Meewella | Critic

According to P

Tag: Mark Mothersbaugh

QuickView: Cocaine Bear (2023)

“Apex predator… high on cocaine… and you’re going towards it?”

Bob

Loosely inspired by an absurd real event, Cocaine Bear is deliberately stupid but unabashedly honest in its intentions — if what you are after is a rampaging wild bear blowing through a remote American community, you will be entertained. Elizabeth Banks’ direction revels in the gore as much as the comedy, and often both simultaneously as the film lines up its victims. Unsurprisingly the bear is a digital effect (courtesy of Wētā) and it bumps against the monster movie rule that the threat is greater than seeing it. Despite a sprightly 95-minute running time, the script swiftly runs out of ideas with cracks appearing around the one hour mark and it hews so closely to the monster movie formula that it becomes predictable despite its inanity. Despite a few flakey performances, most are nothing to sniff at, but only the ever-reliable Margo Martindale’s park ranger is worthy of note. Cocaine Bear is no pearl, then, but it provides enough to enjoy if your expectations are limited to it doing exactly what it says on the tin.

6/10

QuickView: The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021)

The Mitchells vs The Machines

“I’ve always felt a little different than everyone else, so I did what any outsider would do. Made weird art.”

Katie Mitchell

Following an unconventional family unexpectedly caught in a robot uprising, The Mitchells vs The Machines is really about family relationships, and the need to find common ground and ways to communicate. Continuing the looser approach to animation style from Into the Spider-verse, the art direction blends detailed 3D animation, flatter cell-shading, and sporadic flairs through 2D overlays. The result lends the incredibly polished production a handmade feel, mirroring Katie’s amateur filmmaking and bringing to mind the creative low-fi filmmaking in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. Reference humour spans the generations, from Internet memes to older movies (numerous nods to Kill Bill are an unexpected choice). Like Wall-E there is an underlying warning about lazy reliance on technology, although it’s all rather on the nose, with the disaster caused by a young billionaire tech entrepreneur named Mark (“It’s almost like stealing people’s data and giving it to a hyper-intelligent AI as part of an unregulated tech monopoly was a bad thing”). Its depth may be limited to its family dynamics, but spending a couple of hours with the Mitchells is raucous fun and it is hard not to root for a family who plainly love one another, even if their abilities place them at the opposite end of the spectrum to the Incredibles.

8/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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