Month: February 2023

Logic is set to drop College Park, his debut independent album since departing Def Jam with Vinyl Days as his final label act last summer. The multi-platinum rapper and best-selling author conjured very college vibes on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday night, February 22, the same day Logic released his “Lightsabers” single.

In the “Lightsabers” video, Logic traverses fantastical and vast landscapes. But on Kimmel, he only needed Juicy J, C Dot Castro, and the all-too-familiar confined nature of a college dorm.

The performance began with Juicy J proclaiming, “Logic! Juicy J! College Park! We gon’ take it back to 2011. Y’all know what time it is.” As Juicy exited the screen, viewers were welcomed into a staged college dorm where Logic sat next to C Dot Castro, who handled the keys. “It’s a good day, good day, good day,” Logic rapped. “Had a lot of bad ones this year / But today’s a good day, good day, good day, good day, good day.”

The song is equally reflective and projective, with Logic reminiscing on past times when he felt down but didn’t stay down and spreading a message of perseverance: “I hope you don’t give up your dreams for a 9-to-5 / Don’t get me wrong, it’ll pay your bills / But if you don’t love your job, tell me, what’s the point? / Don’t disappoint / Gotta make it a point to do it a better way.”

Logic emerged from his makeshift set to dap up the Kimmel audience and lead into slowed-down, jazzier verse backed by a live band from a traditional stage. It wouldn’t have been a complete performance without Logic tossing dollar bills into the crowd during Castro’s verse. But the true finale was Logic saying, “My wife’s pregnant again. It’s a little boy.”

Logic and his wife, Brittney Noell, announced they were expecting their second child in early January, but Logic’s Kimmel appearance served as a gender reveal party.

Watch the “Lightsabers” performance above.

College Park is out on 2/24 via Three Oh One Productions. Pre-order it here.

Netflix will soon start charging for password sharing, but it’s lowering its cost in more than 30 countries worldwide. Not the United States, however. “The streaming company’s recent price cuts span Middle Eastern countries including Yemen, Jordan, Libya, and Iran; sub-Saharan African markets including Kenya; and European countries such as Croatia, Slovenia and Bulgaria,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Affected markets also include Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

The price drop — which, in some cases, halves the cost of a subscription — is good news for more than 10 million subscribers, or roughly four percent of the company’s 230 million-plus subscribers.

While Netflix didn’t unveil the pricing changes in a big announcement, it communicated them locally. “Starting today, our Basic Plan in Malaysia is now RM28 per month for both new and existing members,” the streamer tweeted in that country, for example. The 28 Malaysian Ringgit ($6.32) is down from 35 Ringgit ($7.90) previously.

“It definitely goes against the recent trends not just for Netflix, but for the broader streaming industry,” John Hodulik, a media and entertainment analyst at UBS Group AG, told the WSJ. “Some of these cuts on a percentage basis are substantial.” That they’re happening before the password sharing crackdown goes into effect is not a coincidence. You can see the full list of markets with lowered subscription costs (congrats to Papua New Guinea!) here.

(Via the Wall Street Journal and the Hollywood Reporter)

In an attempt to score political points ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump paid a visit to the site of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio in an effort to distinguish himself from Joe Biden who spent President Day making a surprise visit to Ukraine. Like any good Trump visit, it involved naked shilling for his own brand of water, and of course, a stop at McDonald’s where he bragged to employees that he knows the menu better than they do.

The Ohio visit turned even more Trumpian when the former president decided to hold court with the press and ramble about how… he saved football during the pandemic? To hear Trump tell it, he personally brought back both the Big 10 and the NFL just by placing phones calls to commissioners and saying, no joke, “You gotta get this football open.”

Here’s the full text of Trump’s weird football rant:

I don’t know if you remember when Ohio State wasn’t going to be playing football for another season. They were gonna sit back and watch with the China Virus or COVID or whatever you want to call it. And I called the head of the Big 10, the Big 10 football, and I said, ‘You gotta get this football open.’ And they were great and they responded and Ohio State played that season. Nobody remembers that, I think, right? Does anybody know? We got that opened very early, and you had a great season of football to put it mildly. So it was a very great honor. The Big 10. That led to the NFL and it led to most of the rest of football in the country. But you led it through Ohio State and Big 10 and we got that done. And I did that very personally. I called the commissioner and he did a good job.

