DOES A BEAR SNORT IN THE WOODS?

Opening in theaters this weekend...

Cocaine Bear--This shocker has at least as much right to claim "true story" status for itself as Fargo or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There really was a Cocaine Bear: back in 1985, an American black bear was found dead in the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Georgia, just south of the Tennessee line. The poor creature had OD'd, having ingested more than 30 kilos of cocaine, valued at tens of millions of dollars.

The stuff had been dropped from an airplane by a smuggler who then died himself in a parachuting mishap. The unfortunate ursine, dubbed "Pablo Eskobear," was stuffed by a taxidermist and ended up on display in a shopping mall in Kentucky, where it reportedly still stands.

The movie, directed by Elizabeth Banks from a script by Jimmy Warden, is set in 1985 and uses some real place names and at least one real person's name (the smuggler's). But it's still a load of gleeful b.s., a highly entertaining sick joke. Unlike the real animal, the movie's bear--arguably the newest addition to the stable of Universal Monsters--turns into a drug-crazed spree killer, mauling and dismembering hikers and park personnel, as well as the drug traffickers that enter the forest in search of the lost product.

Cocaine Bear is as violent and gory as any big-studio movie you're likely to see. But it isn't scary, and isn't meant to be; the splatter is played entirely for gruesomely slapstick laughs. Indeed, the exuberance with which the blood and brains and guts fly is the central recurring and escalating gag.

Except for a single mom (Keri Russell), searching the woods for her daughter and the daughter's friend, most of the major characters are scoundrels or cretins or both, though not necessarily unlikable scoundrels and cretins. All of them are broadly played caricatures, so Banks invites us to leave our empathy at the door, take a cathartic break from compassion and hoot at the horrors which befall them. I indulged, and so did the audience with which I saw the film.

The title character, generated through some reasonably seamless combination of virtual and practical effects, has a guileless personality that contrasts with the bloody mayhem. Indeed, you're more likely to feel for the blameless beast than for most of the humans.

The cast is nonetheless excellent, even if most of them are not employing ten percent of their talent. I've long thought that Russell is one of the more underrated and underutilized lead actresses now in movies. I also don't understand why Alden Ehrenreich hasn't become a bigger deal; he's comically muddled yet sympathetic as an elaborately bereaved drug operative. So is O'Shea Jackson as his weary partner, Aaron Holliday as a dimwit would-be mugger they encounter, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. as a cranky detective.

The film was one of the last in which the late Ray Liotta appeared. He's in his usual strong form as Ehrenreich's father, the heartless local boss of the drug dealers. It's not a rich enough role to be a worthy swansong, but it's a good performance, and the film is dedicated to him. The great Margo Martindale nails every line and facial expression as a hard-up park ranger trying to get the attention of a naturalist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). Maybe the best of all are Brooklyn Prince and Christian Convery as the two kids, who get across a genuine affection behind their mild, familiar ragging and posing and their dares of each other. They, along with Russell, offer us somebody to unambiguously root for.

Banks has a lot of fun evoking '80s-movie atmosphere, not only with the costumes and cars and posters and overheard pop songs but with her direction. From the full opening credit sequence to the leisurely camera movement to the driving synthesizer score by Mark Mothersbaugh, the film is as much a throwback to the decade in which it's set as last year's Top Gun: Maverick, and the response to both of those films suggests that maybe today's audiences wouldn't object to a return to that style.

WITH BOB ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE

On VOD today:

J. R. "Bob" Dobbs & the Church of the Subgenius--Yet another in the pandemic-era boom of offbeat documentaries has struck a nostalgic autobiographical chord with me: Sandy K. Boone's behind-the-scenes look at the "parody religion" (or is it?) founded by Fort Worth, Texas weirdo Ivan Stang and his friend "Philo Drummond" in the late '70s. In the mid-'80s, my best friend gave me, one Christmas, The Book of the SubGenius, published by McGraw-Hill no less, a compendium of the Church's exhaustingly dense prophecies, teachings and aphorisms ("You'll pay to know what you really think") mingled with hilarious yet unsettling apocalyptic artwork, much of it clip art collage.

The book, my friend said, was too strange for him, but he thought I'd like it. He was right. I had never heard of the Church, but there was something deeply compelling about its scripture; it was like the Tibetan Book of the Dead crossed with a Chick tract, re-edited by Firesign Theater. And it was hard not to reflect, while reading it, that it contained a high degree of self-deprecating good sense. It's still on my bookshelf.

