It's not as if I confine myself to stoner movies released in Australia, which are not that many. I trawl through the overseas suppliers buying DVDs of movies never released here. It's a genre my friends gave up years ago, once they stopped smoking pot. So when I tell them I've been watching Half-Baked, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back they roll their eyes and quickly jump to another topic before I can bore them any more.
Like most people my friends believe these movies are puerile, only appeal to immature males between the ages of 15 and 30, and seem to promote dope smoking. It's a world where men behave as if they are still boys, no one has a job, and marijuana is the main subject of conversation.
If the plots are not stupid then they are ridiculous. It's a world where silliness and goofy grins reign. The criticisms are absolutely true but they are precisely why I like these comedies.
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss these movies as just dumb comedies. Although they are seldom taken seriously as a genre, they have great appeal for audiences beyond those who indulge in marijuana. Their popularity is growing yearly, as last year's Pineapple Express proved. These films cost little to make but generate significant profits. Their influence has infiltrated television with shows such as Weeds and The Simpsons and especially the comic tone and characters of Family Guy. Even My Name is Earl, with its slacker main characters, could be mistaken for a stoner movie.
The success of these films is easy to understand. They're simple and unthreatening. They have a childlike, or if you prefer, a childish glee in basic humour such as pratfalls, car crashes, slapstick, fart jokes and clownish stupidity. The violence is cartoonish and there is no real evil. In fact, they have a pervasive sweetness about human nature that can be quite endearing. To me, and I suspect millions of others, they are a comic antidote for our dark and uncertain times.
Most drugs are never the basis for movie comedies, even though since the early days of cinema drugs have been a frequent subject. In the silent era op*um addiction was a common theme. By the time the talkies arrived other drugs became integral to plots, which featured morphine-addled scientists, co*aine madness and the misery of he*oin.
The template for he*oin-addiction films was established early and continues to this day. They are depressing dramas that go through the same dreary story cycle. The main characters become hooked on the drug then fall into crime and degradation in order to pay for the habit. There are several attempts to become clean, most of them unsuccessful. Sordid deaths are frequent.
The drug that was often used for comedy was alcohol. There are countless films from the 1930s and 40s that highlight drunken pratfalls, inappropriate flirting and monstrously comic hangovers. Nowadays we are so aware of the dangerous physical and mental consequences of booze that it's difficult to think of recent films where alcohol is the basis of comedy.
Marijuana seldom featured in early cinema, as it was a virtually unknown drug. So little did filmmakers know about it that when it was the subject of Reefer Madness, a delirious drama made in 1936, it was believed to lead to murder and insanity. If cannabis was mentioned at all in the 50s it was the cause of violence and sexual promiscuity and invariably the smoking of a joint led to harder drugs. In the public's imagination, dope was associated with the Beats and jazz musicians.
As Martin Torgoff so ably demonstrates in his Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000, it was these musicians and writers who helped usher in what he calls the 60s age of marijuana. Young people started to smoke it as an act of hip rebellion and films began to change public perception of the drug.
Two movies in particular helped this. In the jejune and often bathetic Easy Rider (1969), an alcoholic lawyer, played by Jack Nicholson, is given a joint by the two bikers. At first he is reluctant and expresses the apprehension of many people of that era. He is afraid that taking a puff will lead to harder drugs. Dennis Hopper's character assures him this won't happen.
Instead of becoming drowsy or maniacal Nicholson grows uncommonly relaxed as he hilariously speculates on the evidence for UFOs and aliens. Hopper's advice to the inexperienced pot-smoker Nicholson, "You've got to hold it longer in your lungs, George", taught a whole generation how to smoke a joint properly.
Perhaps the most radical portrayal of marijuana use during that time was in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, made the year before. In it Peter Sellers plays a middle-aged man who falls for a beautiful hippie who makes marijuana-laced brownies. The effects of the drug liberate the uptight Sellers and instead of cannabis being a subject of drama it leads to comedy. This was arevolutionary leap from marijuana being associated with violence and depravity, to it being the basis of benign behaviour and the cause of good times.
