"Weapons" - Review

At 2:17AM, seventeen children rise from their beds in Maybrook, sprint away into the night, and disappear. As the town reels, attempts to make sense of it and come to terms with what has happened, they attempt to lay blame: every child was from a single classroom of new teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), and one child remains (Cary Christopher), clueless as to what happened. Wracked with grief and confusion, the town spirals, and we watch a dark mystery unfurl from multiple perspectives...

(Piture Credit: Bloody Disgusting)
I was so, so, so excited for this. Off the back of "Barbarian" (my second favourite film of that year), I was all too eager to see where the wild, unpredictable Zach Cregger would go.
Fucking hell yes.
Abso-fucking-lutely yes.
Told in a "Rashomon" style (an absolutely fantastic choice and creative idea) the film keeps that unpredictability and slipperiness of "Barbarian", as a mystery unfurls across several perspectives. The horror begins as a ruinously effective, somewhat bleak, human element: a town tears itself apart and delves into its base instincts, blaming innocent people, transforming it all into a witch hunt. It's great shit. And Cregger remains grounded not just in the human elements (Josh Brolin sleeping in his missing child's bed and screwing up at work, whilst his wife angrily tells him "she's going to work", cold and with a wedge driven between them by this tragedy) but in horror too: I was genuinely gripping my seat, unsure where it was going, what was going to happen, and driven to anxiousness by the simplicity of an average American suburbia draped in darkness and evil behind its walls, like a David Lynch painting shot by a documentarian. Is this person approaching Miss Gandy in a shop during an excruciating long take here as a grieving mother blaming her, or something far more dangerous?
It's excellent with the atmosphere, and flickers between 6 perspectives fluidly, crossing over and overlapping wonderfully, whilst ending each on a genuniely great "what the fuck?!" moment. I don't want to spoil too much, because the mystery is genuinely fun, though when it settles on a resolution, it loses steam in the 6th perspective and drags a little too long (it could have been halved) despite doing a good job delving into abuse and how it's behind closed doors, though the absolutely barmy and energetic 3rd act pulls it out of the bag and salvages it.
The performances are excellent across the board, and Cregger has a firm, solid, equally excellent grasp on characters: Garner plays Miss Gandy as a messy, kind of flawed and all-too-relatable human being; Josh Brolin is exceptional as the grieving father Archer Graff, who has a wonderful arc with Gandy and I ended up REALLY worried for him in the final act; Alden Ehrenreich (I'm happy he shows up!) plays a local cop and is great; and Benedict Wong man, Jesus fucking Christ... He'll haunt me forever. June Diane Raphael shows up too! Sweeeet! Toby Huss as well, in a cool supporting role.
It's great fun.

"Cocaine Bear" - Review

In Georgia, the year is 1985. A disparate group of characters enter the woods today, and are in for a big surprise.
Dee Dee (Brooklyn Prince) is skipping schol so that she and her friend Henry (Christian Convery) can go and paint the waterfalls.
Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr) is taking his recently widowed friend Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) on a job in the great outdoors so that he can begin to heal and move on.
Aging cop Bob (Isaiah Whitlock Jr) decides to take a day off from his new dog, to follow up on a case.
And Sari (Keri Russell), a nurse on her day off, is fuming about having to go into the woods to find her daughter, who has skipped school, and is saddled with a pair of lovesick park rangers (an always welcome and secene-stealing esteemed character actor Margo Martindale, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, unfortunately not related to John Pyper-Ferguson... I think) the whole way.
But soon, they will clash with a bear who has developed a rather finnicky cocaine habit, and they are on its turf...

The title is pure meme fodder, but this film is a good time, you get exactly what it says on the tin. It could be a wacky, weird pisstake of monster movies, or embrace the absurdity of the concept and be a subversive 4th wall breaking joke, but in a refreshing and counter-intuitive kind of way it just plays is straight as an action comedy, so avoids a lot of the smugness and arrogant pretentious folly which could follow.
It's a fun, B-Movie with a Hollywood budget (kind of, it's actually a nice middle number, refreshingly) and it plays to its strengths: the 4 movies of the start (road movie, kids' adventure, renegade cop and wilderness survival) are fun enough to follow on their own merits (particularly Daveed and Eddie: O'Shea Jackson Jr is pretty much always the best thing about whatever he is in, and it's nice to have Ehrenreich in good films again, I like him as a performer) and the jokes land. When the bear enters the picture, director Elizabeth Banks (which is still weird to say) keeps the momentum going with a goofy sense of humour really quite unique to her, and I rather like it.
Standout sequences are a standoff at a gazebo, an ambulance playing "I Just Can't Get Enough", and the two children first finding a parcel of cocaine. Ray Liotta enters the picture as a coke lord, and has some fun with the film largely by playing it straight, and the film's idiocy and bimbling of its characters are where it shines. The soundtrack by Mothersbaugh is fantastic.
Also, just an observation: it's kind of strange seeing no Marvel Cinematic Universe in this.