'Cocaine Bear' And The Curse Of A Good Trailer
#215: "Cocaine Bear," Oscars Race, "The Shop Around The Corner," "Roma"
Edition 215:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
This week: “The bear man…it like did cocaine!” Here’s what happens when one of the wildest movie trailers in years gets turned into a star-studded movie. Plus, my update on the state of the key races ahead of the Academy Awards. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Disney is making a movie out of its haunted mansion ride and I am…confused.
Cocaine Bear
If I had it my way, movie trailers would not be allowed to be longer than thirty seconds. A “teaser,” as it’s known in the biz. Show us the cast, the vibe, and some pretty cinematography, then leave us guessing.
Instead, movie trailers of today have become an art form all their own — three minute short films complete with their own five-second teaser immediately proceeding. These days, our trailers have trailers.
I’m not immune to their charms. At various times in the four-plus year lifespan of this newsletter I have declared certain ones to be the best movie in a given year (who can forget that first A Star Is Born trailer, my goodness).
What I’m trying to say is that often the trailer itself is the product, not the marketing. A very small percentage of the millions of people who watch your trailer are actually going to see the full movie, but a punchy trailer can absolutely boost business (think about the success story of M3GAN, or the entire career of Jordan Peele). That’s why production companies don’t mind spoiling plot lines, or showing the best jokes and moments. They don’t worry about inserting footage in a trailer that’s not in the actual movie (in the case of Star Wars: Rogue One, it was drastically different), or completely altering the tone of a movie to make the trailer more marketable (I wrote about this in 2018 with White Boy Rick but more recently The Fabelmans comes to mind).
Cocaine Bear had a fantastic trailer. It got me hyped. Maybe that should be a warning. Rather than signal a great movie to come, in this case it was more an indication that the idea had about three minutes of good material to support it.
The entire story, to the extent there is one, can be summed up in the title. The true events the movie is based on — of a man in 1985 parachuting to his death with pounds of cocaine on him and then a bear being found eating it all and dying — would’ve made for a great SNL sketch (a three-minute one), if cocaine had been something people could joke about back then rather than simply indulge.
That initial shock of an “apex predator, high on cocaine” cannot sustain a 95-minute runtime. The plot is essentially throwing more and more characters into their own confrontations with the beast and getting their reactions. Admittedly, it’s an elite cast for shocked faces: Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Margo Martindale (the MVP of the movie), Jessie Tyler Ferguson, and a posthumous Ray Liotta, whose final performance and final moments on camera will forever be him clutching a duffel bag of cocaine being eaten by a bear. Seems fitting.
In order to amplify the crowd reaction, this movie contains a surprising and (I’d say) excessive amount of body gore. Hands, feet and faces in various stages of chewed on, shot and dragged over concrete. All of it is played for comedy — remember, all horror must now be ironic — but that doesn’t mean it’s not gross.
The CGI of the titular bear is … spotty at best, which makes taking the whole thing less seriously an easier task. Obviously there’s no easy way to practically act opposite a bear, cocaine or not, but at times it is abundantly clear that the actors are interacting with a green screen tennis ball. The best moments of the movie, I dare say, are those where the bear isn’t even present. In particular, every moment of Martindale’s park ranger before her grizzly (pun intended) demise.
The overarching point here is that none of this matters. Almost 20 million people watched that trailer, and it would be hard to pin down any other reason for box office enthusiasm about a movie that immediately cuts out the child and family audiences. It seems apparent the trailer is the reason the movie has made $34 million in its opening week (against a CGI-heavy $30 million budget).
I suppose that makes it a success for Elizabeth Banks’ third effort as a director. The Hunger Games actress has previously made a sequel (Pitch Perfect 2) and a reboot (Charlie’s Angels), which also made profits on their budgets. If all three projects fall somewhere between artistic disappointment and utter failure, that can be excused. If her attempts to create comedy have universally fallen flat, so be it. All she needs to do is make sure whoever cut that trailer gets a big fat raise.
Something New
Oscars Campaign Update! Since there aren’t new movies to talk about this week, I thought I’d catch you up on the state of the awards races, to give you the best chance to beat me in our annual Oscars pool. Sidenote:
IF I DIDN’T MAKE IT CLEAR BEFORE, THE OSCARS POOL IS 100% FREE TO ENTER.