The impossible-to-summarize theology goes something like this: Social misfits and oddballs are really members of a class of person called a SubGenius, distinct from and superior to the "pinks, glorps and mediocretins" that perpetuate conformist society. The state which SubGenii properly seek is "Slack," an undefinable form of well-being. The Church venerates a figure known as J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, a stereotypically clean-cut midcentury-style clip art white dude with blazing eyes and a pipe clenched in his grinning teeth. The central prophecy was that eventually (well, in 1998) aliens would come to Earth and liberate the faithful.

Now affable old longhairs who look like veteran Deadheads, Stang and "Philo" rather sheepishly tell Boone's camera how their in-joke pamphlets gradually caught on across the country, spawning "Devivals" and radio hours and selling out live shows; other talking heads include Penn Jillette, Mark Mothersbaugh and Richard Linklater. It's to Boone's credit that she doesn't shirk the potentially dark side of the Church's supercilious, misanthropic outlook, or how closely it's flirted, at times, with being a real creepy cult over the years. But overall, this portrait suggests a positive, even comforting religious experience: The meaning of life and the universe, interpreted by a like-minded community.

THE MOON ALSO RISES

As much as any Tolkien geek or Star Trek nut, Wes Anderson delights in invented worlds of immersive detail. At times he’s like a little kid, showing you the pictures he’s drawn in a spiral-bound notebook. The difference is that his invented worlds aren’t fairy-tale domains or distant planets, they’re embellishments on twee upper-middle-class Boomer-era culture, especially as experienced by adolescents, and by the eternal adolescents that this culture produced.

The conceit of Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums (2001) was that we were seeing enacted a Salinger-esque midcentury Manhattan novel. In The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) he went so far as to invent marine species, like the “Sugar Crab” or the “Jaguar Shark” (charmingly stop-motion animated by Henry Selick), for his titular TV star/explorer hero to chronicle.

His latest, co-written with Roman Coppola, is Moonrise Kingdom, a pubescent star-crossed love story set on fictitious New England coastal islands in 1965, and it’s as obsessively imagined as the rest. Anderson gives us maps, fake meteorological history delivered by an authoritative-sounding Chorus (Bob Balaban), a warren-like house with an intricate floor-plan, a made-up scouting organization for boys called the “Khaki Scouts”—with its own magazine, Indian Corn—and a series of “young reader” novels pored over by the heroine that truly look like the sort of thing you’d have found on a Bookmobile in that era. The movie is a ‘60s childhood as it should have been, but also, specifics aside, as it sort of was.

Said heroine is twelve-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward), whose cold-fish Dad (Bill Murray) and repressed Mom (Frances McDormand) are both lawyers. At first the stonefaced Suzy is a little creepy, peering through binoculars out the windows of her handsome home, but even though she’s capable of violent outbursts she’s no bad seed. She’s a romantic, keeping vigil for her beloved.

He arrives in the form of Sam (Jared Gilman) a runaway from a Khaki Scout camp on the island. A year earlier, he saw her as The Raven in a local production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, and knew immediately he’d found the meaning of life. They talked only once, but she invited him to correspond, and he did not shirk.

The two of them run away together. Sam, an orphaned foster child, tries to impress her with his woodcraft, unaware that his ardor has already won her heart. They camp out, and she reads to him from her favorite books as he smokes a corn-cob pipe. Needless to say, their idyll drives the rest of the island into a tizzy.

Besides Suzy’s parents, the worriers include the earnest Khaki Scoutmaster (Edward Norton) and the slow-spoken, sad-sack Police Captain (Bruce Willis). The other Khaki Scouts treat the operation not as a search for two missing children but as a manhunt for potentially dangerous fugitives; they fan out, armed to the teeth.

More complications arise, including a Deus ex machina storm, and eventually a Social Services representative (Tilda Swinton in striking blue) and a Khaki Scout bigwig (Harvey Keitel) enter the action as well. Willis gives one of those performances that he’ll be remembered for after most of his action roles are likely forgotten, Norton is touching, the kids are excellent, and Murray and McDormand are effective even if they get less than usual to do here. Robert Yeoman’s water-color-ish cinematography is ravishing—there’s a shot of Willis crossing a church roof that has the austere devotional beauty of an image from Dreyer—and so is the music, by composers ranging from Alexander Desplat to Mark Mothersbaugh to Britten.

For me, Anderson has never topped his first two features, Bottle Rocket and especially Rushmore—one of my favorite movies—but Moonrise Kingdom, despite some clunky missteps toward the end, falls only a little short of these. Some parents may be uncomfortable with the (non-graphic) scenes of Suzy and Sam’s physical intimacy, and with the period-realistic tobacco habits of both Sam and the Scoutmaster, and in the course of the story an animal meets a jarringly awful (and gratuitous) fate that might be a deal-breaker for some kids (and some adults). But with these caveats duly noted, Moonrise Kingdom borders on the sublime.