The Screengrab : cheech marin

Morning Deal Report: Cheech and Chong Re-Lit

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Wake and bake! Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are reuniting for a concert film. "The Cheech and Chong Concert Movie will lense in March during a San Antonio stop on the 'Light Up America' tour, which kicked off Sept. 26. Tour, their first together in at least 25 years, will continue well into 2009," Variety reports.

Chevy Chase, Burt Reynolds, Vinnie Jones, Michael Madsen and "Stuttering" John Melendez…I should just stop there, shouldn’t I? But wait – it gets better. The abovementioned luminaries will star in Not Another Not Another Movie. "Chase plays a studio head who quits his floundering company, leaving his ex-con sibling (Madsen) in charge. Soon their equally inept gangster friend (Jones) takes over and assigns a production assistant (David Leo Schultz) to direct a spoof of spoof movies. Reynolds plays an actor playing the director of the chaotic film within the film," The Hollywood Reporter explains.

Those of us who found Counting Crows to be the most humorless band of the ‘90s are surprised to learn that Crows lead singer Adam Duritz is teaming with comedy troupe Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest) for Freeloaders. "Story revolves around five guys and a girl who live in the lap of luxury in a rock star's mansion. But their sweet situation is threatened when the rock star decides to sell the home," per Variety.

Related:
Take Five: Weed
Unwatchable #70: "Epic Movie"

Take Five: Weed

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

We were going to call this Take Five "Buddha", and then, like, totally blow your mind by not including Kundun, but frankly, we're just too, you know, we're too, uh...what were we talking about? Oh, right! That weed! The chronic! Sweet Mary Jane! A favorite in Hollywood for so many years that it doesn't even seem like a vice to some people (remember Tom Hagen warning the movie producer in The Godfather that one of his stars was about to 'graduate' from marijuana to cocaine), it was a while before social pressures eased up enough to portray herb in anything but the most hysterical terms. How far we've come, bros! Today, only a few scant days after 4/20 (the national stoner's holiday), we can each of us get nicely toasted and ditch work early for a matinee of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which posits that even our Commander-in-Chief enjoys a good bong hit now and again. The noir classic The Sweet Smell of Success contained a plot point that expected us to believe that a jazz musician -- and a white one, at that! -- might see his career ruined by the mere possession of the devil weed, while the new Kal Penn/John Cho vehicle implies that toking up on a regular basis is the best career move you can make. Here's five more films that deal with the sweet leaf in all its hazy glory.

REEFER MADNESS (1936)

This absurd scare-flick is typical of the anti-drug hysteria of the 1920s and 1930s; it's only exceptional in that it's exceptionally over-the-top in its woozy narrative, lurid dialogue, and bizarrely sensationalistic vision of what marijuana will do to you. (Apparently, it turns you into a murderer or a sex fiend instead of a lazy Xbox-addicted dolt.) Directed by French-born Louis Gasnier (whose other major claim to fame was the Perils of Pauline serial), it's unintentionally hilarious to the degree that it's been reissued endlessly in every format imaginable for new generations of potheads to giggle at. In fact, for a film that did poor business, featured no stars, and is incompetently made at every level, it very well may be that Reefer Madness is the most-watched film of the 1930s. Ah, irony.

CHEECH & CHONG'S UP IN SMOKE (1978)

You simply can't talk about dope movies without mentioning Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, the guys who turned them from a taboo into a franchise. Although it's easy to condemn the boys for how quickly their on-screen efforts turned into dogshit (I'm still reeling from The Corsican Brothers), those only familiar with how bad things eventually got might want to go back and give their motion picture debut another look. It's not great art or anything, and Lou Adler's direction is strictly syndicated sitcom level, but it's got a number of genuinely funny moments, some hilarious dialogue, some swell celebrity cameos from Tom Skerritt and Stacy Keach, and all in all, it's exactly what a stoner comedy shoud be: a good-natured, consequence-free thumb in the nose to petty authority. Good afternoon viewing for a baked summer day.

THE BIG LEBOWKSI (1998)

It's downright shocking that such a successful dopehead comedy was made by the Coen Brothers. While I certainly can't speak to their own habits of indulgence or not, their filmmaking is incredibly tight and unbelievably disciplined, exactly the opposite of most art created by the Cheeba-American community. And yet along comes The Big Lebowski: a movie that, aside from being an unbelievably funny comedy and an eerily precise if cleverly disguised Raymond Chandler detective story, is probably the most perfect stoner flick ever made. The Dude is the ultimate slacker hero, lighting a J when he gets bored listening to the title character rattle on about hard work and responsibility, as well as the roach-butt of many a joke, as he smashes up his much-abused car after dropping a maggot on his pants while driving.

HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004)

Of course, we can't praise the sometimes subtle, sometimes anvil-heavy stoner comedy of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay without mentioning its predecessor, a hugely successful cult flick that came out of nowhere and captured the public imagination in just the right way with its combination of gregarious dope jokes and over-the-top grossout comedy. It launched the careers of appealing leads Kal Penn and John Cho; it proved that you can make a successful buddy picture without a white guy; and best of all, it was funny as hell and forced beloved/reviled mini-hamburger chain White Castle to acknowledge its existence with an extreme line-toeing ad campaign that tried to capitalize on the movie's success without explicitly avowing the truth: that White Castle is the preferred 3AM nosh joint for the seriously blunted.

SUPER HIGH ME (2007)

Explicitly lifted from Morgan Spurlock's anti-McDonald's stunt documentary Super Size Me, and based on little more than a two-minute comedy routine by star Doug Benson, Super High Me -- which combines a fairly legitimate section on drug law reform, straight-up concert footage of Benson's act, and extended segments of his attempt to get high every day for a month -- isn't the most coherent or well-presented film you'll ever see. Which, given the topic, is pretty understandable. But it's got its funny moments, and if nothing else, it allows you to see that Benson is none the worse for wear after his 'experiment' (which, let's be honest, would represent cutting back for a lot of people), and the movie is stocked with successful actors and comedians who are successful and yet get stoned quite regularly. It's a good thing Benson's not black, though, or this movie would probably be used as evidence at his trial.

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent