Cocaine Bear

Director: Elizabeth Banks
Starring: Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Ray Liotta, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Christian Convery, Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Kristofer Hivju, Hannah Hoekstra, Ayoola Smart, J.B. Moore, Scott Seiss, Matthew Rhys
Running Time: 95 min.
Rating: R

★★★ (out of ★★★★) 

Labeling Elizabeth Banks' horror comedy Cocaine Bear as "based on a true story" probably stretches things a bit, but it's at least loosely inspired by one. In 1985, A giant black bear did ingest a duffle bag of drugs worth $15 million, only to die shortly thereafter. Edit out that very last part out and the rest of this dramatization is an uproarious "what if..," calling to mind other campy animal attack movies like Snakes on a Plane or Anaconda. The commercials and trailer pretty much guaranteed this, and whether you're even a fan of the sub-genre, it's hard to accuse anyone involved of false advertising. 

There's something to be said for a movie that knows exactly what it is. No more and no less. With few grand ambitions, the premise doesn't runs out of gas, clocking in at a lean, mean running time of barely over an hour and a half, which isn't only a relief, but feels just right. After meeting the characters and getting a very straightforward set-up, chaos ensues, followed by lots of laughs and carnage.

In many ways, it's the ideal project for Banks, a filmmaker whose choices have endured the usual mocking reserved for movie stars turned directors. And the decision to make this definitely wasn't an accident, as if to shut down any misconceptions she's taking herself too seriously. But it's still a shrewd move, mostly because it works and ends up being a lot of fun. Apparently, her idea was to view this as the bear's fictional revenge story, with the real animal now gaining an infamy and respect it couldn't have achieved as just a helpless casualty. Strangely, that sort of makes sense.

It's 1985 when drug smuggler Andrew C. Thornton II (Matthew Rhys) drops a large stash of cocaine from his plane before knocking himself unconscious and falling to his death with a duffle bag of drugs in Knoxville, Tennessee. Local detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) identifies the body and links the coke to slimy St. Louis drug kingpin Syd White (Ray Liotta). But when the rest of the supply shows up in Chattahoochee National Forest's Blood Mountain, a giant black bear ingests it, becoming hyper-aggressive and out of control, killing a hiker. 

Skipping school, young Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friend Henry (Christian Convery) come across the drugs in the forest, putting them in the crosshairs of this dangerous animal. As detective Bob descends upon the forest, Syd sends his right-hand man Daveed (O' Shea Jackson Jr.) and grieving, emotionally fragile son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) to find and retrieve the stash. Also arriving is Dee Dee's mom Sari (Keri Russell), a nurse, who searches for the kids with the help of park ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) and wacky wildlife activist Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). But as the bear consumes increasing amounts of cocaine and takes more victims, the chances of anyone escaping alive start to look a whole lot worse.

Despite the early steps taken to set this scenario up, it isn't long before the bear's on the loose eating any brick of coke it can find. The eclectic cast of characters all have differing motivations but once they come to the realization of what's happening, it's not difficult figuring out where the plot has to go next. Jimmy Warden's script may not have a handful of surprises up its sleeve, but the story's what it needs to be as far as crazy cocaine bear movies go.  

Once the action gets going, the gore and excitement rarely let up and Banks does bring a little extra flair to the proceedings and relishes the 80's setting, particularly with some key song choices (like in a thrillingly hilarious Depeche Mode-backed ambulance chase scene), Mark Mothersbaugh's synth-driven score and the costuming selections. We even get an opening "Just Say No" PSA montage featuring Nancy Reagan and in a fitting cameo from Smokey Bear, at least in cardboard form. But it's really "Cokey" we're more interested in and the CGI beast really doesn't look half bad in a movie where they easily could have gotten away with it looking far worse.

Aside from the bear itself, there are some surprising scene stealers, namely Ehrenreich (who has great interplay with Jackson) and a very funny Christian Convery, who gives a performance right out of the precocious, geeky action kid handbook and really nails it. And even if this isn't what most envisioned for a major headlining Keri Russell role, she kind of holds it all together, especially in the second half where her adventure with the kids arguably carries the most interest among numerous sub-plots. Acting vets like Isiah Whitlock and the great Margo Martindale predictably shine, and though this won't be the late Ray Liotta's final screen appearance, he's perfectly cast, comedically sending up the type of sleazy, intimidating heavies he played throughout his career.

In the real story, there's a missing block of time between when the bear took the drugs and its death, so this creatively fills in those blanks. While no one knows exactly what happened, it's a safe bet the animal uneventfully succumbed before it could eat and dismember everyone in a coke-fueled rampage. But a documentary on a quiet, sleeping bear isn't what we came for. All the actors understand the assignment and seem to be having a blast. And why wouldn't they? Cocaine Bear lives up to its outrageous title, which is all that can reasonably be asked of it.

