This ‘Bear' didn't gnaw on my funny bone

   Braving snow and extreme cold, I went to a preview screening of Cocaine Bear. I didn’t expect a must-see movie but I was curious to learn what filmmakers might do with a story based on an oddball report from the 1980s.

   In 1985, a drug smuggler leaped from a plane after dumping much of the cocaine he was transporting. The poor man's parachute didn’t open, the smuggler died, and the cocaine landed in a Georgia forest. A bear ingested some of the cocaine. Eventually, it was found dead, too.

   I had never head the story before reading about the movie inspired by this long-ago incident but two things immediately struck me. Both the 1980s and cocaine jokes are culturally passé, a dated backdrop for a contemporary story.

    The movie’s trailer seemed to suggest that the filmmakers were trying for a blend of horror and comedy, mixing jump scares, gory gags, and goofy characters, nothing to be taken seriously. 

   That’s pretty much what the filmmakers achieve in a strained attempt to make something out of the movie’s weird hook.

   Director Elizabeth Banks concentrates the story in Georgia's Chattahochee-Oconee  National Forest where a variety of folks embark on different searches -- all while trying to avoid turning into bear food.

   -- A mom (Keri Russell) searches for her teenage daughter (Brooklynn Prince) and her daughter’s pal (Christian Convery). 

    -- A detective (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)  tries to track down drug smugglers. 

    -- And some lame drug dealers (Alden Ehrenreich and O'Shea Jackson Jr.) seek to recover the product they hoped to sell. 

   -- In his final screen appearance, Ray Liotta plays the father of one of the drug dealers, a two-bit drug lord with little regard for human or animal life.

   -- Margo Martindale shows up as a horny park ranger. 

   I'm omitting some of the cast but it hardly matters because many of the movie’s humans wind up in pieces anyway. A severed leg here. A head there. Entrails streaming from torsos. You get the idea.

   Of course, a CGI bear terrorizes everyone with its claws, jaws, bear slobber, and insatiable appetite for increasing quantities of cocaine.  

   Banks can’t get much beyond the novel allure of the movie’s title, and Cocaine Bear, at least for me, didn't whip up enough scares or laughs to satisfy any initial curiosity.

   

   

Rebelling against the South's Rebels

Despite Matthew McConaughey's fiery performance, Free State of Jones is a bit of a slog.

Some background: During the heat of the Civil War, Newton Knight left the Confederate army, returned to his Mississippi home and formed a ragtag band of fighters to combat what he viewed as injustices inflected by the Confederate Army on poor farmers and blacks who had been enslaved. Knight's rogue army -- a.k.a. the Knight Company -- was composed of deserters and runaway slaves.

Knight was motivated to desert the Rebel army, where he served as a nurse, by the Confederacy's "Twenty-Negro Law." That law exempted Southerners who owned 20 or more slaves from fighting, thus establishing grounds for believing that the Civil War was a battle in which poor southerners fought to protect the bounties of the rich.

A bona fide man of personality, Knight evidently took seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. He had nine children with Serena, his white wife. Knight also had a common-law wife, a former slave, with whom he had five children.

So was Knight a prototypical hippie or an authentic champion of the poor?

That argument reportedly remains unsettled, but not for director Gary Ross, whose new movie -- The Free State of Jones -- treats Knight (Matthew McConaughey) as a heroic figure who believes in racial equality and in simple economic justice: A man deserves to own what he plants, etc.

I don't know whether Ross's interpretation of history is correct, but I do know that his movie possesses a pulse that beats only intermittently. Free State of Jones also suffers because Ross seems to prefer the lengthy accumulation of events to incisive character development.

Looking fierce, a bearded McConaughey blazes with passion as the committed Knight, but the rest of the cast -- including Knight's two wives (Keri Russell and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) -- aren't given enough chance to evolve.

Like nearly everyone else in the movie, they're swamped by Ross's need to cover ground -- from the waning days of the war through reconstruction to a jarringly presented 1948 trial in which Knight's great-grandson is accused of miscegenation, interracial marriage being illegal in Mississippi.

At times, the movie seems like an American take on Robin Hood with Knight's merry band of rebels living an idyllic life in the Mississippi swamps. At other times, the movie seems like a Western; Knight becomes the loner who protects the weak. At still other times, Ross uses photographs of the period to add authenticity. It's as if Ken Burns cropped up in the middle of the story to add his two cents.

There are compelling scenes, Knight discovering the body of a comrade in arms (Mahershala Ali) who has been hanged and castrated by Klansmen who can't accept the Reconstructionist idea that black men could vote. Unfortunately, such harrowing moments emerge amid what amounts to a general slog through an obscure slice of history.

