Tag Archives: Keri Russell

Hell of a Drug

Cocaine Bear

by Hope Madden

As misbehaving bears go, Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear puts Winnie the Pooh to shame. The laughs are intentional, for one thing, but the outright carnage outstrips anything I’ve seen in a genre film this year. And it’s not even a horror movie!

The year is 1985, from what I can piece together from an inspired soundtrack of pop hits spilling out of speakers, and one Jefferson Starship fan is about to make a jump from his plane with an awful lot of coke. Things don’t go well, and next thing you know, drug kingpin Syd (Ray Liotta in his final screen performance) is sending his reluctant son (Alden Ehrenreich) and best guy (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to Blood Mountain to retrieve $14 million in missing blow.

As you may have guessed from the title, a bear found it first.

It’s barely (bear-ly?) accurate to say that Jimmy Warden’s screenplay is based on true events. In fact, a smallish black bear overdosed on drugs dropped into a Tennessee wilderness, only to be stuffed and displayed in a mall. That’s just sad no matter how you look at it. So, Warden says to himself, what if the bear was like three times bigger? All hell might break loose.

We meet an assortment of folks trying to stay out of the bear’s way, as well as those trying to track down the cocaine. One mom (Keri Russell) is looking for her errant daughter (Brooklynn Prince) and her buddy, Henry (Christian Convery, scene larcenist).

The great Margo Martindale as Ranger Liz is hysterically deadpan opposite three skate punks (Aaron Holliday, J.B. Moore and Leo Hanna, all superb). And even with as little time as we get to spend with the paramedics (Scott Seiss and Kahyun Kim of the badass blue eyeshadow), you’ll miss them.

That’s really Banks’s trick. The film offers little more than a loose assortment of national park visitors/bear meat, but the filmmaker and her comedically able cast invest enough in each character that you like them. You root for them, despite the fact that most of them are bad people. And bound to die.

For a very dark comedy, Cocaine Bear is light entertainment. It’s hard to imagine expecting anything more.

Not every animal lover is going to appreciate the comedy in this film, FYI. An enormous black bear is high out of her mind for 90 minutes and, in that deranged state, does some funny things but mostly tears humans to pieces to the delight of the crowd. If this doesn’t sound entertaining to you, maybe don’t see Cocaine Bear.

Into the Woods

Antlers

by Hope Madden

Hey, do you remember what a non-stop laugh riot Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace was? No? Well, compared to his latest — the long, long-awaited horror Antlers — it is.

The film takes us to depressed, smalltown Oregon at the height of the opioid crisis. Julia (Keri Russell) has returned after decades away. She lives with her brother, the town sheriff (Jesse Plemons), teaches middle school and deals with her demons.

Someone else’s demons are less metaphorical.

Cooper co-wrote the screenplay with Henry Chaisson and Nick Antosca, who adapts his own short The Quiet Boy. The short uses fairy tale language to cast an image of abuse and horror — an idea Antlers plays with but eventually abandons for more heavy-handed parallels between child abuse, addiction and economic blight.

At the center of the action is 12-year-old Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas) in a remarkable turn. Hollow-eyed and tragic, he conveys secrecy and desperation in equal measure. And as soon as your heart breaks for Lucas, you see his little brother Aidan (a crushingly adorable Sawyer Jones).

The boys have a problem that seems unsolvable, but it might have played better if Cooper could have kept the focus a little more on the monster movie and a little less on the metaphor.

There is a monster —literal and figurative—in this film. The creature effects for the literal monster amaze and unnerve, thanks to an impressive design and to emotional seeds planted early in the film by actor Scott Haze.

Antlers looks great, whether cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister’s camera lingers in the woods, tiptoes down hallways, or witnesses red-flare lit doom in a mine. But Cooper is an odd choice for a supernatural film, and perhaps an entirely wrong-headed filmmaker to take on the perspective of a child to tell a horrific fairy tale.

Whimsical he ain’t.

In the end, the film suffers from a lack of imagination. Cooper and team lead us through a dour metaphor full of familiar genre tropes and leave us with a brutal, great-looking, well-acted lecture.

Stone Cold Jane Austen

 

by George Wolf

 

Though I didn’t read the 2007 novel that inspired Austenland, the premise of sending Jane Austen devotees off to their own fantasy camp is one that seems full of possibilities for satire-filled fun.

Consider them missed.

Keri Russell plays Jane Hayes, an Austen freak who blows all her money to attend Austenland, longing for life in a ” simpler time” and the promise of romance with her very own “Mr. Darcy.”

One she arrives, though, Jane learns she has only purchased the “basic” Austenland experience,  which means modest accommodations, poor social status and the new name “Jane Erstwhile.”

Still, she tries to make the best of it, buddying up with the obnoxious but wealthy “Miss Elizabeth Charming” (Jennifer Coolidge) and stealing kisses from the off-limits stable boy Martin (Flight of the Conchords Bret McKenzie). Eventually, Miss Erstwhile catches the eye of the standoffish “Mr. Nobley” (JJ Feild) and..

You can probably guess the rest, which is exactly the way the film wants it. In many respects, Austenland is a dumbed down Midnight in Paris, where the whimsical fantasy elements and sublime writing is replaced with forced humor and one joke obviousness.

The flat conventionality of it all is a bit of a surprise, coming from director/co- writer Jerusha Hess. Though this is her directing debut, she co wrote the screenplays for Nacho Libre, Gentlemen Broncos, and Napoleon Dynamite, three wonderfully offbeat comedies that were anything but crowd pleasingly safe.

There’s no sharp wit, satire or subtlety here, just sitcom humor and fluffy romance dressed up in period costumes.

For a more successful mix of romantic fiction and present day fandom, check out the 2008 mini series Lost in Austen, and leave Austenland on the shelf.

 

 

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