Is it just me, or does everyone feel that if they’re going to see a stoner movie, the producers should provide blunts at the door – and a no-smoking waiver inside the theater? What separates the great stoner movies from the roaches is that the story gets the audience high without the benefit of drugs.
I had this “aha” moment at the SXSW premiere of Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum (in theaters March 29). I tried to make do with an oversized box of M&M’s, which really seems like putting the cart before the horse – or the munchies before the high. The distributors provided a dope-scented scratch-n-sniff card in the John Waters vein – but it didn’t quite capture the experience.
Korine’s relatively light sex-and-piss comedy puts Matthew McConaughey in the title role as a charming if leathery Florida Keys drugs-and-booze-and-boobs-consumer nicknamed Moondog. What, Gidget’s boyfriend is back?
A so-called “brilliant” poet (a claim unproved by the script), Moondog prefers the sketchy street life of a Charles Bukowski denizen over the candy-colored luxury at the Miami waterfront mansion owned by his super-sexy wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher). Moondog’s belated entrance to his daughter’s lavish wedding (to a total square) is a scene straight out of trashed Father of the Bride.
And maybe you have to be equally high to truly appreciate it – and not believe this is ass-hat parenting to rival the Varsity Blues scandal folks. As Moondog puffs Cuban-cigar-sized joints alongside his friend and his wife’s lover, the pot aficionado Lingerie (Snoop Dogg), I felt like raising my hand and saying: pass it over here so I can feel the feels.
If the cast appears to be enjoying themselves more than you are long after you’ve finished your M&M’s, something’s missing.
Not all stoner movies are equal. Easy Rider stands out as a classic that defined a generation of young adults seeking an America that felt authentic to them. Starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper (who also directed) and Jack Nicholson, it was the Western remade in 1969 with motorcycles subbed in for ponies.
The beautiful vistas in the background contrasted starkly with the claustrophobia of social interactions – and it reflected a society at a tipping point, the battle of hippies and squares. Sure, the characters smoked and dropped acid, but they were trying to capture their Summer of Love generation’s search for a personal land of the free-from-the-man, home of the brave on screen.
As Fonda’s Wyatt (an Earp reference) says about toking: “It gives you a whole new way of looking at the day.”
That’s also true about Hunter Thompson’s gonzo journalism manifesto Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, translated to film by Terry Gilliam in 1999 with Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio Del Toro as Dr. Gonzo. Part of the movie’s hilarity is how messed up and crazy these drug-addled characters are – but they also provide a prism for Thompson’s vision of capitalism run amok at its Las Vegas epicenter. There’s a sense that you can’t be sober to comprehend the corrupt truth of American institutions and the narcotic effect they have on a sheep-like citizenry.
As Duke says in a movie crammed full of quotable lines that zing out whether the viewer is sober or stoned: “There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.”
When it comes to stoner stories that’s just the tip of the bong.
Peter Sellers delivered physical comic brilliance in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968) opposite Jo Van Fleet as a square who learns to swing with the help of dosed brownies. Or ascend the heights of John Belushi playing a funky frat-boy-gone-wild along with his merry pranksters in Animal House. (“Food fight!”)
There are plenty of examples of stoner comedies that worked: Dazed and Confused, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or the best of Cheech and Chong. Or venture to more obscure pastures with the 1954 Girl Gang in which a seedy dude pimps out a crowd of female delinquents after getting them hooked on drugs. Original Cinemaniac Dennis Dermody praised the B-movie, writing “Despite the sordid subject matter, the movie is really very funny – a scene with the partying girls smoking reefer and jitterbugging while a hep-cat pounds away on the piano is a high point.”
I’m for smoking pot as much as the next mother of two, but it beach bums me out to watch McConaughey and Dogg seeming to have more fun partying with each other than entertaining their movie’s audience. While my idea about passing out joints with tickets is illegal and impractical, it would certainly enhance the experience if, like a drinking game, the audience could puff every time McConaughey’s Moondog does.
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