August Rush

Director: Kirsten Sheridan
Starring: Freddie Highmore, Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Robin Williams, Terrence Howard, William Sadler, Leon G. Thomas III, Mykelti Williamson
Running Time: 114 min.
Rating: PG

*** (out of ****)

Most movies these days if you ask me to describe in a few words or less what they are about I can’t do it. What they start out being at the beginning changes totally in the middle and by the end it’s a completely different motion picture than what it started out as. Sometimes, after being bogged down with unrelated sub-plots and useless distractions, it ends as a different genre altogether. This time, for a change, if someone asked me in one sentence to describe what August Rush is about I could actually do it. My answer would be: "It’s about how music touches peoples’ lives." Every scene and every line of dialogue spoken contains within it that message. How the movie delivers that message is a little manipulative, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less effective.

It’s unabashedly sappy and features some amazingly contrived coincidences that will leave you scratching your head. If someone told me they thought this was the clumsiest screenplay of the year they’d be able to present a lot of solid evidence…at least maybe on the page. What we see and, more importantly, feel on screen is a far different story. The film makes no apologies about what it is and is smart enough not to pretend to be more intelligent than it really is. It’s a modern day fairy-tale and even though it isn’t a conventional musical it sure feels like an excellent one. It even manages to survive a child actor’s performance that borders on being a little creepy. In telling two stories, one more effectively than the other, its intentions are unabashedly pure enough to make you care deeply when they converge at the end. You’re required to take giant leaps of faith and the real gift of this movie is how it makes implausible coincidences feel like fate.

Evan Taylor (Freddie Highmore) is a child who lives in his own world. He tunes everything out except the music he hears all around him. It’s this music, he believes, will lead him to his parents from whom he was separated from at birth. We flash back to 11 years earlier and meet those parents, Juliard-trained cellist Lyla Novacek (Keri Russell) and aspiring rock singer Louis Connelly (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who share a one-night stand that feels like a lot more than that. After giving birth, Lyla’s overprotective, domineering father (William Sadler) with only her career goals in mind, tells her she miscarried and gives the child up for adoption. Louis and Lyla go their separate ways and are forced to wonder what could have been.

Now entrusted into the care of an orphanage, Evan meets child services representative Richard Jefferies (Terrence Howard) who’s impressed with his resolve and wants to find him a family. But there’s only one family Evan is interested in finding and he sets off alone to New York City in hopes of doing it. He hooks up with a street performer named Wizard (Robin Williams) and this is an interesting character. It’s as if Bono from U2 decided that instead of championing for world peace, he’d rather spend his time exploiting small homeless children’s musical proclivities for monetary gain. Only, Evan isn’t like the other kids. He’s a musical prodigy Wizard soon christens with the catchy stage name, "August Rush." Rush’s gift doesn’t go unnoticed by the public for long and Wizard’s self-serving agenda threatens the possibility of Evan finally finding his parents.

This is a movie littered with huge stretches in plausibility that some just may not be willing to buy into. Like how Lyla just happens to discover she has a son at just around the same exact time Louis coincidentally comes down with the sudden urge to track his lost love down 11 years after the fact. Or how then at that very same moment Evan embarks on a road trip to find his parents. Or how the child services rep Lyla runs into just happens to be the one assigned to Evan’s case. How children are free to roam through the apparently crime-free streets of New York City without much consequence. How everyone happens to be at the right place at the right time for the ending of the film. You could write a book on all the contrivances but it would be a waste of time because all of them have little or no negative bearing on a film like this. It’s not misrepresenting itself as anything other than a heartwarming fairy tale, but just because it’s a fairy tale doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hit on some real emotional truths, particularly regarding the stories of Lyla and Louis.

Even though the screenplay presents it in a rather direct, clichéd way the movie touches on idea that sometimes people either through the choices they made in their lives or circumstances that go beyond their control, don’t end up where they imagined they’d be. Things that their life revolved around (in their cases it’s music) slowly disappear and they don’t realize how much it really meant until it’s disappeared completely. It’s interesting where they end up 11 years later and the viewer doesn’t need to put the pieces together as to why they did or how it happened. It’s available to us in the sincere earnestness with which Russell and Rhys-Meyers play their roles. Their first encounter kind of reminded me of the film Before Sunrise, although Louis does manage to bed Lyla in nearly record time and with very few words. Guys everywhere will probably want to pull out their notebooks, but remember, it’s just a movie.