As for what any of this has to do with helping victims of an environmental disaster is anybody’s guess. Is Trump going to call the train and say, “You gotta get this town open,” because, seriously, what is he talking about?

(Via Aaron Rupar on Twitter)

Lana Del Rey’s family is all over the music industry: Sister Chuck Grant is a photographer who has directed some of Del Rey’s videos, and it was just revealed that father Rob Grant is putting out a new album, Lost At Sea. The LP is set for release on June 9.

An album blurb from Rough Trade (that has since been removed but is cached here) reads:

“Rob Grant releases his debut album, Lost At Sea via Decca Records. An accidental recording artist, Grant has never had a lesson on any instrument in his life. No kind of formal musical training at all. He can’t read sheet music. But when he sits down at a piano, something magical happens. Notes flow from him and out pours composition after composition. The father of international icon Lana Del Rey, he enlisted an array of talent to contribute to the making of the album. Features and writing credits include his daughter Lana Del Rey, while production credits include Jack Antonoff, Luke Howard, Laura Sisk, and Zach Dawes. Now signed to Decca Records, Rob Grant is set to embark on his next venture as he delves into his newfound career in music.”

Per a tracklist shared by Vinyl Tap, the album has 14 songs and Del Rey features on the title track and another called “Hollywood Bowl.”

Some Del Rey fans on Reddit pointed out that the Lost At Sea cover art is reminiscent of Rey’s Norman F*cking Rockwell art, in which she also stands on a boat with the water in view behind her. Another user made note of a Del Rey Instagram Live broadcast from last September, when she mentioned Grant’s album and he seemed upset about her letting the cat out of the bag. Furthermore, another clever commenter called Grant a “nepo daddy.”

Grant had previously teased the project himself on his Twitter account, with photos of him in the studio accompanied by leading captions.

Lost At Sea is out 6/9 via Decca Records.

South Park duo Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been incredibly busy with their long-running quest to re-open Casa Bonita in Colorado. That shall happen in May (and they’re looking to hire 500+ more employees), but that doesn’t mean that South Park itself is on the back burner. Nope, the show recently made scores of headlines after a recent episode roasted the “privacy”-claiming ways of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

That subject is necessarily a loaded one, so it’s right up South Park‘s alley. It should be noted, as well, that the Comedy Central show remains an equal-opportunity offender, so to speak. The series profanely scorched the Royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton back in the day, and dare I say that that was a more brutal take on certain rumors.

However, we’re now in 2023, and South Park made a fine point while going over the top in their typical satiric way. Harry and Meghan are arguably overexposed, and it’s hard to claim they want absolute privacy while Harry is out there releasing a memoir about losing his virginity and all that. South Park poked fun at this with the “The Worldwide Privacy Tour” episode, mainly to point out contradictions. And although the Harry and Meghan critics pointed towards this as evidence of them being “over,” a spokesperson wants everyone to know that they’re alright, and they’re not suing. Via People:

A spokesperson for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry is shooting down reports that the couple is suing over a recent South Park episode.

On whether Harry and Meghan are pursuing legal action against the show, a spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex tells PEOPLE: “It’s all frankly nonsense. Totally baseless, boring reports.”

Yes, this will all blow over, much like every instance of South Park taking aim (other than skewering of Scientology, which did leave a substantial mark). Parker and Stone do perform a great service to humanity, and I’m being very serious here. They’re gifted satirists and revel in pointing out pop culture hypocrisy, no matter how big or small. And if this causes Harry and Meghan to take some downtime, so be it. They have, after all, had quite a public run with a Netflix docuseries about their lives and how they fled the British monarchy. However, yes, they will recover from this and be alright.

Comedy Central’s South Park is streaming on Paramount+.

(Via People)

Nicki Minaj is having a good year. Last month, she kicked off 2023 by becoming the female rapper with the most consecutive years charting a single on the Hot 100. She then broke another milestone by becoming the first female rapper to surpass 28 billion streams on Spotify.

Now, it looks like she’s gearing up to share new music. She shared a video on Instagram that previews a new song. It’s playing in a club and Minaj — with her half-red, half-pink hair and thick shades — mouths along to the flow while people around her dance and twerk. The caption reads: “#RedRubyDaSleeze 3/3.”

Minaj has been otherwise quiet on social media, aside from congratulating Rihanna. “A lil pretty boy already,” she commented on Rihanna’s post. “Congratulations on the new bundle of, joy, Queen. Bodied the Super Bowl.”

In November, the “Super Bass” singer teamed up with Maluma and Myriam Fares for “Tukoh Taka,” the official FIFA World Cup anthem. “I am so happy to be part of this FIFA World Cup anthem!” Maluma said in a statement. “I always dreamt of an opportunity like this. Representing Latin music on this global track alongside amazing artists that sing in English and Arabic, takes our culture to another level.”

And Just Like That… did a masterful job of throwing fans off their scent ahead of the reboot series’ HBO Max debut in December 2021. Executive producer and showrunner Michael Patrick King admitted he and his team staged fake scenes to hide the death of Chris Noth’s Mr. Big. (Remember the Peloton fiasco?)

But it would be just cruel to tease a Sam Smith cameo and not deliver.

According to Deadline on Wednesday, February 22, Smith “is set to appear in Season 2,” though “details of the character Smith will play will remain under wraps.”

All we have to go from for now is a shared Instagram post from Smith and And Just Like That… captioned, “Up to something unholy on set.” Of course, that’s a cheeky reference to Smith’s Grammy-winning pop behemoth “Unholy” with Kim Petras.

And Just Like That… initially was billed as a limited series revival of Sex And The City, but it was renewed for a second season last March.

By June, it was confirmed that Kim Cattrall’s famed Samantha Jones will be featured again in the new season — presumably still off-camera, considering Cattrall hasn’t publicly taken back any of her vitriol toward her former castmates. Additionally, King told Variety in October that Sara Ramirez will reprise her controversial Che Diaz character, while Deadline reported around the same time that Tony Danza had signed on for a recurring role that may or may not be as Che’s father.

More recently, Sarah Jessica Parker has been spotted filming with John Corbett. The And Just Like That… Instagram teased stills of SJP’s Carrie and Corbett’s Aidan seemingly rekindling their old flame.

And Just Like That…‘s second season has yet to release a trailer or set a release date.

This June is the 10th anniversary of “The Rains of Castamere,” better known as the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones. It feels longer than that — probably because the trauma it caused will last a lifetime. Some people are experiencing Walder Frey’s betrayal for the first time, however.

“Nothing convinced me to watch GOT yet but this might make me wth happened on that screen?” @xPlatinumShanel tweeted, along with a reaction video of a devastated TikTok user watching the Lannisters send their regards. This inspired others to share their Red Wedding memories.

In an oral history of the episode, Michelle Fairley, who plays Catelyn Stark, described to EW what it was like filming the wedding scene. “The woman is just grief-stricken. But she doesn’t lose control,” she said. “She knows she’s dead — and in her mind she wants to be dead — and wants to get revenge as well. Because of the way it’s filmed, you felt incredibly static, which is just powerful — she stays rooted to her spot. Her grief has to be expressed in some shape and form, and that’s vocally and through her face.”

The real tragedy of the Red Wedding: that Fairley wasn’t nominated for an Emmy.

Bears. Why do we love them? My guess is that bears are sort of like big dogs, who can occasionally stand up on their hind legs and sit at picnic tables. A dog that thinks he’s people is one of life’s great pleasures, and what are bears if not slightly anthropomorphized dogs? Bears also like to hibernate, which leads me to another point in bears’ favor: bears are lazy. Meat? Plants? Fish? Trash? Bears eat it all, they don’t give a shit.

And yet they’re also strong, fast, and even ferocious when they need to be, like big-headed dogs who can climb trees. Bears are basically the Gerard Butlers of the animal kingdom: mostly cuddly or hungover, but occasionally surly and heroic. Nice, until it’s time to not be nice, if you will. It’s no wonder the cinema loves them.