Gradually the comic potential of marijuana began to infiltrate the screens, especially in the six films Cheech and Chong made between 1979 and 1984. Probably only the first one, Up in Smoke, has stood the test of time, but even so it's a trial to watch without being high. However, the two comedians did provide the model for stoner comedy still used today. The plots resemble shaggy-dog stories, they often focus on two or three buddies, the dope smokers get in trouble with the law but somehow their stupidity saves the day, and the dialogue is a mixture of pop-cultural references and non-sequiturs.
Regarded as the grandfathers of stoner comedy, Cheech and Chong proved there was a small but loyal audience that wanted to see this kind of film.
Over the past 10 to 15 years this niche market has grown considerably larger. In the US it is estimated there are 15 million regular marijuana users and if you count the occasional smoker, plus those who used to smoke, then there's a large core audience.
This is reflected in the fact that most of these comedies make money. Pineapple Express (the title is named after a powerful strain of marijuana) cost $US25 million dollars and has so far made more than $US100 million. The genre has spawned sequels, such as the Harold and Kumar films (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay) and the trilogy of Friday films that star Ice Cube and Chris Tucker.
Many an important actor has made his mark as a stoner. In Fast Times at Ridgemont High a young, scrawny long-haired Sean Penn gives a hilarious performance as Jeff Spicoli, who prepares for school by getting high and whose idiot grin hides his skill as a surfer. Before he became famous, Brad Pitt played a stoner in True Romance. His brain-fried character stays inside all day smoking weed and watching television. He's so stupefied he can barely register whom he's talking to and accidentally betrays his best friend to a thug.
So influential was Pitt's performance that it inspired Pineapple Express. Director Judd Apatow wondered what would happen if you followed that character out of his apartment and watched him get chased by bad guys.
Perhaps the definitive stoner is the Dude in the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski. Jeff Bridges plays a guy who lives in his own spaced-out world and is so laid back that he's practically horizontal, except when playing tenpin bowling.
The influence of the stoner humour means that even genial comedies set in American high schools, such as Clueless and Mean Girls, acknowledge stoners as an intrinsic part of school culture. And here it has to be noted that there is a cross-pollination between movies about stoners and those about slackers.
Director Richard Linklater made slackers a buzz word with his 1991 Slacker. The characters in this film and his later Dazed and Confused seem to have no ambition or aspirations. If they work at all, then it is in a job that has no future and their lives seem strangely aimless. These are people who have no faith in the American dream and who react against it by living the life of losers, some of them spending all their free time smoking joints.
(There is a case to be made for interpreting Waiting for Godot as the ultimate slacker story: two guys waiting around for their dope dealer Godot to turn up.)
The other influential director in this domain is Kevin Smith. His classic Clerks centres on slackers, but the two drug-dealing stoners Jay and Silent Bob became so popular Smith put them in other films, such as Mallrats, and even had them star in their own vehicle, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
All these movies reveal a crucial difference: stoners are also slackers but slackers are not necessarily stoners.
Real stoner movies are different. The raison d'etre of their stories is dope. The plots often revolve around the need for marijuana and the jokes are those of weed-smoking insiders. The stories can be as hallucinogenic and moronic as the effects of hydroponic marijuana. In Dude, Where's My Car, the two protagonists find themselves pursued by aliens who look like escapees from a Kraftwerk tribute band. In the gloriously silly Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay the two protagonists end upsmoking weed with a cheerfully stoned George W.Bush, who confides in the boys about his all-consuming hatred of his bully of a vice-president.
And this leads to the most obvious aspect about all these films. They are about men. This is a male world where buddies live in shared houses or apartments that make no concessions to cleanliness or neatness. They may have temporary jobs or are unemployed. There are frequent attempts to come up with schemes to make money.
