2020 Directed by Lawrence Michael Levine
At a remote lake house in the Adirondack Mountains, a couple entertains an out-of-town guest looking for inspiration in her filmmaking. The group quickly falls into a calculated game of desire, manipulation, and jealousy, unaware of how dangerously intertwined their lives will soon become.
Marina Grasic Aubrey Plaza Richard J. Bosner Julie Christeas Sophia Takal Lawrence Michael Levine Jonathan Blitstein Jai Khanna William G. Santor Andrew Chang-Sang John Hills
Черный медведь
clearly, intensely, MAJORLY influenced by cassavetes, which i had no idea about going in!! the story is split into two distinct parts, and the second half finds aubrey plaza going full Opening Night (plaza has previously talked about her love of both elaine may and cassavetes).
at its core, the film probes artists' relentless quest for authenticity, and posits two conflicting questions:
-if someone is manipulated into feeling and behaving in certain ways, are those feelings and behavior truly genuine?
-alternatively, is manipulation the best way to elicit genuine feeling and behavior? (example: kubrick manipulated tom cruise and nicole kidman so intensively during production of Eyes Wide Shut that they got divorced. at the same time, Eyes Wide Shut is…
“i’ve been lying since the second i got here”
i’m so fascinated with this, but right now that fascination is all i know for sure. this is layered in such a particular way that makes me feel in this moment like i’m missing something that’ll click into place naturally with time. i’m hoping that’s the case, because the potential is all there, i just have to think on it. and honestly, it’s good i need time to process because i can’t say much more without giving things away
but two little things before i click save: 1. go in knowing as little as you can, and 2. aubrey really is THAT good
aubrey plaza come collect your academy award it is yours it belongs to you!!!! the amount of anxiety this just caused me is unreal go in blind for a real fun time!!! i’m shaking
Who'd have thought a film about writer's block could be so fun?!
Lawrence Michael Levine's Black Bear is an endlessly fascinating, riveting and metatextual look at the manipulation & sacrifices made in the name of art, maybe a little too meta for it's own good. Aubrey Plaza gives her best performance yet, and Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon are terrific.
Go in completely blind with this one.
“You’re really hard to read...”
“Yeah, you know what, I get that all the time, but I actually think that I’m so easy to read that people just get confused and they make it harder on themselves.”
Black Bear is savagely primal. Aubrey Plaza’s performance is both captivating and horrifying. Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon delivery as well, but our lead is the lead for a reason. Plaza plays off the two of them in such an intense way that it leaves a visceral sense of dread in the best way possible.
A complexly webbed story that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from. It’s beautiful to look at. The sound design is at times haunting and others downright vicious.…
The feeling of tension, uneasiness and confusion erupts greatly in a meta film and this phenomenon is best seen in Black Bear–a thriller drama about a filmmaker who went to a rural lake house, but found herself entangled in the desire and jealousy of its owners, as her past slowly resurfaced. The line between history and fiction is blurred, as it juxtaposes two different, yet related storyline into an almost two-hour film, producing a sense of bewilderment for every revelation shown.
The film tackles the difficulty of being an actor on a film, especially if its director uses an auteur approach in bringing the needed emotion for the character the actor is portraying, for better or for worse. Filmmaking really…
I bet her pussy smells like fucking spider shit!
is a line in this movie
Aubrey is great. That's it. That's my review.
Experimental yet grounded firmly in its own ambitious meta premise, this movie never stops delivering. It might be a laugh, a gut punch, a 180 turn, a bear in the trees, Aubrey Plaza without pants, psychological manipulation, an emotional breakdown, this movie has it all. It's a dense narrative based in lies on top of performative actions, rolled into role playing and gaslighting. Everything from the direction, cinematography, sound, and score - and especially Aubrey Plaza's unpredictable (too predictable? lol) and commanding performance - is an absolute win, causing the runtime to fly right by me and ensure I was completely enraptured despite having have no idea what the hell most of this is trying to say.
thx claira!
Another film that's been making the waves in this platform, with reviews being mixed mostly positives and very cryptic in many ways, I seriously had no idea what to expect coming into this film. The poster kinda lets you know something trippy is going on, but at the same time is a bit misleading (what the hell are those red things supposed to be?).
In the end, this film is a very interesting journey into the world of filmmaking and creativity. Its like reality and our deepest thoughts and nightmares found the way to incarnate into those closest to us. And for someone who hasn't watched the movie, that sentence probably didn't make much sense, but once you watch this…
tell me you love me, you don’t have to mean it
looooved this. horror aubrey plaza is the best aubrey plaza. she’s SO good. I read to go in with no knowledge of the plot and was very happy I did. might go up to 5 stars on a rewatch but right now I’m still processing it
that was some game we played
Black Bear is a perfectly harmless film. It’s the type of thing that you forget about for years until you see an instagram thread on mindfuck movies and it’s name crops up. The first half is pretty well done; Aubrey Plaza gives a preformance like she actually cares, which is always nice. The visual tone and colour pallet are very consistent, even in the films lighthearted moments, which I felt was a nice touch.
There are some moments that don’t fit with the film and feel awkward and jarring in the second act, which is really what derailed the movie for me. I feel like if this had let the black comedy take a backseat and just gone full throttle…
Nach der ersten halben Stunde hätte ich fast ausgeschaltet. Dieses Beziehungsdrama hätte ich entweder subtiler oder drastischer sehen wollen. So war mir alles zu erwartbar. (Ich meine hier das Drehbuch - nicht das Schauspiel, welches immer nuanciert und präzise ist.)
Dann kommt der spektakuläre zweite Teil, der mich mehr als versöhnt hat. Und Aubrey Plaza liefert hier eine geradezu oscarwürdige Performance ab.
Im Nachhinein erkläre ich mir, dass der erste Teil wohl als Kontrast zum zweiten gebraucht wurde. Ganz überzeugt bin ich davon aber nicht.
A big surprise, not only it's such a blast to watch but it also manages to be a fascinant puzzle.
This film is weird and I like that. It’s themes are presented thorough a cyclical story telling that will need subsequent viewings from me to fully decipher but the mood, the acting, the music and the camera work makes this a very pleasurable watch regardless.
Si la interpretación de Aubrey Plaza no es la mejor que he visto este año en una película, poco le falta. Menudo recital.
The shit was not mellow, and now I'm just fucking stoned, and I have diarrhea and you should have fucking said that it's not fucking mellow, ok? damn. *spills coffee*
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