Cocaine Bear

This is a film heavy with 'premise buzz'; it hangs it's hopes, almost singularly, on the simple combination of a bear and shitloads of cocaine. By the amount of reviews I've seen rolling through my social timelines in the last few days, I'd say it's doing the job. The poster is great, and there's one word on it that's used extremely loosely - 'INSPIRED by true events'. These true events involved drug dealers dumping around 40 containers of cocaine into the Tennessee wilderness, and a black bear eating a lot of it. The real story is way too prosaic, so a gory action comedy was scaffolded around those bare bones. 

An odd, anti-drug TV spot featuring Pee-wee Herman and Nancy Reagan lets us know what tone to expect and it doesn't take its foot off the slightly tacky, weirdly endearing pedal. It has a great 80s music synthy pop soundtrack and the cast is one of the most esoteric I've seen in a long time. Keri Russell is probably the lead, along with Alden Ehrenreich (presumably, this is the kind of script he's getting after the sadly under-appreciated Solo nearly derailed his career). O'Shea Jackson Jr (son of Cube) and the angry Ikea guy, Scott Seiss appear, but also fucking Ray Liotta, in his final role! The cast alone would make this a curio, without even considering the bloodthirsty, coked up bear.

Director, Elizabeth Banks and writer, Jimmy Warden serve us a number of cracking moments of terror, relieved by splatters of blood and bone - a park ranger in a tree, the stalking of people in a park office, and my pick of the bunch, an ambulance sequence that dialed the ridiculous up to eleven. The human bits, Russell and her daughter (and her amusingly sweary friend), and Ehrenreich's reluctant crim, are fine enough, but they're really just place holders for the main event - the bear attacks (and drug use scenes). 

If you're going into this film expecting anything meaningful, or hell, even anything of much quality, you might have to rethink that ticket purchase. But if your anticipation is black bear + cocaine + blood and guts = satisfying chuckles and winces, then settle in for a film that knows exactly what it is and what it offers.

Cocaine Bear is showing everywhere now.

See also:

This is similar in style to the recent Violent Night (2022), directed by Tommy Wirkola, and if you're looking for more bear films, how about Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005)?

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2023)

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

This striking documentary is from the stable of heavy-hitter, Laura Poitras, who has made films about the Iraq War, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. In this Venice Golden Lion winner, she covers the life of photographer/artist Nan Goldin, and zooms in on her fight against the opioid crisis in the US. Poitras handles the structuring really well, there are no jarring transfers between 'stories'; at least, I didn't feel any. Taking roughly equal screentime, Goldin's life story runs chronologically, with the shorter timeline of her current activism interspersed. 

It begins (and ends) with Goldin's sister, Barbara, and how she affected the course of her life, and soon turns the focus to the Sackler family, a disgustingly rich cabal of 'big pharma' knobs who have made a proper killing off the sale of addictive opioids since the mid-90s. Goldin, an ex-addict herself, founded P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which rails against the Sackler family's involvement in the arts field. Museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The National Portrait Gallery and the Louvre, have all taken money and/or sponsorship in one form or another from this family. 

There are some amazingly candid scenes from Goldin, she's not at all regretful about anything she's done. After being removed from her family home as a teenager, she drifted around until landing on her calling - photography. She was drawn to the gay and transgender communities of Boston and New York, where she started screening slide shows, eventually culminating in her major work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The recurring touchpoint throughout is Goldin's incredible durability - the amount of shit this woman has been through is staggering. Apart from her opioid addiction, she's had to deal with suicides, domestic violence, discrimination, and the death of many friends during the AIDS crisis. On top of all this, the bureaucracy involved in her attempts to bring the Sacklers to account is a complete arse ache.

The film is brimming with frustration, anger and hopelessness - see the witness statements in the deposition that members of the Sackler family are made to sit through on Zoom - but ultimately I think it's about fighting the good fight and not giving up hope. The title comes from a psychologist's report about some readings from a Rorschach test and the final sequence with Goldin's mother reading a Joseph Conrad quote is both heartbreaking and full of promise. Tough job to strike the right balance but Poitras has pretty much earned her kudos here.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is showing at the Somerville at UWA as part of the Perth Festival from Feb 27 - Mar 5. 

See also:

On the photography angle, Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields (1991) still packs a punch and Goldin has cited Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) as an influence on her work.

