I'm Ben Zolak and I host the Ring Iron and Felt Draft Show with Danny Kelly. Danny Heifetz and Bray Horbak. Join us twice a week as we talk everything NFL Draft and Breakdown. All the players will make your team better.
Except the Rams because they don't really have any pecs. Check us out on the Ring Iron and Felt Draft Show on Spotify. I'm Sean Fettnessy. I'm Amanda Daven.
And this is the big picture, a conversation show about cocaine. That's right folks. Cocaine Bear is here. It's a movie about a bear on cocaine.
That's the movie. So we're going to talk about that movie and our favorite cocaine movies today on the podcast. This is really happening. Excited about that Amanda?
Is this a good idea? I'm not so sure. You have a whole personal section on here? Yeah.
Well, I haven't made any notes on that because we're going to share our feelings in real time. Before we get to that, I do want to point out that in the second half of this episode, we have much more wholesome content. Honestly, one of the best interviews I've ever done on this show in a long time, Don't be the director of Turning Red, which is a wonderful Pixar movie that was released in 2022. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
Don't be here on the show. She was really fun and insightful and talked about basically her whole career, her rise to the ranks of Pixar and how she made her movie. I hope people will stick around for that conversation, which I promise is more wholesome than what we're going to be discussing in the first half of our talk here. So there's no normal way to segue.
Let's just talk about it. Let's talk about cocaine there. The trailer for this movie dropped and you thought what? That's funny.
Okay. I thought I will enjoy 15 minutes of this movie and then, you know, nap or meal plan through the rest of it, which is what you do with premise movies like this. But I thought it had at least a solid 20 minute set up because a bear on cocaine. That's funny.
Good bit. Yeah. I will say that I didn't pay very close attention to the trailer. It was on during sports and I kind of saw Alden Aaron Reich doing something and seeming sort of funny and I'm happy to see Alden Aaron Reich at opportunities to be funny, as are you and the film rules don't apply.
One of my favorites. So I was like, Oh sure. Okay. Cocaine bear.
I will say that I thought it had a completely different plot than the plot of the film that we saw, aside from the bear on cocaine. And I think my plot was better and more opportunity for things I would have enjoyed watching. But I was at least like sure. Yeah.
Like it could be at least a little funny. I wasn't quite sure what to expect from the movie. I think I was expecting in part because this movie is directed by Elizabeth Banks, the actress turned filmmaker and comes to us from Lord and Miller, the writer, director producing duo that has brought us across the spider versus producers and has brought us 21 Jump Street and the Lego movie and has this long heritage now of a kind of like goofy meta hyper intellectualized movies about dumb stuff. You know, and they're really kind of the masters of that.
And Elizabeth Banks, who has now, you know, she made a perfect sequel and then she made the Charlie's Angels reboot, which you saw and I did not, which was not very successful. But those are some sort of comic sensibility. So I think in my mind, I was like, this will be a hard comedy, like almost a maybe not an optovian comedy, but like a premise bound comedy with lots and lots of yags. That kind of sort is, but it's really not.
In fact, it's like a deeply violent and sometimes gross kill comedy. And the comedy is not as funny as I wanted it to be. And so I'm trying to remember a movie like this, rather like it is a true neither fish nor foul. And I had hoped that this would be wildly successful, even as an absurdist property.
And ultimately it was just not that successful for me. What did you make of it? You and I went together to see it. And I thought we would at least laugh.
Like I thought, as we mentioned on the last podcast, we've been in a good groove of seeing movies together. We got to the point where like I was giggling at a, at Corey Stolle's like oversized frame. So in an anime movie, not in real life. Yeah.
Yeah, I should all respect to Corey Stolle and his Modak money, which I hope he's enjoying his travels around the world with that. So like we're gay, you know, and I felt like okay, Maricada is like an open place. And we were like, there have some fun. And I think you and I did laugh once.
It was like, you could feel the silence in that room. And they made us come see it in person, which is fine. That's not, that's our job. And also it's going to see a movie in the middle of the day for a living.
I'm not complaining. But I felt like they insisted on the in-person experience because they wanted it to be that sort of in-person everyone's laughing, voting each other on didn't work out. Didn't work out. We didn't laugh.
So it's not funny. And then the plot is extremely convoluted. It really is. Let me give you my pitch for cocaine bear.
Okay. You want to share your pitch before we tell the audience what this movie is actually about? Why don't we tell them what it is really about? Okay.
And where it comes from? And then we'll do the Amanda version. Okay. So, you know, it is what it says on the label.
After ingesting a duffel bag full of cocaine, an American black bear goes on a killing rampage in a small Georgia town or a group of locals and tourists much joined forces to survive the attack. So this movie is inspired by a real story. There was a 175 pound black bear that died after ingesting a duffel bag of cocaine in December of 1985. The cocaine had been dropped out of an airplane piloted by a man named Andrew C.
Thorne the second, was a former narcotics officer and convicted drug smuggler because his plane was carrying too heavy a load. So Thorne then jumped out of the plane with a faulty parachute and died. The bear was found three months later in Northern Georgia alongside a 40 open plastic containers of cocaine. And that is very much the premise of the movie.
It opens with Matthew Reese portraying this enter Thornton character. Having a great time. Zooted out of his mind, thrown bags of cocaine off of a plane that is about to crash. The bags land in a forest and then we learn very quickly, this bear is going to do some blow and do some killing.
And now there are a lot of other plot contrivances that kind of meet. This is like a meeting point movie where there are about 10 characters who are all coming from different directions and all have different motivations but they all eventually cross paths with this cocaine bear. We can talk about the details of how they converge. That also makes it sad a lot more intentional and developed than it is.
I mean that's the other problem. There is a drug cartel element to it. There is a mother daughter element to it. There is a breakup element to it.
I don't know. There is some nature loving to it. Conservationist maybe. I don't know.
Definitely some social media photography to it. I'm trying to get the bear on camera. None of it really adds up. It's all really loose.
The tone is really loose. The writing is really loose. You're not really with anyone the whole time. There is not a character you are rooting for.
A karaoke Russell is a star of this movie. She plays a mother figure whose daughter wanders into the forest and then of course gets lost in the face of the cocaine terrorism. The karaoke Russell is wonderful. I always love karaoke Russell.
But she doesn't have a whole lot to do here. And you know, there are other, you mentioned all the Nernreich. I loved. He's making a comeback for that guy.
That's great. He looks like absolute shit. This movie on purpose. I really enjoyed it.
It's a movie as his cohort. Aaron Reichs, they're drug dealers. They're working for Ray Liotta, who is Aaron Reich's father and a kind of drug kingpin. This is really his final film performance.
And the film is dedicated to him and frankly that's disrespectful. That's really troubling for me. Ray Liotta of course an icon of the screen and I love him very much. Brooklyn Prince, who people may know from the Florida project.
She's in this film as the daughter of karaoke Russell's character. Isaiah with La Jr. Clay from The Wire. He plays a police officer.
Margal Martindale, great character actress. She plays a park ranger. There's talented people involved in this film. What happened?
Tell me your version. What do you think this movie was? This was a movie about a group of friends who go camping and take a large amount of cocaine to do while camping because I'm told that this is one of the things that you do while camping. Maybe not cocaine.
Maybe you're doing- So two things you know nothing about. Camping and cocaine. The one time that I have been camping, which was with you, was for your wife's birthday because the only person on this earth who could get me to go camping is your wife one night. And we did do drugs, but they were legal in the state of California.
They were. Yeah, it was neat. That was good. That was one time.
It was okay. It was okay. I would say that the food spread that we brought was awesome. One of the great cheese plates of all time.
I packed like I was going away for three weeks. There were a lot of snacks. What else do you do? I didn't really understand what else we were supposed to be while camping.
Also, when I'm anxious, I just bring all my own supplies so that I don't have to worry. I got it. I got the dried apricots. I got several different types of crackers.
I got the cheeses. You're a survivalist, but not in the way we think of it. You're like a bourgeois survivalist. Right.
But I do remember at some point after it was dark. That's another thing. Once it gets dark, then there's nothing to do besides the fire. I got five to tell you.
We got really high and then we did riddles. You remember this? No recollection was there. Yeah.
I remember it because I got the riddle. I remember that moment of being like, I know and it was like I was ascending to a higher plane. I was like, I've solved the riddle. When you say we did riddles, like to read riddles from a card?
No, I think our friends Anna and Clay presented riddles. What? They were the experienced campers. We all sat around the campfire and they had some memorized and you had to solve them.
Oh my God. I don't remember this at all. Yeah. I remember that when we drove home the next morning, you made us listen to the Jets on the radio.
That was a really tough moment. Don't remember that either. But that tracks out. It wasn't a happy Jets game.
So what you're saying is you thought that the film would be a recreation of the weekend that we had camping with cocaine. But then the bear obviously gets the cocaine. It steals the cocaine from the campers, snorts it. Yeah, they were secure it.
They put it in the bear bag with the bear gets the bag. Oh, yeah. We didn't get any. We didn't get a bear technology.
That's true. I actually have been camping. I want to say four or five times at this point. My wife loves the camp.
I don't love the camp. One thing that I like. I'm super into couches, can't TVs. I love to just walk over to my cabinet and pull out a box of Cheezits.
That's one of my hobbies. I like to take a shower and then sleep out of that dress. Super in the showers. Yeah.
Another thing that I really like is being able to access a bathroom in the middle of the night. That was my number one issue. At some point, I really had to pee while we were all camping, but I didn't know what to do. I didn't know.
I didn't have my contacts in obviously because I was asleep, but wherever my glasses because I can't. I'm going to get eaten because I can't see before I can pee. It was very, it was stressful. But then I couldn't go back to sleep because I was stressed out about all of it.
Didn't think this is where we'd be going on the show, but here we are. Handful of times I've been true blue camping. I've been camping in Montana. You really got to make sure that your bear gear is in order because they will approach you.