The boys in Knocked Up spend all their time smoking dope and cataloguing nude scenes for a website called Flesh of the Stars, an activity that will prove redundant, as do most stoner ideas. As in all these movies the stoners are not handsome, but a mixture of the skinny, the gormless and the overweight. If anyone typifies this it is Seth Rogen, the star of Knocked Up. He's plump, not that attractive and makes no attempt to dress to impress. There is also another fascinating dynamic in these movies; marijuana acts as a social lubricant. As long as you love weed you can become one of the gang, despite different social and racial backgrounds. A common trope is the harmonious mixing together of black, white, Hispanic, even Indian and Korean stoners.
Women are not part of this universe. In most of the films women are sidelined or non-existent, and if the males pursue women they invariably fail. If they do talk to women they barely make sense. The only time they express affection is for their buddies and a recurrent refrain through these stories is one buddy confiding to the other, I love you, man.
If women are in this world at all they act as moral arbiters. It's not until you see Smiley Face, made in 2007, about a would-be actress played by Anna Faris, that you realise it's almost impossible to think of any women in these comedies smoking a joint. Watching the first 10 minutes of the film is an unsettling experience. Faris's performance as constantly stoned Jane is a wondrous thing to behold, but unlike with male stoners her condition seems to make her highly vulnerable, especially when she undergoes her wild experiences without that essential component of stoner movies: the buddy.
Once the viewer relaxes and knows no harm will come to the lead character then Smiley Face reveals itself as a comic gem.
It was thought the reason women weren't protagonists in this kind of film is that women getting off their faces is not as funny as men, but Faris proves to be the exception to the rule. I think it's more likely the reason why women hardly feature in stoner movies is that they represent adulthood and all its responsibilities. In Knocked Up, Rogen's character gets Katherine Heigl's pregnant. The result will be that he has to leave his buddies and their world behind.
David Chappelle in Half-Baked makes this connection obvious. At the end of the film he has to make a decision between the weed and the girl. In a symbolic act he tosses his joint away and walks off with her (but of course, in typical stoner style there's is a deleted scene from thefilm where Chappelle rushes back to get the joint).
At the end of Pineapple Express the three men drive off together, having forgotten the girlfriend. Heigl probably spoke for many women when she called Knocked Up a little sexist. It seems that most of these movies have a dismissive attitude towards women, but I think it would be a mistake to label them misogynist.
These movies are based on the notion that adulthood must be avoided at all costs. The men are Peter Pans and Lost Boys and they live together in their stoner version of Neverland. And like J.M. Barrie's Wendy, the women who partake in it are responsible and more mature than the boys. Gangsters and law officials are finally ineffective against the stoners, not unlike Captain Hook's losing battles against Peter Pan.
There is a telling example of this template in Half-Baked. Chappelle and his buddies smoke some medicinal marijuana. It is so potent that they rise up from the floor, and Peter Pan-like, float outside where they fly through the neon-lit city to visit their friend in jail.
The superb Withnail and I acknowledges the limiting factor of these stories of arrested development by ending with one of the characters giving up dope and his hedonist lifestyle. With his hair cut and dressed sensibly, Marwood heads out into the real world leaving his best friend Withnail behind.
There is no doubt that the films can be morally irresponsible about the dangers of cannabis and even Rogen has admitted -- tongue in cheek -- that he doesn't know if they're anti-dope or pro-marijuana.
But it should be obvious by now that I have great affection for them, with their ludicrous, shaggy dog stories that meander and turn in on themselves and the surrealist monologues that make no sense in the scheme of things, but which can be very funny. (Danny, the malevolent dope dealer with the courtly manner in Withnail and I, has many an inspired riff.)
Yes, they can be in bad taste, but part of the attraction is watching these comedies tackling taboo subjects and overstepping the boundaries of good taste.
Besides, no one is really hurt in these stories. Characters survive the most ridiculous wounds and beatings because the stoner world is closer to cartoon than reality. Above all they set out to do one thing: make the audiences as happy and silly as a stoner on the herb. And what's wrong with that?
Finally, the important question: are these movies just as funny if you don't watch them through a marijuana haze? I wouldn't know.
