‘Cocaine Bear’ and the Top Five Cocaine Movies

‘Cocaine Bear’Elizabeth Banks directs the bear-on-blow movie

Cocaine Bear 2023

Loosely drawn from the real 1985 black bear that ate a smuggler's dropped duffel of cocaine in northern Georgia. Elizabeth Banks directs from a Lord and Miller production, with Keri Russell as the mother whose daughter wanders into the woods, Alden Ehrenreich and O'Shea Jackson Jr. as low-level dealers, Ray Liotta in his final role as their kingpin boss, plus Brooklyn Prince, Isaiah Whitlock Jr., Margo Martindale, and Matthew Rhys. Sean and Amanda saw it together and never laughed once. They land on a convoluted, tonally lost kill comedy that's more gore than gag, with a bad CGI bear. Sean's most damning note: the movie is dedicated to Liotta, which he calls disrespectful.

Cocaine, the movie drugwhy coke plays like a period piece now

Easy Rider 1969

Sean's entry point for the whole conversation: the New Hollywood landmark is, at bottom, a road trip to sell cocaine. He's never really loved it, but reads selling illicit product as a recurring American story engine, sometimes the drug itself, sometimes just the MacGuffin.

Amanda's Top Five Cocaine MoviesNo. 1 first

No. 1

Goodfellas 1990

The shared No. 1. Amanda knew she needed a Scorsese and picked the one whose helicopter-overhead paranoia and Henry Hill's cocaine spiral taught a generation both the glamour and the wreckage of the drug.

No. 2

Basic Instinct 1992

People doing cocaine and having sex around a lot of mirrors: the sleaze vibe Amanda imagined the '80s were, even though it's 1992. Sharon Stone, the ice pick, and a long tangent about the perfect untraceable murder.

No. 3

American Psycho 2000

Mary Harron's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis. When Amanda hears 'cocaine in the '80s' she hears Ellis: the ultimate yuppie satire, with Christian Bale bringing full coke-eyed mania as Patrick Bateman.

No. 4

Bachelorette 2012

Leslie Headland's vicious comedy about three bitchy friends doing coke and being awful to the bride. Amanda's contemporaneous pick (she likes it more than 'Bridesmaids') and the movie she thinks of for blow at a special event.

No. 5

Triple Frontier 2019

Amanda's 'fun' curveball, chosen after a family poll. Nobody snorts anything, but the mule that falls off the mountain lands them on a cocaine farm, and the aggro, life-ruined energy of the four men reads as pure coke to her.

Sean's Top Five Cocaine MoviesNo. 1 first

No. 1

Goodfellas 1990

The shared No. 1. For Sean the film's first hour is elegant gangster glamour, then cocaine becomes the tool that shows everything coming apart. Growing up near people tied to the Pileggi world, he says it was practically part of his youth.

No. 2

Magnolia 1999

Paul Thomas Anderson's third feature. Not on the list because Melora Walters's character snorts it, but because the whole movie feels like it was made by someone on cocaine, from the camera work down to the editing. Sean's 'least annoying friend on cocaine.'

No. 3

Climax 2018

Gaspar Noé's descent into hell: a '90s French dance troupe's after-party where the drugs, cocaine among them, curdle into purgatory. Sean nearly used it on the dance-movies episode. He calls it queasy and hypnotic, and says he didn't clock it as a period piece at first.

No. 4

Scarface 1983

Subbed in late because leaving it off would be stupid. Sean's granddaddy of the coke-opera gangster epic: De Palma at his height, an Oliver Stone script, and Pacino's most ludicrous performance in movie history.

No. 5

Bug 2007

Sean's curveball, not literally about cocaine but a one-to-one map of being consumed by a drug. William Friedkin directs Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon losing their minds together in a motel room. Genuinely upsetting, hard to rewatch.

Domee Shi on ‘Turning Red’

Domee Shi on

Turning Red 2022

Shi's Oscar-nominated Pixar feature about a Chinese Canadian girl who poofs into a red panda with her emotions. She pitched a universal puberty story through a culturally specific lens; it took eight screenings and rewrites with writer Julia Cho to land Ming's closing line, 'The further you go, the prouder I'll be.'

Domee Shi on

Bao 2018

The Oscar-winning short that started as an indie side project, a dark, 'Chinese gingerbread man' riff on a mother wanting to consume her child. Shi pitched it to Pete Docter for feedback, and his enthusiasm pushed her into Pixar's open short-pitch process, where it won.

Domee Shi on

Inside Out 2015

Shi's first full-time story-artist job out of her internship. She felt she'd lucked into a show where knowing the inside of a 13-year-old girl's head was currency. Docter's open story room, she says, built her early confidence and voice.

Domee Shi on

Incredibles 2 2018

The feature 'Bao' premiered in front of. After it, Pixar invited Shi into development to pitch three feature ideas, the studio's home-grown path from short to director.

Domee Shi on

Aladdin 1992

The first animated work Shi remembers falling for, her family's first VHS after immigrating to Canada. She credits it, half-joking, with an early awakening ('how is this possible, he's a drawing?') that fed into 'Turning Red.'

Also mentioned raised along the way

Cocaine honorable mentions BlowAmerican GangsterKing of New YorkThe Wolf of Wall StreetBright Lights, Big CityCity of GodFoxcatcher

The creature-comedy ancestors JawsPiranha

Club drugs, not coke GoLong Shot

In passing Boogie NightsBabylonFerris Bueller's Day OffSnakes on a PlaneThe Florida ProjectRules Don't ApplyMagic Mike XXLThe 40-Year-Old VirginPitch Perfect 2Charlie's Angels21 Jump StreetThe Lego MovieAnt-Man and the Wasp: QuantumaniaSleepless in SeattleThe Pelican BriefTeen WolfThe School of Rock

Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads

TV VinylEuphoriaNarcosThe White LotusThe WireThe Acolyte

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