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Relying on an almost postmodern meathead premise, Cocaine Bear is mainly notable for how doggedly it tries to pass off patently ridiculous plot points as having enough credibility to survive 90 minutes of complicated exposition. We have cocaine, and we have a bear, the combination of which leads to the kind of bloody carnage that’s meant to tickle the funny bone as opposed to stimulating fright responses. The premise itself is reportedly based on a true story from 1985 about a bag of cocaine dropped from a plane into a Georgia forest that was eaten by what is believed to have been a bear. No one knows what happened to the bear, but rumors were inevitable (most likely it died from toxic shock), and now someone has decided to extrapolate on those rumors to their most ludicrous ends. In a nutshell, our ursine protagonist—a female, which itself becomes a vital plot point—goes ballistic and just has to have more, meaning: instant junkie. Anything between her and more blow gets mowed down with savage efficiency.

So the whole point is to provide human fodder for the bear, and screenwriter Jimmy Warden and director Elizabeth Banks do a respectable job of devising subplots that can be intertwined to that end. After introducing the bear by means of an unlucky couple hiking through the woods, we see, in flashback, the obviously stoned drug courier dumping the coke-filled duffel bags from the door of his small plane and inadvertently knocking himself unconscious. Then we’re presented with the most entertaining of the various subplots: two adolescents (Brooklyn Prince, Christian Convery) who skip school to visit some waterfalls in the woods where the cocaine has landed. On their journey, they happen upon one of the bags and make some pretty good jokes about either selling it or snorting it. Meanwhile, the girl’s single mother (Keri Russell) starts to get worried when she finds out her daughter’s playing hookie and goes looking for her. There’s also a park ranger (Margo Martindale) accompanying a wildlife expert (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) she has the hots for as the latter does some research. Of course, there’s the drug honcho (Ray Liotta, in his last movie appearance) who owns the product sending his dimwitted son (Alden Ehrenreich) and the son’s more sensible friend (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to retrieve the drugs. Finally, there’s the inevitable police officer (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) who has been tasked with finding out about the plane crash. 

All these vectors eventually come together but not before crossing paths with the bear, who deserves to be called the protagonist even if she’s the creation of motion capture technology. There is a measure of desperation to the bear’s behavior that really does convey inebriated rage. The gore and severed limbs are served up al dente without a lot of sympathy—you actually end up rooting for the bear not because the humans are evil, but because they’re dumb—and on balance the gross stuff doesn’t make an impression either way, probably because Banks doesn’t provide much in the way of suspense. It works better as a comedy than as a horror movie, but one-joke features are really difficult to pull off. 

Opens Sept. 29 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Cocaine Bear home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Universal Studios

As do many new directors nowadays, Carlota Pereda expands on a previously made short subject for her feature debut. That short was also titled Piggy, and was about a teen living in a provincial Spanish town who is relentlessly teased and bullied by her peers because of her weight. The short focuses on an isolated incident. The girl goes to the public swimming pool during an hour when few people are using it. The only person there is a male stranger (Richard Holmes), who mostly ignores her. However, while she’s in the pool, some classmates sneak in and steal her clothes, forcing her to walk home only in her swimsuit. While escaping some male tormentors she comes across a white van on a side road. Her classmates are locked inside, screaming, the man from the pool at the wheel. He looks at her and gives her her clothes before driving away.

The feature makes a thriller out of this premise—the man in the van turns out to be a serial killer, but only our protagonist, Sara (Laura Galán), knows about this once bodies start turning up and the girls in the van are reported missing. There’s a kind of secret sharer quality to Sara’s behavior that’s a mixture of curiosity and gratitude, which only intensifies when other people in town suspect she knows something about the killings and disappearances but won’t say anything. As it turns out, Sara’s home life is no more tolerable than her so-called social life. Though her equally overweight father dotes on her to a certain extent, her mother is critical to a fault, thus providing a more accessible target for Sara’s incipient rage at the hand life has dealt her. Pereda teases the slasher possibilities of the story by making the family business a butcher shop (Sara always seems to have a bit of blood on her) and hinting that Sara is skilled with a hunting rifle. She also plays up the sexual angle by showing Sara indulging in porn, which seems more a reaction to loneliness than horniness. In the end, she can’t articulate her attraction to the deadly stranger because she’s so caught up in her own resentments, and as a result more people may die.