They're not necessarily violent and there is actually a card at the beginning of this film that indicates that the American Black Bear is not historically violent. You need to have all of that technology, your fingertips. None of that stuff was really a part of this story. It was unfortunately fell into this kind of absurd movie, as you said, after we exited.
It came up with the title of the movie and then the movie and that barely works out. And you know, Sninks on a Plane was mentioned recently as Chris and I talked about SkyTrash and it felt very similar to that movie where it was almost like cut together to get a reaction from an audience when you showed the trailer ahead of another movie, but not to necessarily actually make people watch the movie. I'm sure that everybody who worked on cooking, they worked really hard on it. That's not really what I'm trying to say.
I'm sure they're passionate about entertaining audiences, but it just doesn't work. And when a movie that is so expressive about its intent doesn't work, it hurts worse. You know, it's more frustrating. I would have loved to have had a great time with this movie, but it just is a miss.
For me, the tough thing is that it was not even funny. Like it really didn't land very many of the jokes. And you mentioned that it's also weirdly violent and you see a lot of intestines and sprains and splatter and everything. And that's done in quote unquote for humor or for shock value.
It's like a kill comedy. So like that's all fine. I guess, I mean, none of it looks very real. Can we talk about the CGI bear?
Yeah, I mean, this is a huge problem. Like, so all of that, but you could look past all of that if they landed the jokes. Yeah. And you'd be like, wow, this is totally ridiculous, but I laughed at the jokes and like that.
CGI bears on cocaine. No jokes. Just it where they tried. And the timing was just not there.
It was weird. Is that an Elizabeth Banks problem as a filmmaker? What do you think is going on with that? As someone who did sit through all of Charlie's Angels, like Redux, whatever.
Kristen Stewart managed to be funny in that movie, but yeah, I don't, at least like the timing and the editing and the pacing of it seems I have two pieces of evidence now that it's Elizabeth Banks problem. It's funny because Elizabeth Banks, who I've always liked at the movies and I think it's both a very funny and charming actress. We were talking about her pre-performance and magic, like, I've got very funny. Wonderful.
The 40 year old Virgin, the Hunger Games, like she's appeared in huge films, always a welcome presence. You'd imagine that somebody who knows how to perform well could nail this stuff, but now this is a few movies in a row that are really just kind of stilted and I don't know. It is hard to make a funny movie as we have discovered watching comedies or plaque there out for the last five, 10, 15 years. No question about it.
But this is a particular type of comedy. Weirdly, the part that works best is that gore that you're describing. There are a couple of kill scenes. In particular, when a pair of EMTs arrive at the park rander shack that is like a really intense sequence that then leads to this kind of manic breakout moment where there are a lot of deaths in a short period of time.
Really well done. I'm referring to, but to what end, I guess I'm not really sure. You don't really have a relationship with most of the characters that get killed. We don't really care about them.
The deaths are creative, but they're not really that funny. I was thinking about this a lot because this is a kind of movie that I like a lot. I like movies that have a sense of humor that feature nature or a creature kind of rampaging. In the aftermath of Jaws, there were a lot of movies like this that were attempting to rip it off.
Jaws itself is kind of funny at times. The best one I think is Joe Dante's Piranha, which is a ridiculous movie about evil, violent piranha that kills people in a small town. But that movie is satirical. It's about something.
It also features funny kills. Is cocaine there a commentary on anything? Is there something that it's some message or idea that it's trying to convey? Don't do cocaine?
I don't know what it is. I don't know. I guess it's borrowing a little bit from different, well, not really from different movie genres, but from the drug cartel we lost the cocaine. We got to get it back.
Genre of a movie, which is a trope. It's a trope, is a thing that shows up in cocaine movies, but it doesn't have anything to say. It has nothing to say about anything. I don't even understand some of the relationships in the movie.
All of them, Aaron Reich, is Ray Liotta's son, and he doesn't want to be in the business anymore, but he is a whittle. What is going on? He's a whittler, and he has a child of his own, but he's in mourning of his wife. But also Ray Liotta needs to retrieve that cocaine because the Columbians are going to kill him and his whole family if they don't get that cocaine back.
And so the kid's still just like a Chuck E. Cheese alone by himself. He's watching television in St. That didn't make a lot of sense.
Just feels unfinished. Yes. It just feels unfinished. It feels like there are five characters too many.
There's a way to focus this movie on Carrie Russell. Sure. Who is funny? Yeah.
Can I say one positive thing about it? Certainly. So this movie was filmed, I believe they call it Secret Falls, and it's in the Chattahoochee National Forest. Anyway, it does involve a waterfall in a cave in Northern Georgia, incredibly close to Ruby Falls.
And I just want to say, I've heard from maybe almost a dozen people who listened to our 1993 movie draft, and were like Ruby Falls, I see you. So shout out to all my lookout mountain friends. Don't see this movie. It's not worth it.
But our history lives on in Cape Bear. When those people reach out to you about Ruby Falls, what did they have to say about the way that sleep was in Seattle was stolen from you? I have heard from so many more people and people in my own life. It's mostly just respect for Rob.
