Movie Review: COCAINE BEAR...

Earlier today, I watched the new Elizabeth Banks-directed dark comedy Cocaine Bear at AMC theaters.

This was actually my second time viewing this film...as I was lucky enough to attend a private test screening of Cocaine Bear back in November of last year.

So now that the comedy which is loosely based on the true story of an actual black bear that overdosed on a duffel bag full of cocaine in 1985 is finally out in theaters, all I can say is, Cocaine Bear was a hoot!

Unsurprisingly, there were no changes made to the movie since that test screening (apart from the final music score and the addition of end credits), and that's because Cocaine Bear was perfect the way it was. Who cares about the current 71% score on Rotten Tomatoes? I don't.

The cast was astounding—from the late Ray Liotta playing a drug kingpin named Sydney White to Keri Russell portraying Sari, a single mom in Georgia who's determined to find her daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) after she played hooky from school to paint waterfalls in the forest.

Alden Ehrenreich went from being Han Solo (in Solo: A Star Wars Story five years ago) to playing Eddie...the level-headed son of Sydney White, while O'Shea Jackson Jr. portrayed Daveed—Eddie's unofficial best friend who's bent on finding the bags of cocaine in the forest while not messing up his spiffy new shoes and sports jersey as he did so.

Margo Martindale was great as Liz, a Georgia park ranger who had the hots for Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a wildlife expert who—as the movie's trailer showed—died a very horrific death at the paws of the coked-up bear.

Isiah Whitlock Jr. played Bob, a no-nonsense Tennessee detective whose two goals in life were to locate the cocaine while looking for the perfect dog to adopt and play with at the same time. Ayoola Smart, who somewhat resembled Jennifer Lawrence in this movie, portrayed Officer Reba...Bob's subordinate who was both loyal (by looking over Bob's adorable canine Rosette while he was gone searching for the coke) and not-so-loyal (I won't spoil that plot twist for ya) to the detective simultaneously.

Christian Convery played Henry, Dee Dee's best friend from grade school who would do anything to impress Sari's daughter...even taking a spoonful of cocaine to do so (of course he spat it out).

Scott Seiss—who did a great job promoting Cocaine Bear on his Twitter account up till the film's theatrical release yesterday—portrayed Tom, a paramedic who, along with his coworker Beth (Kahyun Kim), also had pretty gruesome fates after they came across the bear.

Aaron Holliday, J.B. Moore and Leo Hanna were hilarious as Kid, Vest and Ponytail...a trio of bandits who were a pain in the arse to Ranger Liz even after they got their butts kicked by Daveed inside a public restroom.

Kristofer Hivju and Hannah Hoekstra genially set the tone of the film as Olaf and Elsa, two tourists who were both lucky enough to see a black bear in person for the first time, and also unlucky enough to experience the fury of a black bear that was high on coke.

And not to be forgotten was Matthew Rhys as Andrew Thornton—the real-life drug smuggler in the 1985 incident who set things in motion by dumping all those bags of cocaine out of an airplane onto Georgia's Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest below.

If you've read my previous movie reviews, you'll notice that I didn't really go into detail about all of the characters for those films like I did with the folks in Cocaine Bear...and that's because I waited three months after seeing this flick to express my pleasure in watching this extremely gory but very funny thriller!

From 2015's Pitch Perfect 2 to Cocaine Bear, Elizabeth Banks showed that she is adept at creating satisfying cinematic comedies. (She directed the 2019 action comedy Charlie's Angels as well.) With Cocaine Bear, Banks has demonstrated that she can make a movie that's almost as bloody as what you would see in a film by Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth...and that's saying a lot!

So two enthusiastic thumbs up for Cocaine Bear! It may be a B-movie, but it provided grade-A entertainment for me at the multiplex.

And not to spoil the ending, but Cocaine Bear lent itself to a sequel. Happy Saturday!

Photo of the Day - A Sneak Peek at JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX...

Lady Gaga

So I just found out that Lady Gaga tweeted this picture (back on Valentine's Day) from next year's Joker: Folie à Deux...in which she'll appear as Harley Quinn alongside Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck.

As recently been the case with Warner Bros' other DC Comics movies, Lady Gaga will portray Harley at the same time that Margot Robbie is playing the Joker's ex-girlfriend in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU)...specifically in the Suicide Squad films. Of course, I'm not sure if this is actually still the case—since James Gunn's shakeup of the DCEU might also mean that Robbie, just like Henry Cavill as Superman, won't be calling Joker "puddin" on the big screen anymore. I got mixed results after looking this up on Google!