The local distributor is promoting Piggy as a kind of transgressive horror film, and I went into it thinking that Sara would turn out to be some kind of avenging psychopath, but it’s not that at all. On the other hand, it isn’t the off-beat psychological drama that Pereda obviously intended, and while I appreciated the occasional comic relief (Sara’s attempts to steal her father’s cell phone while he’s drinking beer and watching TV is pretty hilarious), the juxtaposition of the various set pieces is handled clumsily, and as a result the violent payoff, while clever, doesn’t provide much satisfaction. It’s an impressive first feature without being a very suspenseful thriller.

In Spanish. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

Piggy home page in Japanese

photo (c) Morena Films-Backup Studio-Francesca

Chinese director Qiao Sixue has said that her debut feature is semi-autobiographical. Qiao studied film in France and intended to remain in Europe, but eventually returned to her childhood home in Inner Mongolia in order to make a movie about her mother, with whom she had always had a fraught relationship. In the movie, her avatar is Alus (Yider), a club musician who has achieved a level of success in Beijing by combining electronics with native Mongolian instruments he mastered as a child. In the big city he has essentially thrown off the trappings of his rural upbringing and remade himself as a vanguard artist, but then he hears from his brother that their mother, Naranzug (Badema), has descended into a state of dementia and has practically “destroyed” his urban household. Given that the brother has a family and Alus does not, Alus feels guilty and goes to his house to address his mother’s fervent desire to return to her real home, though it takes some time for him to determine exactly where this home is.

The film takes the form of a road movie, with the Mongolian steppe providing a dramatic background for Alus’s slow and painstaking reconsideration of his relationship with Naranzug, whose cognitive impairment becomes more acute along the way. The title refers obliquely to the colorful rope that Alus uses to connect him to Naranzug, who mostly doesn’t recognize him as her son, so as to prevent her from stumbling off into the vast, empty plains, but along the way it becomes a metaphor for the ties that bind him to his homeland as he discovers not only what it is about the place that made his mother the person she is, but also how much it has informed his own character. As Naranzug almost reverts to a feral state—at one point delivering a lost lamb back to the corral from which it wandered—Alus has to resort to a more primal form of care, playing his music in order to lure his mother back into his control. 

All the while, the idea of where Naranzug’s “home” is keeps shifting, and as the pair move further into the wilderness it becomes clear that home is more of an idea than a place. It’s the people they encounter, the smells and sounds that connect her with something she can still somehow recall; though in the end it’s a landmark she identifies from her childhood. Though the mysticism invoked by Qiao’s camerawork and sound design, not to mention the romance that Alus encounters along the way, occasionally trespasses into the realm of corn, Alus’s newly generated link to a culture he thought he knew but really didn’t is made palpable. When he joins in a grasslands festival by playing his own music, it doesn’t feel anachronistic or odd. His artistic sensibility has always been rooted in this place, and his mother reacts with pure joy, despite her affliction. The connection is complete, thus allowing them to let go of each other forever. 

In Mongolian and Mandarin. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku K’s Cinema (03-3352-2471).

The Cord of Life home page in Japanese

Like the Spider-verse reboot, this new animated take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise completely reimagines the vibe for a more discerning target audience, namely young people who have a stake in the culture that the source material ostensibly addresses. By bringing in people who have proven ability to appeal to actual teenagers, from soundtrack composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to co-screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the producers allow the characters’ adolescent freak flag to fly freely, with the result being a much more entertaining movie than any of the previous ones, which mostly tried to be something for everyone. Rightly, they also went back to the beginning, and the origin story is funnier for the kind of animation used, which looks like stop-motion but seems to be a synthesis of different styles. 