I'm coming around on this because what it's taught me is how many people in my own life really fear me. And because they were like, I can't believe Rob had the balls to do that. And he didn't know. But everyone else is like, wow, so that's sick.
That's what I'm trying to call to be. And I'm really proud of that. And then the most validating thing was I told my husband what happened. And I told him about Chris taking Pelican brief and he just went and he's like, that really isn't a man in a movie.
So like even my husband understood like the true betrayal and has a little bit of fear. So I'm feeling okay now. In the moment it was shocking and it compromised my vision, but long term positive. I'm really happy for you.
I'd like to open the conversation more broadly to cocaine. So we have something in common. We've never done it. We don't have to legally compromise ourselves on this podcast.
That's right. And we were actually having a fascinating conversation on the way home from this movie, which is I don't think we really have any regrets about that. And it is obviously a very dangerous drug and I don't want to make light of it and people have struggled with it. That's not only the point of this conversation, but it is something that crossed paths with a lot of people's lives and some people are able to engage with their recreationally and of course is wildly addictive and destructive.
But it is also like a real, it is an engine of social lives, especially in creative communities. And it is also like something I'm sure you've been exposed to. I've been exposed to many times. And this movie and this movie putting that word in the title, you know, it's meant to be an attention grabber and it being a period piece and it kind of reflecting and recalling back to dare and Nancy Reagan's anti drug stance is all very purposeful.
It's like, wow, we're 40 years removed from. Remember when we were fear mongering about don't use drugs with kids and our relationship as a culture has really radically changed to drugs. You very comfortably shared that we were just high as a kite on a camping trip just a few years ago on this podcast and all the listeners will be like, oh, it's normal. Like no one's going to react to that.
If you had done that 15 years ago on a radio show, it might have been more provocative to say something like that. And so I think like what cocaine is to our culture is a really interesting thing to me. I'm not totally sure how I understand it because I'm not as exposed to it as I was 10 years ago. What does it mean to you and how do you think about it?
Well, it was interesting to talk to I was just in the office before your recording this podcast. So I was telling a lot of people about I was like, oh, we're doing cocaine, baron cocaine movies and asking people for their cocaine movies. Everyone thought that was really funny that we were doing it, which is cultural data point number one. But someone, everyone gave me some version of like, oh, every 80s movie ever.
And it's an interesting kind of reference point for us. We weren't quite old enough for Nancy Reagan in the 80s, but we grew up in the shadow of the 80s and cocaine and those two are inextricably linked in my mind. And I just sort of, you know, Ferris Bueller doesn't do any drugs in the movie. Like Ferris Bueller did cocaine, you know, if not in high school, then like once he made it to college, like that's just that's a that's cocaine energy.
So it's almost like a way of life and like a cultural, almost historical idea to me, a moment in time, almost like a period piece as opposed to like a thing that, you know, people are dealing with it. And like you made a good point and we like shouldn't make jokes about it. It's like a serious thing. Well, the thing is making a joke about it.
I mean, I'm going to, but you know, yes, I don't think about it like in the present day in terms of like people doing cocaine. I think about it in terms of just, as you said, a lot of people in the 80s. Getting suited. You know, I have a complicated relationship to drugs.
My dad for years worked as an narcotics detective. He was really employed at the height of anti drug, you know, the drug war in the United States. And we have some conversations about it, but that's a fraught conversation I have with your dad when you're a teenager. And I was never really a big drug user personally.
But I also was the kind of kid who found like incredible absurdity between legalized alcohol and like raging alcoholism in our country and illegal nature of at least marijuana or something like that. Also, obviously the drug war was a racist institution that was like, and when we say cocaine, a lot of times what Nancy Reagan was talking about was crack cocaine, like not the sort of like magnificent, you know, George Joe Marauder sound tracked, glorious nights at Studio 54, that I think a lot of people will think of when they hear that word or the kind of like Colombian drug war, narco's vision of like a romantic battle and Pablo Escobar. And there are all of these major iconographies that are associated with this drug. And so as we think about it, and like why has become such an important character in movies?
Because there's two ways to view it, I think there is, of course, like the movies where people are using and selling cocaine, right? And we will talk about some of those movies and share some of those movies on our list. And then there are, well, there's three actually, because I think the point that you make is right, there are some characters in movies, even if they are not explicitly using it, you feel like it's either in their future or it's in the subtext of the story. And then there's the people behind the scenes who were using cocaine and making art.
Oh, yeah. And I thought about that a lot as I was thinking about kind of my favorites of the genre, whatever the genre is that we're inventing. I mean, in the 70s and 80s, well, most of my heroes were just, you know, they had the little spoon and they were just going like they were just making, making music together. Like they were, they were whistling Dixie literally.
And it created some of the greatest art in American movie history. And then, well, some of them stopped doing it and started making art about either doing it or the process of stopping doing it. But it informed both the generation directly before us in terms of experience, but the subject of the art that they were making as opposed to, I guess, like 60s. Well, they weren't even really making art about drugs in the 60s, but we eat and mario, you know, I mean, Easy Rider is a good is a really good entry point, I think, for this conversation, because Easy Rider is considered, you know, it's obviously the kicks off the new Hollywood in many ways.