I cared whether Lyla found her son and these two reunited again, even if I can’t say I cared quite as much about Evan. I hate to pick on a child actor because, at such a young age, the director makes most of the big decisions but Freddie Highmore (who previously starred in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland) just isn’t that great here. Part of it could be that the tone of the character is played confusingly, especially in the early stages of the film. He seems to have this blank look on his face as he just stares into the unknown while every once in a while making bizarre one or two word statements that make everyone around him uncomfortable. I think director Kirsten Sheridan was trying to get Highmore to convey Evan’s uniqueness and whimsical nature, but instead there were times where it felt like he belonged in The Shining. We start to wonder if finding this kid’s parents should take a backseat to getting him to the nearest mental hospital for evaluation. Sheridan went a little overboard in trying to tell us he was special which results in him coming off slightly autistic instead. It would have been more emotionally effective if he were just played as a normal, everyday kid with a special gift.

Now this is the Keri Russell performance I’ve been waiting for. August Rush is the second film in the past year she’s starred in dealing with an unexpected pregnancy. I thought Waitress was pretty much a disaster even if Russell’s work in it was serviceable (no pun intended). But I don’t want to see her bitching and complaining about her jerk husband and baking a bunch of pies. It was a good starring role but the material just didn’t seem as suited to her as this and here she gives a performance that’s just about a thousand times better. Unlike that film, this reminded me why the country fell in love with her in the first place on Felicity. One of the more positive developments that will be remembered about 2007 in film was that Russell came back to us and was finally given the opportunity to break through.

Rhys-Meyers also really gets the job done but his role isn’t quite as challenging. I don’t know what’s with Robin Williams. In every comedy he’s in he’s a total train wreck, yet when he’s given even the smallest dramatic role he invests it with something special. This continues that streak. His Wizard character is cartoonish early on but when he takes a dramatic turn later Williams is ready to go there. The film takes on a very Dickensian feel (comparisons to Oliver Twist are unavoidable) and I think one of the big reasons why is because of Williams’ unusual performance in this role. Terrence Howard’s part is smallest of all, but as usual, he turns nothing into something.

I was more absorbed in the story of Louis and Lyla but where movie does really succeed in telling of Evan’s journey is with his musical talents. It’s in the scenes where he hears a symphony in the most mundane everyday sounds like the wind blowing through the wheat field and the basketball hitting the pavement. And it’s when he grabs the guitar and actually begins playing is when the movie truly takes off. Sheridan lets the viewer sees and hears the world through the eyes and ears of this young boy. It helps that in a story about a boy who believes music can guide him to his parents that the actual music in the film is terrific. Mark Mancina’s score compliments every scene perfectly.

Toward the end we’re asked to suspend belief to the absolute highest degree. You just have to fall backwards and trust that the story will catch you. It does. It does because it’s playing by its own fairy tale rules and it doesn’t break them. The ending is absurd. But you know what? I didn’t care. When that magical last scene comes I couldn’t have cared less about certain creative liberties that may have been taken to get there. It was all worth it and you lose yourself in the final minutes.

It’s been a while since a film has split critics and audiences as widely as this one. A lot of critics (who tend to be sticklers for plausibility) just couldn’t make the jump and despised it, while at the same time, it really struck a deep, personal chord in a lot of moviegoers. I’d land somewhere in the middle. I can see both arguments. However, a movie has to be judged for what it’s trying to do, not overanalyzed for what it isn’t. For anyone who loves and feels a deep connection to music, and doesn’t mind a little sappiness, August Rush should probably be considered a must-see.

Waitress

Director: Adrienne Shelly
Starring: Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Cheryl Hines, Jeremy Sisto, Andy Griffith, Adrienne Shelly
Running Time: 108 min.
Rating: PG-13

**1/2 (out of ****)

One word kept popping into my head as I watched Waitress: "Insignificant." If you never saw it you wouldn't miss a thing. It's the kind of movie women drag their boyfriends and husbands to kicking and screaming and will probably end up in regular rotation on Lifetime television in the next couple of years. Yes, it's a "chick flick." And that's fine by me. My tolerance for those is abnormally (and some say embarrassingly) high, as I've been known to shamelessly enjoy feminine tearjerkers such as A Walk to Remember and The Notebook.

Waitress is the absolute worst kind though. It tries to pass off a bunch of tired clichés and cartoon characters as a deep story in an effort to prop women up so they feel good about themselves leaving the theater. It hides behind a false indie sensibility to try to make us believe we're watching something that amounts to more than a TV movie of the week. All men are abusive pigs and all women are afraid to leave them because they hate themselves. We know the drill.

You may recognize this movie under the many different titles and incarnations it's gone through over the past 50 years. There's no mistaking that "desperate housewives" are the audience for this one, but what's funny is that both sexes are given equally shallow treatment in this film that boasts an IQ of about 10. What, really, can you say about a movie with a final scene featuring two characters LITERALLY skipping off into the sunset? That Waitress has actually generated Oscar buzz says a whole lot more about the dearth of quality films in 2007 than the movie itself. Yet it's still pretty impossible to hate. It's too sweet and good hearted for that.

