears of casually racist parents when they send their darling baby girls into the big bad city for college. What if they move into a “sketchy” neighborhood, fall into casual sex & hard drugs routines with older men, and expose their naked bodies in public for easy popularity? Well, I never. White Girl wants to indulge in the sex & drugs & rock n’ roll lifestyle for easy hedonism, condemn the audience for leering along with it, make a point about white women using POC neighborhoods as consequence-free playgrounds, and then use POC narratives as consequence-free playgrounds. In so many ways the film participates in the very same entitlement it aims to indict.

I don’t mean to sound entirely negative here just because I personally had such an adverse reaction to the film’s casual provocations. I’d usually put in an effort to seek out some redeeming value in the film’s visual craft or occasionally effective performances, but the thematic fumbling left me with such a bitter taste that I don’t have the energy. I don’t believe White Girl is a despicable work worthy of any think piece outrage or moral protest. Its intentions in pointing out systemic racism & the harmful naïveté of unchecked privilege seems to be in the right place. It just chose an oddly compromised tone & outsider POV to tell its story, to the point where it tied its own shoelaces together on a screenplay level before it hit the ground stumbling. The film occasionally finds some interesting ideas in its clumsy button pushing, but doesn’t stand strong or confident enough to support its own convictions. If you’re going to get on a soapbox for a Big Message tirade, you should probably get your story straight before your rant begins. Self-contradiction makes for weak politics, especially if you’re using those politics to get away with indulging in a garish good time moments before getting serious.

-Brandon Ledet