And it was this huge independent film success and it's like a bridge from the corpsman movies into the 60s and 70s filmmakers and Hopper and Fonda, but there's only coconut movie. That's what they're that's a plot of the movie is there. They're on a road trip to sell cocaine, you know, to get free. Yeah.
And it's a beautiful metaphor for kind of what happened to this country. And one of the reasons why that movie remains iconic is it is the fact that I really personally never liked it very much is that selling illicit material narcotics that gives people a kind of recreational joy and mania has always been a core storytelling device for culture. And sometimes it's a MacGuffin, but it's all about like, I need that thing. Yeah.
But cocaine really now is almost a period piece because now everything is club drugs, right? And that starts really around 2000. I mean, there are still like plenty of cocaine movies and like in the last 20 years and well side some of them, but all of my friends, we gave examples. They were like, well, what about go?
And they were like, no, I guess that's exes, and then yeah. And then someone else was like, what about that scene and long shot? And I was like, no, they're doing Molly, you know, like it's, which, you know, it's all of the same. I guess what are they doing on the euphoria?
I think it's a lot of pills. I think, you know, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that that's the thing is there has become a pharmaceutical rise and drug use and then also a club rise and drug use and those two things. And I think that those things are certainly not consequence free.
They also are addictive and they have, you know, major destructive effects on people's lives, but they don't feel as all destructive and all like hollowing as cocaine. You know, like the cocaine narrative is like you will be left with nothing at the end of this. And that still has a power. And so I think that's why it becomes a period piece most of the time because it feels like we were past that era and I agree with you.
We're not actually past it, but at least from a storytelling device, it does seem that way. There is also, you know, someone on Molly is very different than someone on cocaine. Yeah. And it's, it's situationally and historically you're telling different stories, but also just in terms of how it works as character device.
You wind up with like very different movies and experiences. I feel like I, I say a lot that I don't really like watching people do drugs in movies. I find it annoying, but this exercise may be realized I don't like watching people do club drugs. Oh, interesting.
No, that's what it is because it's just a little. I don't even say the opposite. No, because if you've ever been around someone on cocaine and real life, it's so annoying. Oh, annoying, but in like an aggro, talky, like doing things way, all like the chilled out trippy stuff, like get away from me.
You know, I even though that's like healthier, I think for both a person doing the drug and also society at large, I just find it so annoying. Like go on your trip on your own time, leave me out of it. Like with cocaine movies, we are often watching people make terrible decisions in very heightened states and then things go incredibly wrong. Now that's bad in life, great in the movies.
How did you think about what movies put on your list? I had just a couple vivid images of people doing coke and then I put those on the list and then and then I thought of a and it worked out that they represented like maybe not different genres, but different tropes of coke in movies and also different eras and feelings. I like your list. Thank you.
And then I did one for fun because you said have fun. Okay. I think you and I have fascinating numbers five. Do you want to go first?
Well, this is my fun one because I did last night saying I was my son, my husband, my sister in law and I was like, guys, what are your favorite cocaine movies? I was like, no, I was like, Rob's around and it was a lot of, oh no, that's something or other. And then I was like, when the mule falls off the mountain in triple frontier, is that about cocaine? And Zach was like, maybe.
I was like, okay, great, triple frontier. So it turns out I went back and watch. So when the mule falls off the mountain, they're carrying money, right? That bad act has torn from the walls.
Yes. And then I went back to the point land on cocaine farm because they're trying and their intervention is something about getting money from a cartel and it going wrong. And there is also just like a huge amount of people whose lives have been ruined by cocaine energy among those four like aggressive men. So and I really like this movie, even though no one else says so I'm going with triple frontier.
You know, I like it. I think it's a fascinating pick because we don't see those men using cocaine. No, but there is a kind of collective mania that, you know, my experience of this is being in bars in New York City in the 2000s and feeling like everyone who just came out of the bathroom together was all really high. And I was like, oh, I'm not really in this conversation anymore.
And the same is triple frontier. These guys whose lives are kind of circling the drain as they think about one last score, going to South America, going to the aunties and attempting to steal from drug dealers were also like part of the dictatorship of the nation. They may not be using drugs, but they're on drugs. It's a hairbrained plot.
Yeah. I think also I was thinking about my first exposure to Coke. There wasn't very much of it in my college, but there was like always tell of like, like, the cool older guys hanging out and like doing Coke and then fighting each other, which is like sort of the same energy that we're bringing to triple frontier. And I think part of the reason I like it as well, you know?
Yeah. So I don't know. It's there's something very aggro and ill advised about all of it. Well, also being like the classic like drug cartel, we got to get the Coke or the money or something back.
I think it's a fun pick. I don't really have a movie that is quite like that on my list. So it's a good addition to this one. My number five is not really about cocaine, but it approximates an experience of people getting addicted to cocaine.
