Certain drugs do not lend themselves to watching movies. If you can sit still for long enough to watch a movie while coked up, more power to you (but don’t fucking watch Scarface, it’ll give you ideas). If you can keep your eyes open long enough to watch a movie on smack, hey, I’m impressed, though you’re still a fucktard for doing smack. But if you’re watching a movie instead of having a bisexual orgy or rubbing your cheek against corduroy (or both) while on Ecstasy, you got problems, my friend.
For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll be focusing on acid, weed, and booze, the three best movie-watching drugs, as well as the ones about which the author’s (theoretical, ahem) knowledge is greatest.
ACID MOVIES
One time in college, I watched Lost Highway while I was tripping. I can report back that the story made sense until I came down, though that scene when Bill Pullman walked across the screen and left that thick white trail behind him made it impossible to see the other actors for about five minutes, and I think Patricia Arquette’s boobs were out at some point during those five minutes. So there are drawbacks.
Since acid itself is not for the faint of heart, one’s tripping movie choices should reflect the same caution as one’s consideration of even tripping in the first place. If you get visuals, movies aren’t even necessary, but I never got unprovoked visuals, and so needed to find entertainment outside my own head.
I would recommend David Lynch movies, only I know not everyone shares the kind of cosmic cynicism that always used to settle in around Hour 3 back in my acid days. The violence and malignance that lurks around many corners in the universes of David Lynch can be upsetting to more sensitive tripping people. So, because I’m being not entirely tongue-in-cheek with this post, I’ll give an honest, sincere recommendation here: cartoons. Get yourself a whole buncha Bugs Bunny cartoons. You’ll have a nice six hours concluding that Bugs is a trickster god and catching all the hidden (imaginary?) political and literary subtext. Do not watch any of the WWII propaganda ones, they’re fucked up, and flying Nazi clouds will chase you around the living room, squeaking in German at you.
Stay away from cinema verité, documentaries, or anything excessively realistic. Or X-Files reruns (man, that was a long fuckin’ night . . .)
BOOZE MOVIES
For sittin’ around getting drunk, less care needs to be paid to one’s psychological health, and a good thing, too, because getting drunk is good psychotherapy most times. The only genre that needs to be avoided—provided one is single—is romance, and only then if being single is an undesirable thing. Some highlights:
Anything with car chases and explosions
This, naturally, goes without saying. But crappier car chase/explosion movies get a lot better when drunk. Stupid dialogue becomes funnier. A lot more talking back to the screen ensues after a few belts of the ol’ sauce.
Just about anything with Humphrey Bogart in it.
But don’t play the Humphrey Bogart drinking game. If you drink every time he drinks, you’ll die. If you drink every time he’s cool, you’ll die. If you slam your whole drink every time some woman way too hot for him falls in love with him, you and everyone in the room will die. (Look, he’s the coolest guy ever, but he was short and funny-looking. This is something you realize watching his movies drunk.)
Sports movies
Usually, sports movies are as bad as non-sports fans consider sports to be. I say this as not only a sports fan, but a sports fan who plays in fantasy leagues, and furthermore a sports fan who wins his fantasy leagues. But sports movies tend to follow a rigid formula that ignores the reality of following sports. Sports movies are nearly always about some ragged band of underdogs who pull it all together and through desire and heart, beat the soulless, machine-like alpha dog team. This is actually bullshit. In reality, good teams win. Upsets in sports are nearly universally a problem with media perception: a favored team passing its sell-by date running into a younger (or more recently assembled) team that has flown under the radar. The grizzled old veteran who so often stars in the sports movie gets blown off the field in real life.
However, when drunk, sentimentality takes over: hey, of course Tom Berenger can still catch 162 games a season with fucked-up knees! Of course Tim Robbins can throw 95 mph fastballs with that geeky pitching motion! Of course Hickory High’s basketball team composed entirely of white guys under six feet tall can beat the 6’5” black guys from the Big City! (Hoosiers can seem kind of racist when you’re not smiley-drunk . . . it’s a bad movie to watch when you’re bitter/cynical drunk.)
Stupid comedies
Hahahahahahaha, he farted! Hahahahahahahahahaha! Ha ha ha . . . wow . . . damn, that was good. Hahahahahahahaha he got caught jerking off! And he was so surprised he farted! Hahahahahahahahahaha . . .
WEED MOVIES
IF MARIJUANA WERE LEGAL . . . (ahem) . . . (cough, cough) . . .