Aftersun

Aftersun is a fitting title for this top-notch drama set in a coastal resort in Turkey in the late 90s. Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio play father and daughter, Calum and Sophie - it later becomes evident that Calum is separated from Sophie's mother. The title suits because this holiday is potentially the last moment to be cherished between Sophie and Calum, the sun that all following events are compared to. It may also be giving a nod to all the evening scenes, the film certainly eschews the bright and shiny cliches of holiday resorts.

There's a fantastic chemistry between Mescal and Corio. Mescal's portrayal of a seemingly stable bloke dealing with mental health issues is wonderfully understated. There's really only one openly emotional burst, the rest he conveys with stares, downcast eyes and Tai Chi. Corio, on debut, is superb as Sophie, a girl calmly grappling with the onset of puberty. Her interactions with older kids at the resort feel spot on and writer/director, Charlotte Wells deals with her central role in a careful - and caring - manner.

An uncomfortable frisson runs through the events of Aftersun, that despite the pleasantly agreeable setting, the feeling of dread isn't far away. The tiny hints begin in the first scene when we glimpse the reflection of adult Sophie in a TV screen, watching a clip of their holiday videos. These flash-forwards of future Sophie are subtly inked within the film, along with recurring visions of Calum dancing at a rave. I suspect these are dreams or compromised memories where Sophie attempts to reconcile what the fuck happened to her dad, but I'm no psychologist, so I may be wide of the mark here.

Wells is clearly wearing her heart on her sleeve with her first feature (the actor playing adult Sophie, Celia Rowlson-Hall, bears a strong likeness to Wells) and this knowledge of autobiographical connections adds an extra element of poignancy to the film. In saying this, it's not all doom and gloom. It pretty much lives or dies on the relationship between the two leads and, happily, it feels like there's something real there. As a two-hander performance piece, there aren't many better films going around than this one right here.

Aftersun opens at the Luna and Palace cinemas on Feb 23rd.

See also:

This film shares a lot of atmosphere with Michel Franco's excellent Sundown (2021) and Corio's mint first film performance put me in mind of Catherine Clinch's debut in Colm Bairéad's brilliant The Quiet Girl (2022).

SPOILERS IN POD!!

Godland

Hlynur Pálmason's third feature follows his fine A White, White Day from 2019, and this one is also heavy on the white stuff, yes, snow and ice. It charts the physical, and increasingly mental, journey of young Danish priest, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) as he sets off from one side of Iceland to the other to build a church in the late 19th Century. His travelling party includes a translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) and a few hired hands, led by the recalcitrant Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson). The first act of the film is comprised of this journey - think Aguirre, Wrath of God but with tundra instead of jungle. When they finally arrive, after no little calamity, they proceed to to get stuck into construction.

The cinematography by Maria von Hausswolff is fantastic, from the unearthly landscape vistas to the incredible shots of lava spewing down the side of a volcano. The aspect ratio of 4:3 with rounded edges is a nice touch too. The scenery is important for thematic reasons, it almost toys with the protagonist in this 'God land' of his, as if to challenge Lucas and tempt him into a confrontation of some sort. I'd go as far as to say the film is a stalking horse - you're promised Godland, but what you're actually getting is Natureland, and all the better for it. If not an atheistic film, it's certainly agnostic.

The pacing is a bit on the glacial side but some of the writing is pitch perfect. On a boat from Denmark, in the pissing rain, the translator reels off numerous Icelandic words to Lucas, who's looking very peaky as he turns to him and says, "And these all mean rain?" On his first proper meeting with landowner, Carl and his daughters, Anna and Ida, Lucas is asked why he didn't just sail to their side of the island. His reply that he wanted to see the land and meet its people is countered with a droll, "Did you meet many people?" Lucas blanks on this, whether from illness or discomfiture. When Lucas and Anna become close Carl warns her off him by saying, "We don't need men like him here - we don't need any more men." There's a curious antipathy towards the interloper and this is repaid in Lucas's mistrust and hatred of Ragnar. 

Godland is filled with off-kilter moments. A wedding party wrestling match, the youngest daughter's habit of standing on her horse, a story of screaming eels, some old style photography with silver and mercury (that in fact, may have contributed to the priest's mental state) and all the while, mother nature baring her fangs. The performances are tip-top, especially Sigurdsson, Ída Mekkin Hlynsdóttir (who were also in A White, White Day) and Jacob Lohmann (Carl), and the film leaves a thought nugget embedded in the brain for a later date.

Godland runs as part of the Perth Festival at the Somerville Auditorium at UWA from Feb 20 - 26.

See also:

Two Werner Herzog films share some DNA with this film - Fitzcarraldo (1982) and the aforementioned Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972).