It's a movie. It's a very upsetting movie. It's a very powerful movie. It's a hard movie to rewatch.
It's called bug. I read the Wikipedia description of this and then it's stopped halfway through. I was like, how did you make it through this? I'm good.
Bug is a 2006 movie from William Friedkin, of course, one of my favorite filmmakers. It starts actually Judd and in like an all time performance, Michael Shannon. And Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon are two characters who are a bit wayward and a bit lost in their life. Ashley Judd is an abusive relationship.
Michael Shannon we learned fairly early on has just come back from Desert Storm and is a veteran and maybe struggling with something. And Michael Shannon is a bit paranoid and seemingly delusional that bugs have been, he's been infected with bugs by the US government. And he starts to lose his mind. It's a little onscreen.
And Ashley Judd in a very short order, her character also starts to believe that this mania that is consuming Shannon's character is also affecting her. And they proceed effectively in a enclosed environment together to lose their minds together. We've seen this with drugs in a lot of movies. And there's something a little garish about it because it's meant to seem like exciting or thrilling or ridiculous or somehow sexy at times.
But it's pretty gross. It's about like the destruction of the human body. You know, drug addiction is fucking real. It's not a joke.
I mean, one of the reasons why I didn't use hard drugs growing up is because it was explaining me in very clear terms at a very young age what it does to you. And I got afraid of it. And this is a movie that even though it's as much about mental health and a character study and also like a kind of like strange, like an optical thriller, you know, that what you see may not really be there. It is a very clear like one to one mapping of what it could be like to be fully consumed by drugs and especially a drug like cocaine.
So the feeling of watching this movie is very resonant to me. And I too want to have one curveball that is not amongst the classics. So this is my curveball. I don't think you should watch this movie because I know you really well that there's a part of me that wants to watch it.
I'm not afraid of bugs though. And I don't want them like crawling on me or whatever, but I'm the exterminator in the household. Do you know that? I've seen that in real time.
No, no, but I am the exterminator. Yeah. I'm not as I am scared about that. I'm scared about.
Yeah, I'm not. It's a very surprising thing about me. And yet I'm not scared of and then I'm not really scared of and either. It seems like a nice guy.
Lovely man. Scott Lang. Number four. So this is the scene that came to my head immediately.
It's with Bachelorette, which is the 2012 movie directed by Leslie Hadland and starring Kirsten Nuns, Lizzie Kaplan, Eila Fisher, Rebel Wilson. And it is about a Bachelorette party where one woman is getting married and then her three bitchy friends do a lot of cocaine and are just fucking awful to her. And I always like this movie more than bridesmaids. It's vicious.
It is about how people are terrible and really how women are terrible to each other. And I guess the cocaine is a contributor to that, but also just sort of evidence and a a result of people being awful. And I just it's what I think about when I think about it. This is like my contemporaneous example, even though it's from 2012, which is when I was on, I was just like people doing blow at a special event and then just not like being awful.
And that was our social lives. It's a really funny movie. It's really funny. It really means spirited.
Yeah. Leslie Hadland working on a Star Wars show? I was thinking about that. Will you watch it?
I don't know. I haven't watched any of those shows. Okay. I do like Leslie Hadland.
What's it about? It's about four girls who do co-op and party. I would watch that. Imagine but that instead of the Star Wars universe, how do you get it?
Is cocaine legal in the Star Wars universe? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if they have cocaine.
The answer to the Star Wars? Why not? Well, that's a good question. Yeah.
Star Wars is a very creative film. Sure. Feels like more of a marijuana guy than me. It does.
Yeah. But his cohort, of course, we know. Exactly. That's why I was asking.
I'm not really sure. My number four is a movie called Scarface. Okay. You sub this in.
I did. I did. I don't want to overthink myself. I think that's good.
I think that would be really stupid to not have Scarface. I think the cocaine gangster drama, the gangster epic, the opera, the coke opera is a critical sub-genre. It's one that's important to me. It's one that I think I'm probably, people might mistake that it means more to me than it actually does.
I'm not obsessed with these movies. Like you mentioned below just now, which I know has a really strong fandom. I think it's good. I think it's perfectly fine.
I'm American gangster. I thought about this, you know, a movie that I like but don't love. You know, King of New York is a personal favorite of mine, which is an able for our movie, starring Christopher Walken about a guy who gets out of prison and takes New York back. And that movie was so inspirational that Notorious B.I.G.
He took his name from the main character in that film. But Scarface is really the granddaddy of these movies. And it's, of course, inspired by the classic gangster films of Warner Brothers from the 1930s and 40s. And this Scarface is a Cuban man who rises to power Miami by way of the co-trade by Al Pacino.
Perhaps the most ludicrous performance in American movie history. The movie also happens to be written by Oliver Stone, who knows a bit about this experience. And one of the reasons why I think there's so much of a verusimilitude in the cocaineography is that these guys know from which they sort it. And you know, Scarface is just a beautiful epic, like a tragic movie, a wildly violent movie, a hysterical movie, one of the most quotable movies of all time.