Your best bet—because there is truth in the occasional stereotype—is science fiction. When stoned, though, quality is inversely proportional to enjoyment. Shitty 50s SF movies where the more blinking lights a computer has the more powerful it is, are gold. Or where you can tell who the Martians are because they have goatees. Or the ones where there are lines like, “Now that it’s 1980, and Man has conquered the Solar System, we must conquer ourselves.” Or, to slither out onto a very thin limb and begin jumping up and down, Star Wars.
Sorry, y’all, “May the Force be with you” is hippie shit. But hippie shit sounds cool when you’re high. When you’re high you’ll be like, “Yo, if I could pull the Jedi mind trick on the cops when I get busted, that’d be dope.” Unfortunately, when you’re high, you’ll also find it really deep, but such is life.
Now for the less obvious ones (that also won’t piss off my Star Wars fan friends):
Jim Jarmusch movies
This isn’t to say Jarmusch isn’t fun in other states, or completely sober. He is. Jarmusch is great. But when you’re high you don’t have to worry about not being in the mood for the deliberate pace and the minimalism, because you’ll fill in the gaps and have a much more expansive attention span. Dead Man in particular is a good weed-smoking bet: when the guy says to Johnny Depp “You William Blake?” and Johnny says, “Yes, I am. Do you know my poetry?” and lights him and his buddy up, the well-adjusted stoner will smile.
Cinemax soft-core porn
Usually, this shit is unwatchable. But stoned it’s great, because stuff like the woman’s clitoris being in the small of her back is the kind of thing marijuana was made for. The hideous boob jobs, the adorable attempts at intentional comedy, the terrible acting, the ten-minute plots with an hour of sex padding it out . . . the only thing stopping me from writing a book-length dissertation on these damn things is the fact that I can’t afford the weed I’d need to smoke—if weed were legal—to get through enough of them to write anything comprehensive. Also, I hate fake tits.
Music videos
Anyone under 30 or over 50 might need an explanation here: once upon a time there was a TV channel called MTV that showed things called “music videos,” which were (often very strange) short films shot and edited to pop songs (A channel called MTV still exists, but it now stands for Mass-produced Teenage Venality). Considering that the best thing ever to do while high is sitting around listening to music, music videos are the crème de la crème of stoner movie watching.
The best kind of videos to watch while high—and I say this not due to my own musical preferences, but because the videos are so fucking strange—are by early 80s New Wave groups. There’s this one Neil Finn video with women dancing in picture frames that’s terrific. You have to watch it here, though, because occasionally, you’ll catch “Never Say Never” by Romeo Void when you’re the wrong kind of high and be horribly disappointed to find out that the chick singer is about 5’1” and 300 lbs with a mustache, and that her voice being so sexy is even more voice/face incongruous than Bryan Ferry (who should be beautiful and gay . . . am I right? Anyone? Ah shit . . .)
But, if we’re talking about feature motion pictures here, we should have a proper top 5:
(5) 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick)—1968
(4) Head (dir. Bob Rafelson)—1968
(3) Dead Man (dir. Jim Jarmusch)—1995
(2) Repo Man (dir. Alex Cox)—1984
(1) The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (dir. W.D. Richter)—1984
I’ve already talked about (5), if you need an explanation for (4) you’re reading the wrong blog—its fucking title is Head, okay?—I’ve already talked about (3), (2) is going to have its own 10,000 word entry, so let’s kick back and smoke a joint to (1) for a moment.
“Don’t be mean, man, we don’t have to be mean, cuz, remember no matter where you go, there you are.”
“Where are we going?”
“PLANET TEN!”
“When?”
“REAL SOON!”
“I’ve been ionized, but I’m okay now.”
“Why is there a watermelon there?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Buckaroo, I don’t know what to say . . . Lectroids? Planet Ten? Nuclear extortion? A girl named ‘John’?”
“Lithium is no longer available on credit.”
“President’s calling, Buckaroo.”
“President of what?"
“The President of the United
States.”
“Oh.”
When sober, Buckaroo Banzai can occasionally feel like it’s trying too hard, which is because it is. You can’t set out to make a cult movie, you have to try to make something good, but be so strange that you fail at being good, only to have brave legions of moviegoers with joints subsequently codify your unintentional brilliance through drawled, elliptical discussion. Amazingly, Buckaroo Banzai is the one attempted cult movie that managed to become one anyway, but still. The biggest criticism I have of it is that it’s unwatchable unless you’re high. And, since marijuana is illegal, we’re fucked. But if anyone ever legalizes it, we’re all watching Buckaroo Banzai at my place.
No comments:
Post a Comment