In honor of Cocaine Bear opening this week and also being my favorite genre of escort, I thought I would run down the 10 best movies about bears, to help you catch up on all the things cinematic bears have been doing since the Lumiere brothers invented the moving picture. And also to provide you with the proper cultural context to enhance your enjoyment of a film about CGI bear who does cocaine. It’s important to be an informed consumer.

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10. (Tie) Kung Fu Panda, Ted, Yogi Bear, Black Bear, The Bad News Bears, The Various Disney Nature Movies About Bears, Golden Compass

The tenth spot on this list is a repository of all the bear movies we could think of but didn’t care that much about, running the gamut from a forgettable arthouse movie starring Christopher Abbott and Aubrey Plaza (Black Bear) to Jack Black and Seth MacFarlane’s animated bear franchises to a classic underdog sports movie that sadly isn’t about actual bears (The Bad News Bears) to an adaptation of book franchise directed by the guy from American Pie that had a bear wearing a helmet on the poster (Golden Compass). Anyone see that one? Yeah, me neither. I may not know why the bear is wearing a helmet but I will gladly fight to the death to defend his right to wear one.

Hey, remember Yogi Bear 3D?

I can’t believe I didn’t hallucinate this poster. Like, hold on, guys, someone forgot to add the other entendre. The bears were voiced by Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake, by the way.

9. Grizzly 2: The Revenge (1983/2020)

Grizzly II: The Revenge isn’t good so much as it is notable, a movie featuring Laura Dern, Charlie Sheen, and George Clooney in minor roles (along with John Rhys-Davies and Louise Fletcher) originally shot in 1983 but not actually released until 2020. You can actually watch it for free on Prime Video like I did last night.

The original producer (who later did time for tax fraud) apparently walked off the project early on, leaving his co-producer, Suzanne C. Nagy, scrambling for financing. She finally got the film finished and released 37 years later — just in time for a global pandemic, which might help explain why you haven’t heard of it. We had bigger things to worry about in February 2020 than a novelty movie about a killer grizzly menacing a concert in Yellowstone.

Laura Dern, Charlie Sheen, and George Clooney are really only in the opening scene, playing “hot stupid teens who encounter a bear,” though the movie does feel like a nicely, shot, seventies-gritty B-movie about a killer bear. Jaws in the woods, I’m sure was the pitch. Sadly, you get about half of a movie and then it sort of turns into a weird montage of the musical acts playing the aforementioned Yellowstone concert. Definitely a quirky sort of slice of life, but not really a finished movie in the traditional sense.

8. The Great Outdoors (1988)

A year before the better-remembered Christmas Vacation, Dan Aykroyd and John Candy did the same sort of Chicagoan odd couple act that Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid did in The Great Outdoors, set in the woods of Wisconsin (actually shot at Bass Lake, just up the road from where I live in the San Joaquin Valley).

The film had as its centerpiece a killer bald grizzly bear (he’d had his head fur taken off with buckshot years earlier), with memorable moments that included Candy’s character attempting to eat a 96-ounce steak called “the ol’ 96er,” an old-timer who has been struck by lightning 66 times, and a family of foul-mouthed raccoons (god damn what was it with the National Lampoon guys and talking rodents?) — plus the climax with the aforementioned bear.

In retrospect, The Great Outdoors feels like a less-successful trial run for Uncle Buck, but I just recounted about three scenes from The Great Outdoors, which I’m not sure I could do for Uncle Buck. That, my friends, is the power of bears.

7. The Bear (1989)

The Bear was a French film released in the US in 1989 about a bear cub who has to dodge hunters and struggle to survive, filmed mostly using real bears. This one is up there with Benji in my personal pantheon of animal movies I loved as a kid even though they understandably made me bawl my goddamned eyes out. It’s also genuinely a great movie.

Taking a kid barely out of diapers to see a movie about an adorable bear cub whose mother dies in the first 10 minutes feels like a form of child abuse, and yet then again, probably not as abusive as making them watch Yogi Bear (or really anything on Netflix Kids or Nickelodeon today — have you seen kids programming lately? My God it’s a nightmare). I understand why we don’t make movies with real wild animals so much anymore, but strictly from a viewer’s perspective, it’s a shame. These bears were the best actors of the 80s.

6. The Edge (1997)

The Edge, which was not about the guitarist of U2, was written by David Mamet and starred Alec Baldwin as a photographer who gets stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with a billionaire he’s cuckolding, played by Anthony Hopkins. Because this was the nineties, the billionaire wasn’t the clear villain.

(Fun fact: producer Art Linson wrote a memoir featuring a scene where he argues with Alec Baldwin about shaving the beard Baldwin had grown for the role. In the movie version of the memoir, What Just Happened? the Baldwin role was played by Bruce Willis).

After surviving a plane crash, Hopkins’ character and Baldwin’s character are forced to work together in order to keep from being eaten by a killer bear, played by Bart The Bear — the same Kodiak Bear actor (Kodiaktor?) who starred in The Bear. The Edge was actually the second time Anthony Hopkins had worked with Bart (the first being Legends of The Fall), whose 2000 eulogy in the Seattle Times includes this quote from Bart’s trainer, Lynne Seus:

“Tony Hopkins was absolutely brilliant with Bart. He acknowledged and respected him like a fellow actor. He would spend hours just looking at Bart and admiring him. He did so many of his own scenes with Bart.”

The Edge is one of those sexy thrillers that don’t really get made anymore, a very movie kind of movie, and yet if I had the choice between watching that again and watching a behind-the-scenes look at Sir Anthony Hopkins pensively admiring Bart’s lustrous flanks, I’d have to go with the latter. Again, such is the power of bears.

5. Paddington (2014)

Both of the Paddington movies are much better than they have any right to be, especially when you remember the Yogi Bear movie. That being said, the first one is the clear inferior of the two, leaning far more heavily on the CG-bear-gets-into-hijinks aspect of the Paddington character. Still, it was shockingly not-terrible, especially given that it had lost its original voice actor, Colin Firth, which sort of made it sound like it was setting up to be a debacle. What actor doesn’t want to cash a big check for a couple days of voice work? It ended up being surprisingly decent, and more importantly, set up Paddington 2.

4. Brigsby Bear (2017)

Yes, I’m really stretching the “movies about bears” premise in order to include Brigsby Bear, a goofy sci-fi dramedy starring Kyle Mooney as a kid who was raised in a fallout bunker by his crazy father, played by Mark Hamill. When he’s rescued, he discovers that he’s the only one in the world who ever saw “Brigsby Bear,” his favorite television show which was actually a fake television show his father had made just for him. With no one to discuss the show with, he vows to continue the series with his new family, in what turns out to be a sort of love letter to the process of making goofy videos with your friends. I really hate fake sweet movies, but Brigsby Bear feels to me entirely genuine.

I really loved this movie and not nearly enough people saw it. Incidentally, it, like Cocaine Bear, was also produced by Lord and Miller.

3. The Revenant (2015)

The Revenant is basically arthouse Jackass, and I appreciate that. If you’ll remember, back in the teens all the movie talk was about Leo DiCaprio and when was he finally going to win that Oscar (we saved all the talk about him only dating women under 25 for later). The Revenant finally clinched it for him, and I’ve always loved the idea that Leonardo DiCaprio could only prove himself worthy of acting’s highest honor by eating raw bison heart and sleeping in an animal carcass. Actors rock.

Anyway, The Revenant is one of those rare movies that’s kind of a joke, but also still pretty great. Tom Hardy rarely makes words, but hardly needs to. He plays nemesis to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Hugh Glass (whose cousin, Hugh Jass, is a regular at Moe’s Tavern), and yet, the big bear kind of steals the show. The bear scene also spawned possibly the all-time greatest Drudge Report headline, DICAPRIO RAPED BY BEAR IN FOX MOVIE. You can see why he’d use all the sirens for that one.

2. Paddington 2 (2018)

It’s basically become a Twitter meme to crow about how great Paddington 2 is, but acknowledging that it’s kind of hack to say so, Paddington 2 is actually really great. It does, admittedly, have a few stray scenes featuring CGI bear hijinks that aren’t so great, but mostly Paddington is an avatar for Britishness as the contemporary British would like to imagine it.

It’s hard to do something like that while not coming off bellicose and horrendously nationalistic, but Britishness, as Paddington imagines it, is more about kindness, restraint, respect for other cultures, and enjoying proudly dowdy things like marmalade, tweed clothes, and old-timey trains. I don’t really believe that these are 100% genuine reflections of Britishness, but it seems nice enough as an aspirational sentiment. I want to believe, and it even makes me wish Americans could pull off something like this (I’m fairly certain we couldn’t). It’s hard to think of a greater artistic feat than making me briefly jealous of the British.

Hugh Grant deserved an Oscar nomination for this. “Actors playing obnoxious actors” is one of my favorite genres of acting.

1. Grizzly Man (2005)

Grizzly Man was the first Werner Herzog movie I ever saw and the phrase “you must never listen to this” has been stubbornly camped out in my skull ever since. It’s not only a cultural touchstone for every documentarian trying to profile a kooky but lovable subject (Paul T. Goldman creator Jason Woliner mentioned Grizzly Man alongside American Movie as one of his main inspirations), it’s also a haunting cautionary tale about identifying too closely with wild beasts just because they’re cute, to the point that you don’t see them for what they are. Probably only Werner Herzog could’ve successfully combined those two things. It’s also the perfect movie for this list as it’s both a really good movie and is specifically about bears. And not just tangentially either, we’re talking like wall to wall bears. Bear city, this movie.

‘Cocaine Bear’ opens in theaters everywhere February 24. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

Bears. Why do we love them? My guess is that bears are sort of like big dogs, who can occasionally stand up on their hind legs and sit at picnic tables. A dog that thinks he’s people is one of life’s great pleasures, and what are bears if not slightly anthropomorphized dogs? Bears also like to hibernate, which leads me to another point in bears’ favor: bears are lazy. Meat? Plants? Fish? Trash? Bears eat it all, they don’t give a shit.

And yet they’re also strong, fast, and even ferocious when they need to be, like big-headed dogs who can climb trees. Bears are basically the Gerard Butlers of the animal kingdom: mostly cuddly or hungover, but occasionally surly and heroic. Nice, until it’s time to not be nice, if you will. It’s no wonder the cinema loves them.

In honor of Cocaine Bear opening this week and also being my favorite genre of escort, I thought I would run down the 10 best movies about bears, to help you catch up on all the things cinematic bears have been doing since the Lumiere brothers invented the moving picture. And also to provide you with the proper cultural context to enhance your enjoyment of a film about CGI bear who does cocaine. It’s important to be an informed consumer.

—

10. (Tie) Kung Fu Panda, Ted, Yogi Bear, Black Bear, The Bad News Bears, The Various Disney Nature Movies About Bears, Golden Compass

The tenth spot on this list is a repository of all the bear movies we could think of but didn’t care that much about, running the gamut from a forgettable arthouse movie starring Christopher Abbott and Aubrey Plaza (Black Bear) to Jack Black and Seth MacFarlane’s animated bear franchises to a classic underdog sports movie that sadly isn’t about actual bears (The Bad News Bears) to an adaptation of book franchise directed by the guy from American Pie that had a bear wearing a helmet on the poster (Golden Compass). Anyone see that one? Yeah, me neither. I may not know why the bear is wearing a helmet but I will gladly fight to the death to defend his right to wear one.

Hey, remember Yogi Bear 3D?

I can’t believe I didn’t hallucinate this poster. Like, hold on, guys, someone forgot to add the other entendre. The bears were voiced by Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake, by the way.

9. Grizzly 2: The Revenge (1983/2020)

Grizzly II: The Revenge isn’t good so much as it is notable, a movie featuring Laura Dern, Charlie Sheen, and George Clooney in minor roles (along with John Rhys-Davies and Louise Fletcher) originally shot in 1983 but not actually released until 2020. You can actually watch it for free on Prime Video like I did last night.

The original producer (who later did time for tax fraud) apparently walked off the project early on, leaving his co-producer, Suzanne C. Nagy, scrambling for financing. She finally got the film finished and released 37 years later — just in time for a global pandemic, which might help explain why you haven’t heard of it. We had bigger things to worry about in February 2020 than a novelty movie about a killer grizzly menacing a concert in Yellowstone.

Laura Dern, Charlie Sheen, and George Clooney are really only in the opening scene, playing “hot stupid teens who encounter a bear,” though the movie does feel like a nicely, shot, seventies-gritty B-movie about a killer bear. Jaws in the woods, I’m sure was the pitch. Sadly, you get about half of a movie and then it sort of turns into a weird montage of the musical acts playing the aforementioned Yellowstone concert. Definitely a quirky sort of slice of life, but not really a finished movie in the traditional sense.

8. The Great Outdoors (1988)

A year before the better-remembered Christmas Vacation, Dan Aykroyd and John Candy did the same sort of Chicagoan odd couple act that Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid did in The Great Outdoors, set in the woods of Wisconsin (actually shot at Bass Lake, just up the road from where I live in the San Joaquin Valley).

The film had as its centerpiece a killer bald grizzly bear (he’d had his head fur taken off with buckshot years earlier), with memorable moments that included Candy’s character attempting to eat a 96-ounce steak called “the ol’ 96er,” an old-timer who has been struck by lightning 66 times, and a family of foul-mouthed raccoons (god damn what was it with the National Lampoon guys and talking rodents?) — plus the climax with the aforementioned bear.

In retrospect, The Great Outdoors feels like a less-successful trial run for Uncle Buck, but I just recounted about three scenes from The Great Outdoors, which I’m not sure I could do for Uncle Buck. That, my friends, is the power of bears.

7. The Bear (1989)

The Bear was a French film released in the US in 1989 about a bear cub who has to dodge hunters and struggle to survive, filmed mostly using real bears. This one is up there with Benji in my personal pantheon of animal movies I loved as a kid even though they understandably made me bawl my goddamned eyes out. It’s also genuinely a great movie.

Taking a kid barely out of diapers to see a movie about an adorable bear cub whose mother dies in the first 10 minutes feels like a form of child abuse, and yet then again, probably not as abusive as making them watch Yogi Bear (or really anything on Netflix Kids or Nickelodeon today — have you seen kids programming lately? My God it’s a nightmare). I understand why we don’t make movies with real wild animals so much anymore, but strictly from a viewer’s perspective, it’s a shame. These bears were the best actors of the 80s.

6. The Edge (1997)

The Edge, which was not about the guitarist of U2, was written by David Mamet and starred Alec Baldwin as a photographer who gets stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with a billionaire he’s cuckolding, played by Anthony Hopkins. Because this was the nineties, the billionaire wasn’t the clear villain.

(Fun fact: producer Art Linson wrote a memoir featuring a scene where he argues with Alec Baldwin about shaving the beard Baldwin had grown for the role. In the movie version of the memoir, What Just Happened? the Baldwin role was played by Bruce Willis).

After surviving a plane crash, Hopkins’ character and Baldwin’s character are forced to work together in order to keep from being eaten by a killer bear, played by Bart The Bear — the same Kodiak Bear actor (Kodiaktor?) who starred in The Bear. The Edge was actually the second time Anthony Hopkins had worked with Bart (the first being Legends of The Fall), whose 2000 eulogy in the Seattle Times includes this quote from Bart’s trainer, Lynne Seus:

“Tony Hopkins was absolutely brilliant with Bart. He acknowledged and respected him like a fellow actor. He would spend hours just looking at Bart and admiring him. He did so many of his own scenes with Bart.”

The Edge is one of those sexy thrillers that don’t really get made anymore, a very movie kind of movie, and yet if I had the choice between watching that again and watching a behind-the-scenes look at Sir Anthony Hopkins pensively admiring Bart’s lustrous flanks, I’d have to go with the latter. Again, such is the power of bears.

