Grass (1999)

Wonderful Movie

Memorable, crazy movie

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

As a documentary, this film is invaluable. It has footage pertaining to marijuana use from 1920's onward. Government-sponsored radio and television ads, footage of medical testing of THC on humans, interviews with scientists, doctors, legislators, senators, lobbyists, and political activists. For the value of the footage alone, I'd rate this as one of the best documentaries on Marijuana -- of course, that's not to say that what you would learn here you couldn't find in the average introduction to any thick Marijuana book. That's just to say that Marijuana documentaries these days are quite limited, mostly due to institutional censorship and an international legal ban on experimentation with Cannabis. At moments, the video sequences of this movie are a bit hokey and overplayed. For a few seconds, there's goofy cartoons as a "hit-meter" counts up the amount of money the government has wasted on the war-on-drugs. They do this every fifteen minutes of the documentary, too. It's the only part of the film I would've left out. As a baseline statistic, it's too insignificant. The amount of suffering caused by America's War on Marijuana is more than just calculable in lost tax dollars. There are patients who have suffered from disease for years, waiting for a medicinal form of THC. There are those rotting in the prisons, our sons and daughters. To keep seeing this statistic of national debt is boring. And regardless -- no respectable documentary should be reduced to using dancing bunny rabbits as its statistics are being generated.Overall, I'd say 8 out of 10 stars.

One of the better documentaries I have seen in recent times. Well researched and with many entertaining and enlightening clips of films, press conferences, et al.Although there is an apparent bias, the film actually doesn't form an argument, per se. The film is really nothing more than a documented history of government sponsored propaganda.The drawback of such an approach, however, is that one is limited to using facts which are inherently non-controversial. This provides us with an intriguing look into the war on drugs, but not necessarily an all inclusive one.

I watched this right after completing a research paper on marijuana policy, and it was certainly a nice break after working entirely out of dry text. Much easier on the eyes than hundreds of pages of tiny type.There certainly is a lot of stuff this movie left out, including some of the funnier things (such as the marijuana murder trials of 1938, or the 120-second Congressional hearings for the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act), but it definitely gets the point across in a colorful, often rather silly way complete with movie clips, weird songs, goofy video-game graphics, old-ranting-politician footage, and some of the more ludicrous public service announcements. The cultural bent makes it much less dry than most of the strictly historical, legal and political reading I've done, which is saying a bit as the legal history is pretty entertaining.Just in case you somehow miss the point (or forget about it while watching Cab Calloway tap-dance), Grass makes a heavy point of repeatedly pointing out the escalating amounts of money spent on this unobtrusive little weed, and highlights the blatant lies the public has been subjected to over the past century by reiterating "The Truth" for every decade or so.The only real downside to the movie is that it skipped over the disclaimer that every marijuana decriminalization piece really needs to have in it somewhere: There is no such thing as an entirely safe drug.In conclusion, I would recommend this movie quite highly if you're looking to be introduced to the subject in a tolerably entertaining fashion, or if you're sick of reading and want something a little more audially/visually stimulating. For real information on the drug, however, I'd recommend reading "Marihuana: a Signal of Misunderstanding" instead.

Documents, and mocks, anti-marijuana propaganda in America throughout this century. The most interesting thing to notice is how little resemblence the propaganda claims bore to reality, how inconsistent they were over time, and how they tried to associate marijuana to whatever the evil of the day was (communism, heroin).Watch this and then wonder why you believe what you believe.