It looks like a bajillion dollars because the pom, it's really the pom, like at the absolute height of his powers. And even though it has become this object of fascination in the world of hip hop and the world of cinema and hugely inspirational, it's all the movies that I just mentioned about all these, you know, cocaine lords, there's nothing that beats the original. Subscrifices number four. This is a good pick.
I'm glad that you've subbed it in. I mean, how can you make a cocaine race list? You know, Tony Montana sitting in a big throne with the Coca-Lovers notes. Right.
My number three is Americans I Go. I thought about this one. Right. Directed by Mary Heron adapted from the Bret Easton Ellis novel.
And when you say cocaine in the 80s, to me you say Bret Easton Ellis or the works of Bret Easton Ellis anyway, you know, I can't speculate on his personal life. I suspect he has regularly. But, you know, I'm bound by the laws of the United States here. So this obviously like set in the 80s ultimate like satire of 80s YLP culture and like people doing cocaine and you know, the bathroom isn't like good for doing coke or whatever, you know, like there are many scenes of people doing it.
But also the mania and like aggressive insanity, I guess that cocaine produces as typified by Patrick Beaman. So also Christian Bale really bringing cocaine energy to this role. You know, it's kind of just what you think of when you think of someone on Coke. His eyes are bursting out of his head.
Yeah. There is also a mania in this movie. Fascinating movie. Much beloved movie.
Yeah. True cult film. I've never read this book. I read a couple of Bret Easton Ellis novels.
This is not one that ever, I think in part maybe just because I saw the film at a young age and I was like, I don't, that's not something I need to spend my time reading. But you know, he just really spoke this year. Bret Easton Ellis is quote unquote back. Good for him.
Fascinating fellow. My number three is a movie called climax, which I almost put on my list when we did our dance movies episode. I thought you did. I watched my science.
It's a guest bar no film from 2018 that is in part kind of, it's like the scariest musical comedy ever made. It's set in the 90s. It's about a French dance troupe and it's like it's set during an after party after what feels like a performance. And so everyone at the party is dancing.
And of course they're also using a lot of drugs. There are some club drugs, but this is set in the mid 90s. And so one of the dominant drugs at this party is cocaine. And the movie is like a real descent into hell.
And Sophie Nutella is the kind of like leading figure of the movie and you know, a handful of the characters are caught up in this very famous moment where one character refuses to share their cocaine with another character and then that character who refuses to share their cocaine, their hair catches fire. And that's like a metaphor for some of the destructive natures of drugs. But the movie itself is hypnotic and also queasy making like all guest bar no films are like there's something like sickening about what he puts on screen. I don't mean that he's like, it's in bad taste necessarily, but he has a way of like contorting your intestines while you're watching a movie, but it's also a movie about like erotic thriving.
And combine those two things with what's making people feel that way, which is ever just really, really high and they're stuck in a room together. And you come to realize like this is a movie about kind of going to purgatory and hell. But just a fascinating movie. And I don't think I realized the first time I watched it that it was a period piece.
I was thinking about this list. I was like, that actually makes a lot of sense that this is a 1995. Yeah, I had always thought of it as club drugs, but I think it's a bit of both. Yeah.
Okay. What's next? Basic and sing. I don't know.
People doing cocaine and fucking with lots of mirrors. That's like all that's it. This is like the sleaze vibe of this movie encapsulates what I imagined that 80s were like even though it's a 1992 movie. So Catherine, the Sharon Stone Kid figure in this film, she famously murders with an ice pick.
Yes. What would your murder weapon of choice be? I don't know. I haven't thought about it.
Like do I have to have a weapon? It can't be like a poison or something. It's a tradition of the gold thing. Yeah, that's definitely what it would be.
That seems efficient and untraceable. So that's a great idea. No, so you rely at the Ag of the Christie's and then you start thinking about poison as the method. Okay.
So many options, so many of them untraceable or attributable to something else. Weapons seems difficult. You got it. Unless it's an ice pick, which well, no, an ice pick.
Like I, what do you say? Ice pick? I know that it's a different thing, but I always think of like an ice sickle basically, which would then melt, which is the perfect crime. A stalactite?
Yes. This is a second stalactite reference. Right. The lag might see for ceiling.
Exactly. We fucked that up on the pod. I didn't fuck it up. It was Chris.
That's his problem, but still sore over that. Pelican brief situation. You know, I just, I felt like that was a real betrayal of trust. Like Rob Rob did it now.
Chris knew. Okay. Anyway, so can I do an ice sickle? I mean, that's super weird, but you're right.
That is untraceable. Right. Are you wearing gloves? I mean, it doesn't matter if it else.
Like I said, toners. What are you wearing? No, I'm just imagining like breaking it off from the ceiling. I'm a Ruby Falls for this as well.
You know, it's the perfect scene for the crime. You asked me. I did. Would these be like erotic circumstances like Catherine?
Like you would be in a cave seducing and then murdering with an ice ball? I don't think so. I previously discussed a cave is not out. Nature is not really where I'm looking for those situations.