5. Paddington (2014)

Both of the Paddington movies are much better than they have any right to be, especially when you remember the Yogi Bear movie. That being said, the first one is the clear inferior of the two, leaning far more heavily on the CG-bear-gets-into-hijinks aspect of the Paddington character. Still, it was shockingly not-terrible, especially given that it had lost its original voice actor, Colin Firth, which sort of made it sound like it was setting up to be a debacle. What actor doesn’t want to cash a big check for a couple days of voice work? It ended up being surprisingly decent, and more importantly, set up Paddington 2.

4. Brigsby Bear (2017)

Yes, I’m really stretching the “movies about bears” premise in order to include Brigsby Bear, a goofy sci-fi dramedy starring Kyle Mooney as a kid who was raised in a fallout bunker by his crazy father, played by Mark Hamill. When he’s rescued, he discovers that he’s the only one in the world who ever saw “Brigsby Bear,” his favorite television show which was actually a fake television show his father had made just for him. With no one to discuss the show with, he vows to continue the series with his new family, in what turns out to be a sort of love letter to the process of making goofy videos with your friends. I really hate fake sweet movies, but Brigsby Bear feels to me entirely genuine.

I really loved this movie and not nearly enough people saw it. Incidentally, it, like Cocaine Bear, was also produced by Lord and Miller.

3. The Revenant (2015)

The Revenant is basically arthouse Jackass, and I appreciate that. If you’ll remember, back in the teens all the movie talk was about Leo DiCaprio and when was he finally going to win that Oscar (we saved all the talk about him only dating women under 25 for later). The Revenant finally clinched it for him, and I’ve always loved the idea that Leonardo DiCaprio could only prove himself worthy of acting’s highest honor by eating raw bison heart and sleeping in an animal carcass. Actors rock.

Anyway, The Revenant is one of those rare movies that’s kind of a joke, but also still pretty great. Tom Hardy rarely makes words, but hardly needs to. He plays nemesis to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Hugh Glass (whose cousin, Hugh Jass, is a regular at Moe’s Tavern), and yet, the big bear kind of steals the show. The bear scene also spawned possibly the all-time greatest Drudge Report headline, DICAPRIO RAPED BY BEAR IN FOX MOVIE. You can see why he’d use all the sirens for that one.

2. Paddington 2 (2018)

It’s basically become a Twitter meme to crow about how great Paddington 2 is, but acknowledging that it’s kind of hack to say so, Paddington 2 is actually really great. It does, admittedly, have a few stray scenes featuring CGI bear hijinks that aren’t so great, but mostly Paddington is an avatar for Britishness as the contemporary British would like to imagine it.

It’s hard to do something like that while not coming off bellicose and horrendously nationalistic, but Britishness, as Paddington imagines it, is more about kindness, restraint, respect for other cultures, and enjoying proudly dowdy things like marmalade, tweed clothes, and old-timey trains. I don’t really believe that these are 100% genuine reflections of Britishness, but it seems nice enough as an aspirational sentiment. I want to believe, and it even makes me wish Americans could pull off something like this (I’m fairly certain we couldn’t). It’s hard to think of a greater artistic feat than making me briefly jealous of the British.

Hugh Grant deserved an Oscar nomination for this. “Actors playing obnoxious actors” is one of my favorite genres of acting.

1. Grizzly Man (2005)

Grizzly Man was the first Werner Herzog movie I ever saw and the phrase “you must never listen to this” has been stubbornly camped out in my skull ever since. It’s not only a cultural touchstone for every documentarian trying to profile a kooky but lovable subject (Paul T. Goldman creator Jason Woliner mentioned Grizzly Man alongside American Movie as one of his main inspirations), it’s also a haunting cautionary tale about identifying too closely with wild beasts just because they’re cute, to the point that you don’t see them for what they are. Probably only Werner Herzog could’ve successfully combined those two things. It’s also the perfect movie for this list as it’s both a really good movie and is specifically about bears. And not just tangentially either, we’re talking like wall to wall bears. Bear city, this movie.

‘Cocaine Bear’ opens in theaters everywhere February 24. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.