slh-16317 This is 'cute' if you do not mind the fact that birds and animals in the film are NOT even from the same country--you would never see the type of deer and birds together anywhere other than this 'movie'. You will also notice the size of the 'cub' changes throughout the movie. The BIGGEST farce of the "Bear" is that NO male grizzly would ever bond with a cub-not even their own---they would kill it! Let's hear it for REAL nature movies, not this type of silliness.

calvinnme ... is to leave your enemy alive knowing that without his dogs and his guns and his buddies and his notched bullets meant to cause his prey to explode not just die, that this enemy is just a great big sissy. No, the story is more complex than that, but at the climax of the film you can almost detect the trace of a smile on the face of the gigantic Kodiak bear as he roars in the face of the unsuspecting hunter who is left on his knees, hands on his ears begging "please don't kill me". And then the bear just turns around and ambles away.So how did we get to this point? It is British Columbia 1885, and this story starts out with a momma bear and her cub, digging honeycomb out of the base of a hill. The momma is making such a ruckus digging that she causes a minor rock slide and is killed instantly in the process. This is the very saddest part of the film, as the baby first tries to help mom by removing the rocks, and then snuggles up next to her corpse until hunger makes him leave her behind.Meanwhile there is the gigantic Kodiak bear I mentioned in the first paragraph, doing what Kodiak bears do - scratching his back on trees until they fall, mating with female bears he comes across, and killing elk for food because, for something this big, some fish and berries are just not going to do the job.Also there are a pair of hunters, an older one and a younger one. They are obviously after bear pelts, because as we meet them the older hunter is flinging the bear meat into the fire and finishing up the job of skinning his latest kill. Now at the time I am writing this, trophy hunters are in the news, and the news is repellent, people killing wild animals just for the sport. But this is a wilderness and more than likely these hunters need the pelts to sell and to use in the harsh cold winters for themselves. Everything pulls its weight in such an ecosystem or it is deemed as unnecessary and won't last long anyways.What sets up our story is that the pair of hunters detect our gigantic friend. The younger hunter is inexperienced, though, and shoots too soon. He wounds the bear but does not kill it. The hunters go out looking for the bear and when they don't find it, the older hunter says to let it go. That is, until they realize they are the hunted and see that the bear has doubled back on them and slaughtered their pack horses, including the older hunter's own horse, and probably as close to a pet as you get in this place. The older hunter swears revenge and leaves the younger hunter there while he goes back to town and gets their tracking dogs.In the end we have the most unlikeliest of scenarios. The male bear takes up with the baby bear feeding it and protecting it in almost a big brother/little brother relationship that provides some precious moments, and we have the young hunter and the old hunter deciding to let the giant bear get away in spite of the fact that he killed the older hunter's horse and the younger hunter's favorite dog in the chase.Watch this one to see the forgiveness that seems to go both ways in the animal kingdom - human to animal, animal to human, and to see the possibility that sometimes animals can strike up friendships even in the harshest of environments. And might I add that the beautiful Canadian scenery almost steals the show. Highly recommended. Let me also note that there is almost no dialogue in this one, but it is unnecessary to convey the relationship between the hunters and what they are thinking. The acting and direction are that good.

TheUnknown837-1 I tend to be a genuine sucker for animal pictures. One of the reasons may be because animals are so genuinely unpredictable, unlike most people in the movies these days. You can look into the eyes of most animals and not have a real clear picture of what they are thinking or feeling. So I sometimes find movie-animals more fascinating than movie-people. But the second—and primary—reason is because they bring me to admire the skills and patience that go into making a film. All movies are difficult to make, even the awful ones. That goes without saying. But there a number of them where the tremendous effort does not really paint itself on the screen, regardless of whether they are good or bad, absorbing or unbearable. I tend to be astonishing by animal movies for the same reason I tend to be astonished by movies featuring stop-motion animation: I instantly become aware of the exhaustion the creators had to subject themselves to.To make "The Bear," the filmmakers required their stars, two bears, one an adult, the other a cub, to crawl across landscapes, play around in water, and appear to grow close to one another. The cub is orphaned at the beginning of the picture when its mother is killed in a landslide; the adult is a territorial old male wounded by bear hunters. Now the bears had to perform just right before the camera. They had to not only appear convincing, but maintain continuity whenever the director would decide it was time to move the camera to another angle. I've heard of accounts where the director and trainer would wait all day just to get the bear cub to turn its head in the right direction for a subsequent shot and then keep its head there when they got to that subsequent shot.On that level, and others, "The Bear" is an absorbing movie-going experience. But it is also a glorious massage on the senses. First of all, it looks beautiful. The directing, which consists of numerous cuts, not just long documentary extreme wide-angles, is consistently interesting. Also remarkable is the sound design. The movie was probably shot, mostly, without any sound equipment, for the trainers would be shouting at the bears every second, commanding them what to do and when. So every footstep, every grunt, snarl, bird chirp, gust of wind, sound of a grasshopper, you name it, was developed and integrated in post-production. Yet it all feels so natural; it was not until after I saw the movie that I became aware of this, once again reminding me of how much stress the filmmakers had to put upon themselves.Just imaging the making of "The Bear" puts my memories of volunteering on "The Boarder," a low-budget family drama shot in rural Nebraska, to shame.I also liked the movie for its human scenes. I guess that contradicts part of my opening statement, but then again, there seems to be an exception to every rule when it comes to the movies. The only humans in the movies are the two hunters chasing after the adult bear. Apart from the wonderful acting by Jack Wallace and Tcheky Karyo, I also enjoyed the level of detail given to them. The way, in the opening, the movie breaks down the process by which they hunt the bear. I particularly liked the touch where Mr. Wallace plucks some grass and lets it fly from his fingertips in the wind, so he knows just how much he needs to angle his rifle before he takes the shot. These are pretty interesting characters, and I actually did not mind it so much when their moral denouement at the end flew completely from the realm of predictability."The Bear" only loses its head when it tries to get inside the mind of a bear. Literally. Animals dream. Anybody who has ever owned a dog knows that. But just what they dream or what they see in their dreams is anybody's guess. Now the movie does offer a suggestion: a purple-tinted world with a quirkier-moving version of the animal wandering about in some strange surrounding. The dream sequences are handled through stop-motion animation: the other movie-making process that astounds me. And also I certainly did not mind seeing the animation, it nevertheless broke the shape of the picture. More effective would have been implying that the animal was dreaming and allowing us to use our imagination.

Weredegu I have seen both good and bad from director Jean-Jacques Annaud, films such as 'L'Amant' being an example of the former, and 'Enemy at the Gates' an example of the latter. With this movie here he takes you to the edge of the film universe. I'm saying that in the sense that this movie relativises many things. The fascinating thing is that you have bears playing roles here. They are acting, they partake in portraying fictive situations. And they do it with credibility. To liken this to something, the issue of how young an actor might be awarded an Oscar, a César or whatever might be mentioned as one from which similarly tricky questions may stem.As to the story, it is rather simple of course. You could easily re-imagine it with human characters, with some little kid in the focus. Especially if you think of what the older male bear's character would be like then, it could be your typical socially responsible art movie with a lesson. However, telling the tale with bears turns any such consideration totally superficial. What else but a simple story could be credible in their case? Unless you're ready to see talking animals, of course.While the bears 'cast' in this movie have perhaps more of a personality than what you would by conventional wisdom attribute to them, they weren't presented as vegetarians for the sake of being more easily accepted by a moralizing audience. And seeing these bears play as they did, even knowing that in some places the film-makers did use a trick or two, who knows, perhaps I should reconsider how much of a personality a bear might have. Very likely I should, I would add, still under the impression.