News Hawk- Ganjarden 420 MAGAZINE ® - Medical Marijuana Publication & Social Networking
Source: The Australian
Author: Louis Nowra
Contact: The Australian
Copyright: 2009 News Limited.
Website: High Society
Like most people my friends believe these movies are puerile, only appeal to immature males between the ages of 15 and 30, and seem to promote dope smoking. It's a world where men behave as if they are still boys, no one has a job, and marijuana is the main subject of conversation.
If the plots are not stupid then they are ridiculous. It's a world where silliness and goofy grins reign. The criticisms are absolutely true but they are precisely why I like these comedies.
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss these movies as just dumb comedies. Although they are seldom taken seriously as a genre, they have great appeal for audiences beyond those who indulge in marijuana. Their popularity is growing yearly, as last year's Pineapple Express proved. These films cost little to make but generate significant profits. Their influence has infiltrated television with shows such as Weeds and The Simpsons and especially the comic tone and characters of Family Guy. Even My Name is Earl, with its slacker main characters, could be mistaken for a stoner movie.
The success of these films is easy to understand. They're simple and unthreatening. They have a childlike, or if you prefer, a childish glee in basic humour such as pratfalls, car crashes, slapstick, fart jokes and clownish stupidity. The violence is cartoonish and there is no real evil. In fact, they have a pervasive sweetness about human nature that can be quite endearing. To me, and I suspect millions of others, they are a comic antidote for our dark and uncertain times.
Most drugs are never the basis for movie comedies, even though since the early days of cinema drugs have been a frequent subject. In the silent era op*um addiction was a common theme. By the time the talkies arrived other drugs became integral to plots, which featured morphine-addled scientists, co*aine madness and the misery of he*oin.
The template for he*oin-addiction films was established early and continues to this day. They are depressing dramas that go through the same dreary story cycle. The main characters become hooked on the drug then fall into crime and degradation in order to pay for the habit. There are several attempts to become clean, most of them unsuccessful. Sordid deaths are frequent.
The drug that was often used for comedy was alcohol. There are countless films from the 1930s and 40s that highlight drunken pratfalls, inappropriate flirting and monstrously comic hangovers. Nowadays we are so aware of the dangerous physical and mental consequences of booze that it's difficult to think of recent films where alcohol is the basis of comedy.
Marijuana seldom featured in early cinema, as it was a virtually unknown drug. So little did filmmakers know about it that when it was the subject of Reefer Madness, a delirious drama made in 1936, it was believed to lead to murder and insanity. If cannabis was mentioned at all in the 50s it was the cause of violence and sexual promiscuity and invariably the smoking of a joint led to harder drugs. In the public's imagination, dope was associated with the Beats and jazz musicians.
As Martin Torgoff so ably demonstrates in his Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000, it was these musicians and writers who helped usher in what he calls the 60s age of marijuana. Young people started to smoke it as an act of hip rebellion and films began to change public perception of the drug.
Two movies in particular helped this. In the jejune and often bathetic Easy Rider (1969), an alcoholic lawyer, played by Jack Nicholson, is given a joint by the two bikers. At first he is reluctant and expresses the apprehension of many people of that era. He is afraid that taking a puff will lead to harder drugs. Dennis Hopper's character assures him this won't happen.
Instead of becoming drowsy or maniacal Nicholson grows uncommonly relaxed as he hilariously speculates on the evidence for UFOs and aliens. Hopper's advice to the inexperienced pot-smoker Nicholson, "You've got to hold it longer in your lungs, George", taught a whole generation how to smoke a joint properly.
Perhaps the most radical portrayal of marijuana use during that time was in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, made the year before. In it Peter Sellers plays a middle-aged man who falls for a beautiful hippie who makes marijuana-laced brownies. The effects of the drug liberate the uptight Sellers and instead of cannabis being a subject of drama it leads to comedy. This was arevolutionary leap from marijuana being associated with violence and depravity, to it being the basis of benign behaviour and the cause of good times.