Not widely known, Knight's story proves interesting enough to keep this lead-footed effort from totally foundering. But Ross (The Hunger Games) squanders an opportunity: Too many of the movie's scenes fail to spark in ways that would have taken The Free State of Jones to more memorable levels.

Man vs. ape: Can there be a winner?

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes makes for a smart, involving sequel.

The screenplay for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is smart enough to make you wonder whether the movie's intelligent apes didn't have a hand in writing it. This sequel maintains the overall arc of the revitalized series, pitting man (or at least some men) against ape (or at least some apes).

But if we take the apes as metaphors for the natural environment, the one which we tend to intrude upon and despoil, the movie becomes deeper, more resonant.

Director Matt Reeves not only peppers his screenplay with ideas, he tells a story that can be enjoyed on the most rudimentary of levels.

So where exactly are we in the evolutionary saga of the human and ape populations? We're in the near future just after a terrible Simian Virus has wiped out a substantial part of humanity.

A group of survivors -- perhaps numbering in the hundreds -- has assembled in a ruined quarter of a devastated San Francisco.

The apes, who have attained various levels of intelligence and some of whom have developed the ability to speak, live in the Muir Woods, where they've constructed an elaborate wooden village and are in the process of developing an ethos: Apes don't kill apes.

The apes do, however, kill deer: They hunt for food with spears and evidently are carnivorous. They also have family structures and a form of governance.

The apes are led by Caesar (Andy Serkis), a leader devoted the ape population. Caesar has strength, but also a reflective sense of sadness about where the world has been and where it seems to be headed.

The potential for additional trouble arises when the San Francisco humans launch an expedition into the Muir Woods. They hope to reactivate a power plant that's badly needed to maintain the city's supply of electricity and to keep matters from returning to total barbarity.

The mission includes a trio that has formed an impromptu family in the wake of the virus that has taken away husbands, wives and children. There's Malcolm (Jason Clarke), his girlfriend (Keri Russell) and Malcolm's son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

The apes reluctantly agree to allow the mission to proceed, but Koba (Toby Kebbell) objects. It's understandable, maybe even justifiable: Koba -- a victim of cruel human experiments in the last movie -- has no reason to trust mankind.

Eventually, Koba sets himself up in opposition to Caesar, and we know that an eventual battle looms. The clash between Koba and Caesar allows Reeves & company to serve up some strong action while also examining the role of guns in building a civilization, as well as what happens when a society is fractured by two opposing narratives.

That conflict, of course, inevitably pits Koba and his marching minions against Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), a human who takes responsibility for wiping out the apes and protecting humanity.

Reeves (Cloverfield and Let Me In) handles the action, effects and story with great aplomb, developing a sense of mystery and awe from the outset -- with help from Michael Giacchino's powerful score.

The San Francisco-based battle sequences don't disappoint: They're even coherent.

To its credit, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which follows 2011's Rise of Planet of the Apes, doesn't entirely resolve the conflict between all its warring impulses. The movie does what few blockbusters would dare: It leaves us with a lingering, sorrowful feeling about the possibility of resolution.

Not much fun in this theme park

Austenland seems more like a goofy costume party than a sharply honed comedy.

Austenland takes place mostly in Britain, but the movie wanders all over the place. It tries to be a spoof about the much-read and still-admired novels of Jane Austen, a moony romance and a broadly conceived comedy that just happens to be about an American woman (Keri Russell) who's only definable character trait involves an obsession with what she apparently views as the dreamy side of Austen's work. Director Jerusha Hess co-wrote the script with Shannon Hale, who also wrote the novel on which the movie is based. But judging by the evidence on screen, this duo shortchanges Austen's observational skills, as well as her trenchancy. Russell plays Jane Hayes, a woman who's so enamored of Austen that she keeps a cardboard cutout of Colin Firth (as Mr. Darcy in the 1995 TV mini-series of Austen's Pride and Prejudice) in her bedroom. Jane decides to visit a British resort -- Austenland of the title -- that promises to provide full immersion in an Austen-like world. Once in Britain, Jane meets a buxom but crude American woman (Jennifer Coolige)and begins to interact with the male staff, notably a stuffed-shirt of a man (JJ Field) who seems to have gotten into the full swing of things and a stablehand (Bret McKenzie), a rough-hewn guy who refuses to pretend to be an Austen character. As Mrs. Wattlesbrook, the owner of a resort that looks as if it costs a small fortune to maintain, Jane Seymour adds a welcome bit of bite, and Russell can look luminous. But the movie -- which isn't particularly funny -- mostly comes across as a costume party with a shortage of memorable guests.