But the thing about Ruby Falls, if I recall, and maybe this was like a different attraction nearby, maybe this was Rock City. But anyway, you had to like to enter the cave or something. It was like very narrow. You had to squeeze through, which I feel like would prevent authorities from finding us before you really given this thought.
You just asked me. I will not never be going to Ruby Falls with you after that description. You know, I was just thinking about as a colleague of ours noted that someone that they're close to has a 14 year old son and then he's a listener of the show and shout out to him if he knows who we're talking about. But I'm now concerned based on the subject matter of this episode that he just wanted for him.
We're going to record a birthday message for him, which is his birthday is already passed. Happy birthday to him. But I was thinking that we should say don't listen to the cocaine episode in that message. For more reasons than one.
Whether or not you should watch my number two at 14 is an interesting question. I watched it when I was 16 years old and he's called Magnolia. This is the third feature film from Paul Thomas Anderson, who has just been on the brain lately. Paul Thomas Anderson is playing this two weeks sold out run at the Arrow Theatre here in Santa Monica and Paul Thomas Anderson allegedly writing slash putting together his next feature film, which is very exciting.
Magnolia. I like how you had to introduce like a peg for talking about Paul Thomas Anderson. This is what I do. You don't.
He can always be on your brain. He's just the animating force of your mind. And that's cool. You don't have to like give me a news hook for Paul Thomas Anderson.
I'm just trying to ground a listener, you know, just make sure that they don't think that I just have a full stop reel on my mind at all times. But Magnolia is a movie that I think is widely considered unsuccessful, but amazing. And I put it on my list. Certainly there are characters that use drugs.
In fact, you see Marlboro Wolters characters in the movie a couple of times. And we see the kind of like the bounds of addiction in the movie. And that's a part of the story. That's not what it's on the list.
It's made because it's like it feels made like by somebody on cocaine. Yeah. And I have no idea if he was actually on cocaine. We can suspect if he was at the time there have been rumors for years, but the movie feels like cocaine the way that the camera moves, the way that it's cut, even though it's a three hour movie, the way the music is deployed, the absolute paranoia and mania that consumes Los Angeles at this time and the characters who are inhabiting Los Angeles is it's a frenzy.
And it's almost the point of parody now the way that people talk about it and think about it. But I think it would be a mistake to look past the like amazing psychotic accomplishment of this movie. And sometimes I do, you know, I'm constantly like reorganizing with these movies mean to me and how they fit. But this one in particular is just it's the swing of all swings.
And when I've been praising Babylon for the last few weeks and thinking about, you know, why I respond to it so much. And I just love when a filmmaker comes along, it's like, I'm just putting everything on screen. Like I just have a lot of ideas. It's all about how all these things intersect.
And maybe it's super charged by an illicit drug. Maybe it's not. But Magnolia is just such an amazing example of being with my least annoying friend on cocaine. Least annoying.
Yeah. Because it doesn't bother me. I like it. It doesn't bother me either.
I mean, there's just nothing more cocaine energy than going to like a men's self help conference featuring Tom Cruise's performance in the Valley. I mean, that's that is the definition of cocaine. It's also one of his cochiest performances. Fair enough.
They never say whether Frank T.J. Mackey is on drugs. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he was explicitly against drugs based on his methodology. But he is keyed up.
And he is emanating that kind of energy. So it feels like a movie that defines cocaine in a way. Like if you had to make a movie into a movie. Well, great segue into our share number one.
Okay. So I'm glad we both agree that Goodfellas is the ultimate cocaine. I'm not going to come in here and say anything other than Goodfellas. But Goodfellas is for an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and 25 minutes is a much more elegant kind of a film.
It certainly is violent and it's about a criminal lifestyle. But it's got this glamour to it. And it's all about the 50s and the 60s and New York at this time when men were men and you know, the gangster trade was, you know, the numbers was completely different. And then, you know, uses cocaine as this transitional tool to show you how everything came apart of the scenes and uses Henry Hill's addiction and drug dealing kind of like feld.
Yes. Like, Kosun Ostra in New York, at least for a time, at least among that particular concentrated group of people. For me, it was just specifically the, you know, driving in the car helicopter overhead and the sheer paranoia. Like, what made you want to put it on your list?
This sounds disrespectful to say, but I knew I needed a Scorsese movie because yeah, he has been pretty open about that. And like a lot of his movies deal with this era and a certain relationship to cocaine in particular. And so like, I really like Wolf of Wall Street, but I was like, I'm not going to put Wolf of Wall Street over at Goodfellas. It is the subject matter itself and also the recreation.
And I do think we all learned a lot of our ideas about cocaine, both like the glamorization and how it makes someone behave and how it, how things can go wrong from Goodfellas. Like, don't you feel like this was sort of your, your text? And in. I took a question.
Like, did it explain to me how, like, was it a cautionary tale that like, like, lead the and I don't know, the cautionary tale was the egg on the, the frag pan. Right. Right. Which is on the, uh, beginning of cocaine bear.