The Bear

Film review

The film is beautiful, with spectacular scenery and really impressive shots of the bears. Its hard to believe they could get the bears to seemingly do whatever the director wanted. They even got two bears to have it away on camera, while another watched. Maybe the director just a fetish for bears and was desperate to make this happen and wrote the whole movie script around this sex scene – just so he could justify his anthropomorphic porno. Maybe I should go back and watch the credits to see which brave soul was the “Bear fluffer”

I do question how they could have achieved many of these shots without subjecting the bears to considerable distress. People didn’t care so much about that sort of thing in the 80’s… or the risk of actors getting their faces ripped off for that matter.

If the film were made today, they would inevitably have used CGI which might have looked great for a few years and then age terribly and look awful a decade later. But it wouldn’t have felt real and I would have found it much harder to empathise with the animal (knowing that it was actually a stuntman sweating his tits off while he prances around in green spandex covered in ping pong balls).

The dubbed bear noises were a bit too much at times – I think they could have been a lot more subtle, or maybe just removed entirely. I can’t fault the bear’s performances though, and honestly I’m quite annoyed that the young bear cub didn’t receive any recognition at the Oscars that year.

I’ve always wanted to know what animals dream about and I’m not sure that a film has really addressed this before. Now I know that bears have nightmares about menacing stop motion animation frogs and they even take magic mushrooms when they fancy a trip.

It was a much happier ending than I had expected… I genuinely thought that the final scene would transition from the little bear being trapped in a cage to seeing a little bearskin mat in front of the toilet in the hunter’s log cabin to catch any stray drops of piss.

3 shrooms out of 5