Gradually the comic potential of marijuana began to infiltrate the screens, especially in the six films Cheech and Chong made between 1979 and 1984. Probably only the first one, Up in Smoke, has stood the test of time, but even so it's a trial to watch without being high. However, the two comedians did provide the model for stoner comedy still used today. The plots resemble shaggy-dog stories, they often focus on two or three buddies, the dope smokers get in trouble with the law but somehow their stupidity saves the day, and the dialogue is a mixture of pop-cultural references and non-sequiturs.
Regarded as the grandfathers of stoner comedy, Cheech and Chong proved there was a small but loyal audience that wanted to see this kind of film.
Over the past 10 to 15 years this niche market has grown considerably larger. In the US it is estimated there are 15 million regular marijuana users and if you count the occasional smoker, plus those who used to smoke, then there's a large core audience.
This is reflected in the fact that most of these comedies make money. Pineapple Express (the title is named after a powerful strain of marijuana) cost $US25 million dollars and has so far made more than $US100 million. The genre has spawned sequels, such as the Harold and Kumar films (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay) and the trilogy of Friday films that star Ice Cube and Chris Tucker.
Many an important actor has made his mark as a stoner. In Fast Times at Ridgemont High a young, scrawny long-haired Sean Penn gives a hilarious performance as Jeff Spicoli, who prepares for school by getting high and whose idiot grin hides his skill as a surfer. Before he became famous, Brad Pitt played a stoner in True Romance. His brain-fried character stays inside all day smoking weed and watching television. He's so stupefied he can barely register whom he's talking to and accidentally betrays his best friend to a thug.
So influential was Pitt's performance that it inspired Pineapple Express. Director Judd Apatow wondered what would happen if you followed that character out of his apartment and watched him get chased by bad guys.
Perhaps the definitive stoner is the Dude in the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski. Jeff Bridges plays a guy who lives in his own spaced-out world and is so laid back that he's practically horizontal, except when playing tenpin bowling.
The influence of the stoner humour means that even genial comedies set in American high schools, such as Clueless and Mean Girls, acknowledge stoners as an intrinsic part of school culture. And here it has to be noted that there is a cross-pollination between movies about stoners and those about slackers.
Director Richard Linklater made slackers a buzz word with his 1991 Slacker. The characters in this film and his later Dazed and Confused seem to have no ambition or aspirations. If they work at all, then it is in a job that has no future and their lives seem strangely aimless. These are people who have no faith in the American dream and who react against it by living the life of losers, some of them spending all their free time smoking joints.
(There is a case to be made for interpreting Waiting for Godot as the ultimate slacker story: two guys waiting around for their dope dealer Godot to turn up.)
The other influential director in this domain is Kevin Smith. His classic Clerks centres on slackers, but the two drug-dealing stoners Jay and Silent Bob became so popular Smith put them in other films, such as Mallrats, and even had them star in their own vehicle, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
All these movies reveal a crucial difference: stoners are also slackers but slackers are not necessarily stoners.
Real stoner movies are different. The raison d'etre of their stories is dope. The plots often revolve around the need for marijuana and the jokes are those of weed-smoking insiders. The stories can be as hallucinogenic and moronic as the effects of hydroponic marijuana. In Dude, Where's My Car, the two protagonists find themselves pursued by aliens who look like escapees from a Kraftwerk tribute band. In the gloriously silly Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay the two protagonists end upsmoking weed with a cheerfully stoned George W.Bush, who confides in the boys about his all-consuming hatred of his bully of a vice-president.
And this leads to the most obvious aspect about all these films. They are about men. This is a male world where buddies live in shared houses or apartments that make no concessions to cleanliness or neatness. They may have temporary jobs or are unemployed. There are frequent attempts to come up with schemes to make money.
The boys in Knocked Up spend all their time smoking dope and cataloguing nude scenes for a website called Flesh of the Stars, an activity that will prove redundant, as do most stoner ideas. As in all these movies the stoners are not handsome, but a mixture of the skinny, the gormless and the overweight. If anyone typifies this it is Seth Rogen, the star of Knocked Up. He's plump, not that attractive and makes no attempt to dress to impress. There is also another fascinating dynamic in these movies; marijuana acts as a social lubricant. As long as you love weed you can become one of the gang, despite different social and racial backgrounds. A common trope is the harmonious mixing together of black, white, Hispanic, even Indian and Korean stoners.
Women are not part of this universe. In most of the films women are sidelined or non-existent, and if the males pursue women they invariably fail. If they do talk to women they barely make sense. The only time they express affection is for their buddies and a recurrent refrain through these stories is one buddy confiding to the other, I love you, man.
If women are in this world at all they act as moral arbiters. It's not until you see Smiley Face, made in 2007, about a would-be actress played by Anna Faris, that you realise it's almost impossible to think of any women in these comedies smoking a joint. Watching the first 10 minutes of the film is an unsettling experience. Faris's performance as constantly stoned Jane is a wondrous thing to behold, but unlike with male stoners her condition seems to make her highly vulnerable, especially when she undergoes her wild experiences without that essential component of stoner movies: the buddy.
Once the viewer relaxes and knows no harm will come to the lead character then Smiley Face reveals itself as a comic gem.
It was thought the reason women weren't protagonists in this kind of film is that women getting off their faces is not as funny as men, but Faris proves to be the exception to the rule. I think it's more likely the reason why women hardly feature in stoner movies is that they represent adulthood and all its responsibilities. In Knocked Up, Rogen's character gets Katherine Heigl's pregnant. The result will be that he has to leave his buddies and their world behind.
David Chappelle in Half-Baked makes this connection obvious. At the end of the film he has to make a decision between the weed and the girl. In a symbolic act he tosses his joint away and walks off with her (but of course, in typical stoner style there's is a deleted scene from thefilm where Chappelle rushes back to get the joint).
At the end of Pineapple Express the three men drive off together, having forgotten the girlfriend. Heigl probably spoke for many women when she called Knocked Up a little sexist. It seems that most of these movies have a dismissive attitude towards women, but I think it would be a mistake to label them misogynist.
These movies are based on the notion that adulthood must be avoided at all costs. The men are Peter Pans and Lost Boys and they live together in their stoner version of Neverland. And like J.M. Barrie's Wendy, the women who partake in it are responsible and more mature than the boys. Gangsters and law officials are finally ineffective against the stoners, not unlike Captain Hook's losing battles against Peter Pan.
There is a telling example of this template in Half-Baked. Chappelle and his buddies smoke some medicinal marijuana. It is so potent that they rise up from the floor, and Peter Pan-like, float outside where they fly through the neon-lit city to visit their friend in jail.
The superb Withnail and I acknowledges the limiting factor of these stories of arrested development by ending with one of the characters giving up dope and his hedonist lifestyle. With his hair cut and dressed sensibly, Marwood heads out into the real world leaving his best friend Withnail behind.
There is no doubt that the films can be morally irresponsible about the dangers of cannabis and even Rogen has admitted -- tongue in cheek -- that he doesn't know if they're anti-dope or pro-marijuana.
But it should be obvious by now that I have great affection for them, with their ludicrous, shaggy dog stories that meander and turn in on themselves and the surrealist monologues that make no sense in the scheme of things, but which can be very funny. (Danny, the malevolent dope dealer with the courtly manner in Withnail and I, has many an inspired riff.)
Yes, they can be in bad taste, but part of the attraction is watching these comedies tackling taboo subjects and overstepping the boundaries of good taste.
Besides, no one is really hurt in these stories. Characters survive the most ridiculous wounds and beatings because the stoner world is closer to cartoon than reality. Above all they set out to do one thing: make the audiences as happy and silly as a stoner on the herb. And what's wrong with that?
Finally, the important question: are these movies just as funny if you don't watch them through a marijuana haze? I wouldn't know.
News Hawk- Ganjarden 420 MAGAZINE ® - Medical Marijuana Publication & Social Networking
Source: The Australian
Author: Louis Nowra
Contact: The Australian
Copyright: 2009 News Limited.
Website: High Society
