The Bear (1989)

Memorable, crazy movie

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Man Bites Bear It's easy to see why this film was rated so highly. It's awfully likable. The principles are Youk, a bear cub, and Bart, a 1500 pound fully grown male Kodiak bear. Poor Youk. His mother is digging out a honeycomb and dislodges a large chunk of granite which crushes her head. Youk, whimpering, must take off on his own, wobbling along through the grasslands and crags of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, an inhospitable place to everyone but skiers.We are then introduced to the mammoth Bart, who shoos off the rugrat, clearly a bear with dependency issues. Still the cub follows Bart around, though unwanted. Then, enter the enemy, two sinister hunters collecting bear skins to sell for the manufacture of robes, rugs, coats, hats, and whatever else they make out of bearskins. Pow! And Bart is wounded in the shoulder, wobbling off painfully until he manages to heal his wound by rolling around in a muddy pond. His convalescence over, Bart adopts Youk, and teaches him the rules of the game.But during his escape from the two hunters, Bart has killed one of their horses and wounded the other, so now revenge joins profit in motivating the two hunters, who bring in a pack of hunting hounds. Well, I'll tell you, it's one tribulation after another, both for the bears and for the hunters. Youk is hunted by the angriest mountain lion known to man or beast and is saved at the last minute by the intervention of Big Bart. Big Bart also traps the meanest of the hunters, scares the crap out of him, and then after roaring, bearing his teeth, and scraping some dust on the cowering human ("Please, don't kill me!") he wanders off, satisfied that he's made his message clear through his body language and prosody. And he HAS too. The mean hunter has an epiphany. Later when he has a clear opportunity to kill Bart, he spares him.What makes the film so appealing, chiefly, are two of its features.First, Youk is both ugly and cute at the same time. He's pretty funny too, rolling around, eating psychedelic mushrooms and tripping out, so that a floating mushroom turns into a real butterfly. The hunters manage to capture him and in their absence from the camp he rummages through their possessions and winds up covered with feathers. Cute. He witnesses a primal scene involving Bart and a sluttish female and falls asleep while they copulate.Second, although we are constantly on the side of the bears, the humans are not shown as resolutely evil in their actions or their emotions. Having captured Youk, they tie him to a tree, tease him, and laugh at his antics. He's not treated badly. When the men ride away, Youk is perfectly willing to follow them so they must scare him away. And the humans don't show any animus towards bears or other animals. They like their dogs and their horses. They're just depicted as making a living. The living involves killing animals, but the bears kill deer too. Everybody has to make a living.The framework for the relationship between humans and their natural environments was described by an anthropologist, Florence Kluckhohn, who observed that people had three ways of dealing with nature: they could live in submission to it, they could live in harmony with it, or they could try to conquer it. The hunters in this film are more or less living in harmony with nature. The iconography suggests this story takes place in the late 19th century. By that time -- up to and including now -- not everyone felt that way. We have no more passenger pigeons in North America, though they used to darken the skies. If you want to see an American buffalo, you must go to a zoo now. Wolves are disappearing and grizzlies are increasingly hard to come by. I won't go on about this point, though it would be easy to do.One annoying element of the film is that, well, I'm afraid some of Youk's whimpers, screams, and inquiries were dubbed by either a pre-adolescent human child or a fully blown human woman. We can clearly hear little Youk uttering, "Huh?" and "Wow" and "Oh" and "Wassup" and "So's your old man" and reciting Hamlet's famous soliloquy -- "To be or not to be". Under the influence of those psychedelic mushrooms he fantasizes himself at the Metropolitan opera singing "La Donna e Mobile" to a packed house.I kind of enjoyed it, despite the cuteness, not because of it.

The Bear is definitely an adult appropriate movie, but not appropriate for kids. It should probably be rated PG-13 at the least. There were several frightening and distressful scenes that were hard to watch that contained blood splatters, animal cries, wounds and deaths. This was especially hard to watch if you love animals and hate hunting! The moral of the story was a good one and should be taken seriously, but was over-shadowed by the endless terror and gore throughout most of the movie. For instance, just when you feel the worst is over, the baby bear is chased by a vicious cougar and is attacked, blood is shown. I am a young adult who found it hard to sit through this movie without fast-forwarding some of the traumatic scenes. While the scenery was beautiful and there were a few precious moments shared between the baby bear and the adult bear, these weren't the focus of the movie. Parents be advised when showing this movie to your children.

People who criticize this movie for lack of realism regarding bear behaviour have missed the point. This is not an "Animal Planet" documentary; it is a movie. One reviewer bitches that an adult male bear would have killed or even eaten a bear cub. Who cares? This guy probably watches "Dumbo" and then scratches his empty head, wondering whether he ever saw an elephant that can fly.I wish more of these knuckleheads would put that much "thought" and scrutinize Michael Moore's fantasy propaganda "documentaries" with the same kind of nit-picking zeal.Watching the film, I was torn between enjoying it and wondering if some animals weren't hurt in the making of it after all - in spite of the obligatory end-credits statement that "no animals were harmed". Of course, if any animals WERE harmed, they'd hardly be able to take the film-makers to court, now would they? And their animal relatives? Animals are far too poor to afford lawyers that can go head-to-head against Hollywood's finest scheissters.Obviously, bears can be trained to do all sorts of things, being the intelligent creatures that they are, but some of the scenes were a little dubious. "Look... We'll just drop the cub into a fast stream, and see if he does something funny. If he dies, we'll get another one. Who'll notice?" Am I being paranoid? I don't trust film-makers, especially European ones (not to mention French ones)..."The Bear" is a solid movie. It has its slow/dull moments, but some highlights, as well. The dream sequences were unusual, an interesting approach to trying to get inside the mind of an animal. The bear cub himself was also quite amusing in a number of sequences.The only major criticism I have is that they gave the cub human "baby-voices", i.e. half of the noises we hear from him come from some French actress sitting in a dubbing studio, goo-gooing her a** off to please the director. It just sounds stupid. I would think that the noises a bear-cub makes would be sufficiently amusing/entertaining on their own without such nonsense having to be thrown in.

I remember this first as a book I read back in the '50s. I loved it then, and I love the film now.First, I have to address some of the complaints made by other reviewers here.1. About the "fake bear sounds" made by the bear cub. I recall a display of bear cubs at a local game farm; that's pretty much the sound they make, much like a baby.2. The "unrealistic" aspects: The big male refraining from eating the cub; the bear confronting the defenseless hunter and allowing him to go free. Curwood claims in his preface, if I recall correctly, that these events not only really happened, they happened to him! He was the younger hunter, named Jim in the book.3. Bear sex as porn: Get a grip! I think that this was straight from the book, too.Now, to my observations.Much credit has to go to the casting directors and animal trainers. These critters seem perfectly cast! Could any bear cub possible be any cuter than this one? With expressive little eyes, even! I particularly liked the sequence where he chases the frog and ends up imitating it by jumping around after it.The big male is suitably big and ferocious.The sow (female bear) is amazingly attractive and fetching, lolling on her back and practically begging "Come and get it sailor!".The dogs in the book were Airedales, but in the movie were black Dobermans, looking like the spawn of Hell! Now cougars can be pretty appealing looking beasts, but this one has a distinctly dastardly appearance! I especially liked the cub's reaction of studied indifference during the Bear Sex scene, reminding me of the Ron Perlman character in Quest For Fire while his chum was making it with the native girl. Oh! Same director! But how did he get the bear to have that same expression as Perlman?