One thing’s for sure, the frantic pace likely matches the brain function of teens who play video games and surf the net at breakneck speeds. If I hadn’t seen the previous Turtle movies I might not have fully appreciated how adept director Jeff Rowe is at telling a story with such economy and precision. We get the weird scientist, Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito), losing a vial of his mutation agent down a New York City drain, where it gets into the sewage system and creates a whole menagerie of mutants. Our heroes are babies rescued from the sludge by the kung-fu practicing rat, Splinter (Jackie Chan), who has been traumatized by his ventures to the surface world and raises his four boys (voiced by non-famous actors) to shun that world. They do have to occasionally go up top to filch supplies, including their beloved pizza, and so Splinter teaches them Asian martial arts for self-defense purposes. As adolescent boys do, they long for connection to their own cohort and secretly aspire to going to school, things they know about because they spend so much time on the internet, but of course their “father” would forbid it. After they meet April (Ayo Edebiri), a nerdish girl with journalistic pretensions, they can’t get the idea of integrating out of their minds, and together the five take on Superfly (Ice Cube), a mutant fly that plans to use some kind of farout machine to turn all the inhabitants of NYC into mutants.

What’s particularly attractive about the production is how seamlessly it integrates the furious action elements into a typical goofy teen self-expression story. Rogen and Goldberg bring the same spirit of irreverent abandon to the presentation that they did to such classics as Superbad, and the humorous back-and-forth, not only among the Turtles but among the nominal villains, in imbued with a crackling, throwaway wit that never flags. Even the scatology and gross-out stuff (April tends to throw up without much warning) is done with a light touch. Let’s hope there’s more of this to come. 

Opens Sept. 22 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku PIccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem home page in Japanese

photo (c) Paramount Pictures

As a studio, Sony Pictures is relatively light on IP product, though the one they do have, Spider-Man, is a heavyweight. I’m not sure if the race driver simulation game Gran Turismo is franchise-worthy, but the whole presentation here is geared toward endurance. In one significant way, however, it’s a one-off: The movie is based on the true story of Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a British kid who went from a stone talent for the GT game to an actual career as a racer. And while I’m not sufficiently attuned to gaming lore to understand how close the connection is between GT and Sony’s Play Station, the company that gets the most attention and product placement here is Nissan, one of whose Japanese racers came up with GT as a simulator for drivers and which eventually sponsors an academy that invites the best sim drivers in the world to compete for a chance to drive the real thing. Apparently, Mardenborough’s story has been liberally altered in order to sharpen the movie’s dramatic arc, which is only to be expected, and there’s a rote quality to the storytelling that leaches whatever tension the movie might offer outside of the actual racing scenes, which are the best that money can buy.

Much is made of the disconnect in actual experience between racing sim cars and racing real cars. Jann’s father (Djimon Hounsou), a retired footballer, doesn’t see his son’s pastime as a “real sport,” but even the salty Jack Salter (David Harbour), the old school racing coach who is talked into working with the half dozen sim hopefuls who want to join the Nissan race team, never quite buys the idea that skills on the console can translate to skills behind an actual engine. Jann and the other students in the academy are constantly being told “you’re only gamers” and then, of course, they prove everybody wrong, but director Neill Blomkamp has to show this with a lot of CGI that itself looks like it was designed for video games, like when Jann imagines the real race car around him as a set of separate interlocked parts (one of the features of GT is that racers can design their own cars), though exactly how that translates into victory is not clear. Jann’s obstacles are multivalent. Orlando Bloom’s Nissan factotum, the man who came up with the academy idea, isn’t keen on Jann as the best representative of the brand until, of course, he is; and Jann’s competition, especially a smug McLaren racer (Thomas Kretschmann), refuse to take him seriously. As a result, Jann’s string of victories feels vindicating in a pleasant way, but the sailing, to use a completely different sports metaphor, is way too smooth, despite the fact that Jann at one point is involved in a horrific crash that almost kills him.

If I said the racing scenes make Gran Turismo worth seeing, it’s not going to convince people who are already averse to such sports films to buy a ticket, but Blomkamp, who made his name with the sci-fi curiosity District 9, is a very visceral director, and it’s when Jann and the other characters are in actual race cars on a track that the movie comes into its own. Obviously, the makers of the game Gran Turismo are hoping more people will be turned on by this aspect to join in the fun, but I imagine anyone who has ever had the potential of being a sim gamer is already one. And as for Nissan, no one is going to buy a Skyliner after seeing this movie. Sony Pictures should just be happy they got one decent film from this particular IP.

Opens Sept. 15 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Gran Turismo home page in Japanese