The Box Office of M3GAN: The Shock of the Internet? It’s Hard to Lose, but You Can Do It With Them
The film Cocaine Bear is directed by Elizabeth Banks, who is no stranger to silly movies like Wet Hot American Summer, Charlie’s Angels, and thePitch Perfect films. There are a lot of films going to be made in the start of 2023 that are likely to be made for the internet. Not necessarily, but you wouldn’t want to watch them there if they were born of internet discourse or designed to be a part of it.
Coming a few weeks before Cocaine Bear’s February 24 release is M3GAN. This column has already delved into the diabolical doll dance moves that the film’s trailer inspired, and there’s no need to retread that angle here. But watching M3GAN’s titular droid bend and snap her way through countless mashups, it was hard not to see the irony of a movie about the horrors of artificial intelligence being promoted with a marketing campaign engineered for peak virality, as if the same algorithms were responsible for both its script and PR blitz.
The lineup for the Sundance Film Festival was announced this week. Among the most eye-catching entries: Cat Person. If the film follows the narrative of the New Yorker short story completely, it will be fascinating to see if it brings in the same level of attention and discussion.
A story about a college sophomore’s complicated relationship with an older man, which was published in 2017: “Cat Person” was at the center of the conversation around the #Metoo movement. The internet was credited with sending the internet into a meltdown, and is mentioned in almost every reference to it. Five years later, it seems like it is ready to ride a similar wave that may have different impacts. (Side note: The author of “Cat Person,” Kristen Roupenian, wrote the story on which Bodies Bodies Bodies—another film for the extremely online—was based.)
The Cocaine Bear and the End of the Road: a Comedy-Theoretical Approach to a Lifetime Like Lake Placid
Although “Snakes” comes to mind among killer-animal comedies, the more germane comparison might be “Lake Placid,” which found laughs and scares in the rampage of a giant alligator. The gore factor is heightened with limbs flying around in all directions and the body parts look a lot more realistic than the bear itself.
Indeed, despite being (very loosely) inspired by true events, and an errant shipment of cocaine lost in the Georgia woods in the mid-1980s, the movie bears about as much resemblance to those facts as the often-cartoonish-looking ursa does to something you might see in a David Attenborough documentary. It feels like all that is missing is a hat and picnic baskets.
As we’ve witnessed in other movies that employ movie magic to replicate present-day animals (as opposed to, say, monsters or dinosaurs), the bear might be unstoppable, but shoddy CGI renderings can halt a movie in its tracks. The early parts of Jaws without John Williams score are more effective because this “bear” is in the vicinity.
The film derives a degree of its humor from sheer goofiness, introducing a bunch of actors in smallish roles that make everyone potentially expendable.
The mom is trying to find her child and the employees of the drug dealer are looking for the missing coke.
The problem with that template is nobody really registers until they become potential bear food. Already an apex predator, this chemically enhanced bear possesses extraordinary abilities and appetites, with the only means of escaping those slavering jaws being to distract the addicted beast with even more cocaine.
Exploitation fare has its place, and nobody can accuse “Cocaine Bear” of taking itself too seriously. But there’s still a sense that practically all the good stuff – including a sequence where the titular star chases an ambulance – is in the coming attractions, and the movie’s “elevator pitch” has exhausted its novelty before the car reaches the ground floor.
The genre reflects an expansion of Banks’ directing resume after “Pitch Perfect 2” and “Charlie’s Angels,” and the film only runs about 95 minutes, so the filmmakers were wise not to stretch a thin premise beyond its limitations.
Universal recently enjoyed a low budget hit with the meme-worthy “M3GAN.” which has already spawned plans for a sequel. A Cocaine Bear Cinematic Universe is probably going to be created if a modicum of success is any indication.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/23/entertainment/cocaine-bear-review/index.html
Coke Is Not the First Choice of Sleptonic Mixing Algorithm for Heavy Meson Decays (Invited Review)
The movie demonstrates, with apologies to an old marketing slogan, that things do not always go better with coke and should be given more credit for the concept.