Jenna (Russell) is a small-town Southern waitress stuck in an unhappy marriage to her controlling jerk husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto, who's probably earned a masters degree playing characters like this by now) and works as a waitress at Joe's pie diner, where she's regularly yelled at by her abrasive boss. She has a unique gift for creating excellent tasting pies, which she often gives inventive titles to such as "I Don't Want Earl's Baby Pie," in honor of her upcoming pregnancy. She confides to her best friends and co-workers at the diner, Becky (Cheryl Hines) and Dawn (writer/director Adrienne Shelly), but they have romantic problems of their own.

Jenna is soon taken aback and thoroughly creeped out after a visit to her new gynecologist, the very nervous and clumsy Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion), but that last all of about two visits. Before you know it they're emerged in a passionate affair and the relationship with the doctor strengthens Jenna as a person and marks the first time she could truly be considered "happy." Now if she could only find the courage to accept her pregnancy and free herself from the controlling grip of her husband, which seems to escalate to hilarious heights as each minute of this film wears on. She finds a surprising ally in Joe (Andy Griffith), the cranky old curmudgeon who owns the diner and encourages her to escape this mess she's created for herself.

The waitress with a heart of gold. The jerk husband. The bad boss. The loyal best friend. The cranky old man who dispenses life wisdom. All the characters in this movie, which has earned unjustified worldwide praise, can be described in just a few words. That would be fine and I don't doubt a great film could be made with them in it, but they'd have to transcend those descriptions. They don't here. They're not real people, just broad caricatures going through the necessary, predictable motions of the screenplay.

All the actors give fine performances, but it's unreasonable to expect any of them to invest any real depth into this when it's clear there's none to begin with. All the stereotypes are embarrassing and simple, but the worst has to be Sisto's white trash husband. You could file him under "HOW NOT TO WRITE A MOVIE CHARACTER" in your screenwriting handbook. Will he tell Jenna she's "never been sexy?" Will he get angry and jealous that she's making money? Will he hit her? Maybe before the film's over he could even have one huge public outburst.

By making the character a stereotypical caveman with no thoughts or feelings Shelly stacks the deck and makes Jenna look like an idiot for staying with him. I didn't feel sorry for her. I just thought she was a wimp with no self-respect for herself. It's very tricky to ask your audience to root for a protagonist with no self-esteem who allows themselves to be beaten down psychologically throughout the film. All it does is make it look like you're pulling strings and setting things up, which was exactly what Shelly was doing.

Everything is there just so it can build to the big obligatory happy ending. Will Jenna leave her husband? Will she enter (and win) the pie-making contest? Will she accept her new baby? Are pies a metaphor for finding happiness in life? You've seen this movie before you even press play on the DVD remote. An old re-run of The Facts of Life contains more insight than anything in Shelly's screenplay.

If there's one thing fans of this movie and myself can agree on it's that this is the best performance of Keri Russell's career. I'm not sure what that's saying though considering this is the first time she's ever been asked to really carry a movie. She proves more than capable, investing Jenna with warmth and charm but it isn't an Oscar worthy performance, as some have claimed. Not even by a long shot. Oscar nominated performances come when an actor digs down deep to bring a human being to life with complexity. And it can happen in even the most lightweight romantic comedy like this.

Unfairly though, Russell wasn't given the type of role where she could do that and isn't one of the very few actresses who can create that magic out of thin air. This is a great role for her and a very good performance but it would have been an even better one if Jenna was written with more to her so she'd be able to explore more as an actress. That's a reoccurring problem with every character in the film, except Fillion's "Dr. Feelgood," but only because he's too bland and boring to even qualify as a stereotypical cliché. Probably the best performance comes from Andy Griffith who at least does a great job fooling us into thinking his cranky old man is more substantial than we're giving him credit for. He's not, but it's a good effort nonetheless.

One of the script's only signs of true intelligence is that it touches on an issue that's never brought up in movies about pregnancy. That there are pregnant women out there who aren't the slightest bit happy about it, yet aren't upset enough to have an abortion. They don't want the baby because maybe they're scared they won't be a good mother or can't provide them with the love they deserve. Yet somehow they do the best they can and try to make it work. That's interesting.

Everyone has been rooting really hard for this film and it's not hard to see why. The murder of writer/director Adrienne Shelly shortly following the completion of this film is beyond tragic. It's clear she had a vision and that we'll never see another film from her or see the full extent of her talents is a great loss. But this just isn't very good.

It's a charming, well-intentioned heart warmer with vibrant performances and a terrible screenplay. If you're just looking for a good time it does fit the bill, but I just found it too witless and syrupy to really get behind and support. One page of this script probably contains more sugar than any of Jenna's pies. It's strange Shelly had such a battle getting this picture made because you could categorize it as "independent" in financing only. Ironically, Waitress better qualifies as the most mainstream Hollywood film released this year.