I’m paying the prize pool out of pocket, equal to $2 times number of entries. So stuff that ballot box!
Anyway, this week we got a sense of where voters’ heads might be at with the results of the Producer’s Guild Awards (PGAs), the British Academy awards (BAFTAs), and the Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG awards). Namely, that Everything Everywhere All At Once appears to be an almost unsurmountable favorite to win Best Picture. The latest betting odds I’m seeing have them at -750 (you’d need a $750 bet to win $100 on them). A distant second right now is surprisingly All Quiet On The Western Front after winning Best Film at the BAFTAs, but they’re going off at 11-to-1. If the bizarro family thriller does win the top prize, it will be the second year in a row my No. 1 ranked movie of the year wins Best Picture (CODA in a shocker last year).
The movie will almost definitely carry Ke Huy Quan to an easy win in Best Supporting Actor, which literally every human with a pulse is rooting for, and Michelle Yeoh’s SAG win has her a nose ahead of TÀR’s Cate Blanchett for Best Actress. Brendan Fraser from The Whale is now in the poll position for Best Actor slightly ahead of Austin Butler’s Elvis impersonation. It’s looking like the crime of zero Oscars for Colin Farrell will continue for at least another year.
There are still a few preliminary awards shows scheduled between now and March 12, so things could change, but it’s time to do your research and then cast your ballot!
Something Old
The Shop Around The Corner (1940): This Golden Era romantic comedy was the inspiration for Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, and despite coming along almost 60 years earlier, the gender politics in this version may actually be less questionable than the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan classic.
Nothing says tall, midwestern matinee idol like Jimmy Stewart, which is why here he plays a salesman at a department store in…Budapest (?), who answers a newspaper ad to become pen pals with an anonymous woman. Could it be the coworker who he always fights with in real life? Nawww. As with movies of the era, it can come across theatrical and there’s a tinge of slapstick to it, but the script is actually pretty razor sharp, with surprising comedy from the supporting cast and loads of charisma from Stewart and Margaret Sullivan. Ultimately it’s a cute rom-com through which a viewer can see the foundation being built for the next 100 years of the genre. Everything is stolen from somewhere, and for romantic comedies, this is that somewhere.
Something to Stream
Roma (Netflix): For all of my endless criticism of the Netflix house style — which has all but ground the romantic comedy genre into dust and dropped viewer expectations of quality down through the floor across genres — I think the saddest element of the streamer’s failed original film experiment is that way its works by truly exceptional auteur directors have absolutely zero staying power. This week in conversation I mentioned Roma, the presumptive favorite to win Best Picture in 2019 before it was ousted by Green Book, and the person I was talking to said they’d never heard of it.
How many of these Netflix Best Picture nominees have you seen? How many have you even heard of:
Roma, The Irishman, Marriage Story, Mank, The Trial Of The Chicago 7, Don’t Look Up, The Power Of The Dog, All Quiet On The Western Front
I would guess that even those movies which you have seen, the amount of time you’ve spent talking or thinking about them in the time since their release is pretty close to zero. There’s some fundamental truth there about movies released direct to streaming, which is a much broader argument, but for now I’m here to direct your attention back to Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece about the hard life of a maid in Mexico in the 1970s. It’s simple and the stakes are low but the drama is wonderfully rendered and the emotion runs deep. If I were to pick one from the list above for you to check out, it would be this.
Trailer Watch: Haunted Mansion
I can’t entirely knock Disney for mining its Disneyland rides for movie IP. After all, the first Pirates of the Caribbean is a perfect movie. And giving Justin Simien — writer/director behind “Dear White People” — a shot at the big seat in a studio movie is equally commendable.
But this is what I say when I say that the horror genre is broken. Horror movies are no longer scary, purposely, nor do they make an attempt to maintain any semblance of reality. This is a classic Disney CGI mess targeted at 12 year olds with enough bankroll to cast *deep breath* Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Lakeith Stanfield, Winona Ryder, Danny Devito, Jared Leto, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Levy, Tiffany Haddish and Hasan Minhaj. All for a movie that looks garbage! And guess what, when I went to Disneyland a few weeks back, I thought the haunted mansion ride was garbage too!