Also, Robert Pattinson will reportedly begin filming The Batman: Part II this November, while Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck will both appear as the Dark Knight in this June's The Flash. Very amusing.

The image below is of Soundstage 16, which briefly served as holding for background actors when I worked at Warner Bros. Studios last fall and a month ago. I took tons of photos of this building...mostly because of that cool WB logo and not because I was initially unaware of the fact that this stage was where the pirate ship's cave scene in The Goonies was filmed!

Oh, and Joker: Folie à Deux is reportedly being shot inside Soundstage 16 as well! Happy Friday.


Richard T. Par

Movie Review - ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA...

So I watched Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania at Regal Cinemas yesterday, and needless to say, Marvel Studios is really starting to prove Martin Scorsese right!

Scorsese once pointed out that superhero films, particularly those by Marvel, were more like amusement park rides instead of proper cinematic experiences, and the third Ant-Man movie proved that.

Quantumania was an entertaining flick—with Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer once again commendable in their established roles, along with newcomers Kathryn Newton and Jonathan Majors (as the villainous Kang the Conqueror)—but it stopped right there as the film was somewhat deliberate in its attempt to be a typical CGI-ridden superhero movie...filled with banality and playing it safe with its plot.

While it's understandable that computer-generated imagery was needed to bring the Quantum Realm to life in Ant-Man 3 (just like in the two previous installments and 2019's Avengers: Endgame), the visual effects in this movie felt even more artificial than what you saw in last year's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder. I really wanted to like Quantumania, but I couldn't help but yawn and become bored in the first act of the film before Kang finally stepped onto the scene.

As for Kang, Majors' portrayal of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's (MCU) next Thanos-level antagonist was well-done. (Spoilers ahead) I just wished that Kang killed one of the major characters (he only vanquished a bunch of movie extras running away from him) and escaped through that portal in the climax. Of course, the mid-credits scene at the end shows that there will be more than enough Kangs to be a threat to the Avengers once these bad guys arrive on the scene in future MCU movies!

So yea— Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania could've been better. I would say that I'm looking forward to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 this May, but I'm annoyed by what Guardians director James Gunn has done to the DC Extended Universe during his new tenure at Warner Bros. studios.

Henry Cavill is no longer Superman? The Batman Beyond live-action film was cancelled? We'll never see Dwayne Johnson's Black Adam show up in a Shazam! movie? How dare you, Gunn!

"I'M BATMAN." And My Most-Anticipated Movie of This Summer Is...

So Super Bowl LVII has come and gone, with the Kansas City Chiefs winning their second NFL championship in four years, and all I can say is— Bring on The Flash!

The TV spot for the upcoming DC Comics movie was aired during the Big Game today...alongside the commercials for other highly-anticipated summer flicks like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Let's party like it's 1989! Considering the fact that 34 years later, Michael Keaton is donning the Batcowl and Harrison Ford is sporting a fedora and whip once more...

Oh, and I'm also stoked to see Ezra Miller return as the Scarlet Speedster despite Miller's real-world legal issues (Google it), Ben Affleck as the DC Extended Universe's version of Batman (one final time, supposedly) and Sasha Calle as Supergirl in The Flash.

Check out the trailer and Super Bowl spots for The Flash, Rise of the Beasts and The Dial of Destiny below!

Movie Review: INFINITY POOL...

Earlier today, I watched the Brandon Cronenberg-directed horror crime mystery Infinity Pool at AMC theaters.

This is quite a twisted film...with Alexander Skarsgård playing James Foster, a struggling author who travels to an unnamed country (which is Croatia and Hungary in real life) that punishes international travelers who commit crimes on its soil by forcing these visitors to be cloned, and then making these tourists sit and watch as their doppelgängers are viciously executed by local government officials.

Mia Goth contributes a wonderfully psychotic performance to Infinity Pool—playing Gabi Bauer, a fellow tourist who Foster befriends (that's an understatement) at the resort he's staying at. I never watched Goth's recent movies X and Pearl, but if Goth's portrayal of Gabi in Pool is anything similar to her performances in those horror flicks, then I'm totally missing out on seeing what an amazing young talent Goth is!

Overlooking Goth's presence and Infinity Pool's inventive premise, the movie was a bit much to sit through...even for its 117-minute running time. If you want to see a movie that has lots of gratuitous nudity and a scene filled with so many flashing lights that you're afraid you just might suffer a seizure inside the theater auditorium, then Infinity Pool is definitely the film for you!

