Up in Smoke (1978)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

So much average

Fresh and Exciting

The acting in this movie is really good.

Guess White Castle hadn't made it out West, yet.Well, it only took me 40 years to see my first Cheech & Chong movie. I just thought: What the hell? Haven't seen one yet and they're definitely part of the film culture. Without seeing them together, I am familiar with Chong and his numerous arrests and Cheech from The Golden Palace and From Dusk Till Dawn. So much so, it was kinda hard to separate him from his three roles in one of my favorite vampire films.Previously, I had avoided their films because, frankly, the leads looked so incredibly dirty and disgusting, like they haven't showered in weeks, if at all. In fairness, that stance hasn't changed, though it's more on the Chong side than Cheech. He looked fairly well kept up whereas Chong looks like you could smell him a mile away.That all said, I actually had higher expectations from this as it's pretty much considered a comedic classic. True, I laughed out loud at many of the jokes but was let down by the enormous amounts of dead air and the even less time spent on the script.Of course, this wasn't meant for a Screenplay win at the Oscars, nor am I the target demographic. But, it still can be chock-full of jokes and with less stretches of time with absolutely nothing happening of interest. I kept thinking back to The Blues Brothers just two years after this. Totally not my type of film and it took a ton of convincing on my part to finally see that a few years back. I literally couldn't stop laughing for long stretches of time and throughout. Here I was laughing and then waiting 10-15 minutes for something to happen and then a few chuckles and then another 10 minutes of patiently waiting to laugh again.To describe the plot is pointless. Let's just say: aimless dudes meet, fall in friendship love and end up at a clichéd Battle of the Bands for...reasons. Well, it is established Pedro "Cheech" De Pacas is in a weird band, but the entire movie really is about trying to score drugs, getting chased by cops and driving. Lots and lots of driving. I think half the budget went to the gas station.Perhaps I'm thinking too deep here, but I've seen my share of extremely funny and well-written stoner movies. Granted most of those are much more recent than this 40-year-old film. So, I guess I'll cut it some slack.***Final thoughts: Crossing this duo off my bucket list. While I, again, laughed pretty hard at some of the scenes, it was just enough to puff, puff, pass on their follow-up films.

Anthony Stoner (Tommy Chong) is an unemployed slacker who is his father's disappointment and threatened with military school. He drives off with his VW Beetle with the Rolls grill but his car breaks down. He is stranded until fellow weed smoker Pedro de Pacas (Cheech Marin) picks him up. Pedro is tripping on acid with his car parked on a traffic median. The cops arrest them. The guys get released when the judge is found to be drinking vodka. They visit Strawberry (Tom Skerritt) and barely escape the cops (Stacy Keach). Immigration comes to take Pedro's cousin and his wedding party to Mexico after he called them himself. His cousin just wanted a free ride to his wedding. The boys get deported as well. They stumble onto a secret weed factory and wrongly picks up a van constructed with weed.This is filled with stoner jokes and some of them are hilarious. The guys are good together. I wish the movie is just the two guys hanging out together. The best scene is when the guys are out of their mind alone in their car. They don't actually need an outlandish plot. They really only need each other. The meandering plot is actually quite tiring. It's a downer to keep track of the story. I would think that their target audience shouldn't be asked to keep track of such a rambling mess. The movie devolves into a mess instead of simply having fun with the two guys.

Weed used to be great and mellow. Nowadays after they started lacing it with strychnine and PCP to turn everybody who smokes it into a complete idiotic psycho I started to feel a little uncomfortable smoking it. back then they made movies about it where no matter how f**ked up you got everything turned out alright. Now getting stoned is as dangerous as buying stocks on wall street. You never know what your going to get but if your Forrest Gump level retardation don't worry, you'll probably like it and they'll have you dressed up in green, spouting the national anthem, and killing what passes for commies nowadays (I think they're called terrorists)in oil-saturated deserts in no time while bankers back home will be sleeping with your wife, stealing your paychecks, and pissing people off enough to fly planes into skyscrapers while homeless people starve and die on the streets because that's the American way.Oh yea, this movie is about two stoners who go around getting f**ked up and laid with no money, no clue, and no reason. Somehow it's more entertaining, insightful, and intelligent than all the self-important serious movies in the world. A masterpiece!

I finally got to see the definitive stoner comedy, and I wasn't disappointed. No, sir. This 'un has it all, two dudes in a haze, some equally hazy babes, and the fuzz in hot pursuit. Generally, the use of recreational drugs is depicted in a warm, glowing sort of light. Unlike many movies of the same ilk that followed, there is a barrage of good jokes, excellent acting and dialogue ("Hey, double bubble!"), and real chemistry between the actors (modern movies of this genre would have all the same trimmings -- there'd be some dudes, some babes and the supersized comical joints, but would be just gimmicky and have none of the humour). Also the production is excellent, this movie was filmed on a surprisingly huge budget (for example, there is a brief but very elaborate scene which shows us how an entire car is made from -- weed, man!). The plot is very ambling but also very suited if you happen, for whatever reason, to have temporarily acquired an attention span of about five minutes. Warning, you will find yourself using the epithets "dude" and "man" a lot more often after watching this movie.