I'll give Infinity Pool 7 out of 10 stars.

GLADIATOR 2 Has a 2024 Release Date!

So I just found out earlier today that Gladiator 2, starring Paul Mescal and once again directed by Ridley Scott, will make its theatrical debut around Thanksgiving of next year!

Based on the 2024 movie list below, the Gladiator sequel's November 22 opening date doesn't come as a surprise...since it would've need to deal with the Mad Max: Fury Road spinoff Furiosa and Part 2 of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, as well as Marvel's Captain America: New World Order and Thunderbolts during the summer, and potential awards season contenders like Wicked: Part One, Joker: Folie à Deux and Avatar: The Seed Bearer later that year.

And Marvel's Deadpool 3 will open two weeks before Gladiator 2...on November 8. It's all good.

(The first Gladiator film was released on May 5, 2000.)

All I can say is— Movie-wise, 2024 can't come soon enough! In regards to this year, I'm excited to watch Titanic on the big screen again when it returns to theaters next week (on February 10 for its 25-year anniversary, which was last December), Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania on February 17, and Cocaine Bear a week after that...on February 24. Heh.

Blockbusters releasing in 2024:

- Gladiator 2
- Furiosa
- Avatar 3
- Mickey 17
- Joker 2
- Deadpool 3
- Blade
- Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse
- WICKED Part 1
- Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning — Part 2
- Godzilla V Kong Sequel
- Thunderbolts
- Captain America 4
- Mufasa pic.twitter.com/2gN62Av5pw

— Cinema Solace (@CinemaSoIace) February 3, 2023

Movie Review: A MAN CALLED OTTO...

Earlier today, I watched the Marc Forster-directed dramedy A Man Called Otto at AMC theaters.

Based on the 2012 Fredrik Backman novel A Man Called Ove, A Man Called Otto is about a Pittsburgh widower who vents his grumpiness on everyone and everything he stumbles across...from the cashier at a local hardware store and morning joggers who ignore his disgruntled persona on the street as they greet him anyway, to the stray cat loitering on his front porch.

While A Man Called Otto was lighthearted and sweet, it still had a darkness about it as Otto Anderson—played by Tom Hanks—tried to find different ways to commit suicide due to his ever-growing loneliness after his wife Sonya (genially portrayed by Rachel Keller in flashbacks) passed away from cancer a few years earlier.

Otto thought that he could get away with treating everyone he met like garbage, until he's introduced to Marisol (cheerily played by Mariana Treviño), his new neighbor across the street.

While Marisol had a sweet cluelessness about her (Marisol couldn't drive even though she's in her 30s, and she's married to an imbecile who's as carefree as her), she didn't tolerate how Otto tried to dismiss her at the beginning...using her foot to prevent Otto from completely shutting his front door on her after they first met.

As expected with movies about grumpy old men who want to be left alone for the remainder of their lives, A Man Called Otto eventually found Anderson growing closer to Marisol and everyone else he knew. This didn't come as a surprise—seeing as how Otto did nice things to help other people at the same time he called them "idiots" and tried to blow them off.

Saving someone who fell onto a train track from the boarding platform after he suffered a cardiac issue, helping prevent long-time neighbors from being evicted from their home by a heartless real estate company, and taking a stray cat as your pet after finding it freezing in the snow outside your house one morning will do that to ya...

At the end of the movie, Anderson achieves his goal of reuniting with his wife (I won't spoil how, but it fortunately wasn't suicide), while leaving behind a legacy that will be continued by Marisol and other people who never gave up on Otto even as he tried to exclude them from his life.

A Man Called Otto is a film that's both entertaining and heartfelt... It's definitely a must-watch.

The 2023 Academy Award Nominations...

Congratulations to all of the movies, filmmakers and thespians who received an Oscar nomination this morning by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! The winners will be revealed during the 95th Academy Awards that will be televised March 12 on ABC TV.

As shown below, Everything Everywhere All at Once (which I saw at the theater last April and immensely enjoyed) leads the Best Picture pack with 11 nominations. Top Gun: Maverick—which I saw multiple times at the theater last year—is up for 6 trophies; it unfortunately isn't up for Best Cinematography but is amazingly up for Best Adapted Screenplay!

Most-Nominated Movies for the 95th Academy Awards:

Everything Everywhere All at Once - 11 nominations
All Quiet on the Western Front - 9 nominations
The Banshees of Inisherin - 9 nominations
Elvis - 8 nominations
The Fabelmans - 7 nominations
Tár - 6 nominations
Top Gun: Maverick - 6 nominations
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - 5 nominations

I didn't watch the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, but I do know that Ana de Armas is a very talented actress who was great in 2017's Blade Runner 2049 and 2019's Knives Out. Congrats to her for her Best Actress nomination!

Click here to see all of the nominees for this year's Academy Awards.

One actor who I hoped would get nominated was John Boyega for his role as a down-on-his-luck Marine veteran in last August's Breaking. I gave this dramatic crime thriller an enthusiastic review last summer, and I was hoping that the Academy would give this movie the kudos it deserves... Next time, Boyega.

And up for Best Visual Effects for 2022 is Top Gun: Maverick, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Batman (which should've also been nominated for Best Original Score), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: The Way of Water. Yes, James Cameron's sequel to the 2009 sci-fi epic will go home with the trophy.

Can't wait to watch the Oscars on March 12!

Movie Review: MISSING...

A few hours ago, I watched the dramatic thriller Missing at AMC theaters.

An unofficial sequel to the 2018 film Searching (which starred John Cho and Debra Messing), Missing is about an 18-year-old girl named June (Storm Reid) who uses every online tool at her disposal to find her mother Grace (Nia Long)...who suddenly disappeared when she was supposed to be on vacation in Colombia.

Missing was both very clever and pretty suspenseful—with the clever part due to June's ability to figure out the passwords to the Gmail accounts of both Grace and her boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung)...and to do other things like pinpointing (from June's home in Southern California) the locations of surveillance cameras at the Colombian hotel where Grace was staying at. With the exception of actual apps and websites like WhatsApp, Taskrabbit and Gmail, I'm wondering how many of the other sites that June used to locate her mom really existed.

Either way, June was so brilliant at using social media and other online sites to find private information about various people that there should be another sequel, or spinoff flick, where she grew up to become a computer hacker working for the CIA! No seriously.

(Well okay, maybe not the CIA... That's such an overused trope in Hollywood movies.)

The suspenseful part of Missing came from all of the amazing plot twists that dot the film. I'm not going to spoil things here, but just when you thought that June finally discovered where her mom was, Missing threw the audience for a loop.

Missing had some amazing twists... Not as amazing as the twist at the end of the movie The Usual Suspects, but still great nonetheless.

The only downer in Missing was the climax itself; not that it wasn't good, but because it's here where the film switches from being an intriguing, 111-minute take on social media and other forms of Web technology to being a serious statement about spousal abuse and domestic violence. Such a bummer.

Overlooking the climax, ironically, Missing was still a great ride that showed the audience what can be found if you sleuthed through the Internet hard enough. Whether or not that's a good thing is up to the moviegoers to decide.

Movie Review: PLANE...

Earlier today, I watched the action thriller Plane at AMC theaters.

This film—which stars Gerard Butler as an airline pilot who ends up making an emergency landing on a remote island in the Philippines after his passenger jet is damaged in a lightning storm (and his passengers are in turn taken hostage by Filipino separatists who stumble upon them)—was very entertaining. However, I felt that this movie would've been even better if it was a bit longer...as I thought the stakes weren't big enough and the story unsurprisingly predictable.

Mike Colter, who plays Louis Gaspare, a prisoner who was placed on the flight for extradition to Tokyo on a murder charge, was great in Plane...though it seems like he and Butler's character, Brodie Torrance, got along too quickly as they searched for help on the island after the emergency landing. Looks like I need to watch the film again to see if I'm correct in my assessment of this plot point.

As for the setting itself, I'm Filipino and was impressed by how accurate the depiction of the Philippines was in Plane. Yes, there's a Jolo island in the Sulu Sea...and yes, the southern part of the Philippines (which is the Mindanao region, where Jolo is located) is run by militants—namely the Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic State affiliate.

I cracked up when Louis Gaspare asked Brodie Torrance—welding a walkie talkie so he could call for help—if he spoke Tagalog (the main language in the Philippines), only for Torrance to toss the walkie talkie to the ground in response. Yes, Tagalog is basically the Filipino offshoot of Spanish, but I'd get rid of the walkie talkie too if I was in a country where I had absolutely no clue how to speak the dialect.

Bottom line is, Plane was very entertaining but could've been longer and more dramatic. But considering how the film ends, I wouldn't be surprised if we see Butler and Colter team up again in a sequel...which I'll watch.

One last thing— In real life, do U.S. airlines like American, Delta and United have their own private 'assets' (re: commando groups) to use in case their passengers are taken hostage overseas? Hm.