What is a stoner movie?This was the Golden Ganja question as we watched the exotic entries one after another. It’s not just the dude stuff or the trippy images with disassociated dialogue. It dawned on us that what makes a film a stoner movie is its sense of reality, a certain observational distance—Zen detachment. They don’t all show ganja on screen or even touch on weed culture, but they all have in common the state of being stoned.The point being: If contemporary consensus reality with its abusive half-truths is clearly losing its mind, artists, filmmakers and cinephiles have the right—even the dharma—to subvert and shatter that cherished mirage.All we weed is love.

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Lonely fat stoner dude lives in a cabin by the lake with his pet catfish who turns out to be so much more. The unpromising start is left behind in the dust as he eats shrooms and runs with her (the catfish in her bowl) through the woods. A sudden pitch-dark turn as Evil Men make their evil entrance. Indescribable and unpredictable revenge fantasy with transcendental moments of life after death.

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Sinister Chotu the caretaker is a communist from Bihar (India’s Isan) browbeaten by an unjust boss, but the cricket star husband is the Number One Suspect in this trippy Agatha Christie-ish mystery, the kinky occult murder of an Instagram celebrity astrologer. From the moment the corrupt boss cop is saluted with the greeting “Jai Hind!”, this movie’s charm grows irresistibly, sending up contemporary Modi India with its net idols and superstition, and a once in 10,000 years lunar eclipse. Authentic and refreshing.

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Tanuki the trickster fox, embodiment of dark forces, casts a spell on the Thai nation, shaping its history through an endless cycle of lies and violence, defiance, heartbreak and betrayal. This earlier film made in COVID lockdown by last year’s Golden Ganja winner for ‘Blood Rain’ makes use of real coup announcements, including the People’s Party 1932 denouncement of all things royal. While less compulsive than his ‘Gagee’ and ‘Blood Rain’, the eerie shapes, movement and vivid images are there aplenty: Nazi-like red monster barking rabid orders, demon gloating over our devastation, the flag-blinded grovelling weeping people, amazing pleasurable mindscapes. If you’re epileptic (or too stoned), just shut your eyes and ears when the flashing and grating intermittently interrupts the flow.

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This stoner ‘Chinatown’ homage to 1930’s film noir with a private eye hero and his “trouble wrapped up in a fur coat” of a client, does what it wants and does it well. Fun tributes to Star Wars, Hammer House of Horror (sex orgy in mansion with beast-headed people), ghost rat Jason, Burning Man (or The Whicker Man).

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Thai filmmakers have good reason not to make a film, documentary or fiction, on our War on Drugs that claimed so many lives. Knowing the potential consequences, bravo to Philippine director BC Amparado for going boldly, yet so sweetly, where angels fear to tread. Ariel the handsome narcissistic cop leads an enchanting cast. Great ganja songs, ‘How I’m gonna legalise marijuana’ and ‘Magical Plant’.

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“The Guy” supplies all your mind-altering needs in a highrise condo under COVID lockdown. He gets many orders from the rich girls in the penthouse. Simmering lockdown tensions between the housekeeping staff and the overprivileged kids planning an illegal party on the roof break out into open class war. The Guy goes to both sides’ parties but he fits nowhere; he’s only here because his mum bought the apartment for him after leaving for America to start a new family. A stoner dude tear-jerker, if you can conceive of such a thing. Complex, accomplished and intense.

Special Programme: SuperPsychoCebu 

97 min

Philippines

Christian LinabanThis transcendental stoner movie from the Philippines, an intoxicating search for the Ultimate Strain of Ganja that brings on instant enlightenment, won the first Golden Ganja for Best Stoner Movie at the first Amazing Stoner Movie Fest in 2019. Director Christian Linaban will zoom in before the screening to introduce the film and share what’s happened to him as a consequence of making a “druggy” film in a country waging a War on Drugs. 

Drumroll. An Italian stoner smokes a joint. Then some beer. “Having fun on a boring day.” Are the handcuffs real, incidental or metaphorical? You decide.

 

Greece

5 min
Manolis Levedelis
A new plant hybrid (of what?) has no side effects, is non-addictive and makes you dance. Delightful.

Here’s a new profession which AI can’t do: Psychedelic Babysitting Services by “shamans of the suburbs” who make sure you don’t jump out of windows etc. during your trip. So long as the tripsitters themselves do not indulge in shroom pizza.

 

Two expat farang dudes sharing a bong on a couch, in Bangkok, have tickets for a big Muay Thai match. Do they make it? Paraphrased: Do they have the money to film inside Rajdamnern Stadium? Does it matter?

 

From the usual 2 stoner dudes to 2 stoner chicks. Nuns lock up two naughty Catholic schoolgirls for detention, tasking them with cleaning out the storeroom. What do they find but confiscated ganja brownies.

 

They’re filming a cooking show in a loony bin. Authentic stoner outrageous nonsense with a black man slave lover in chains and Lady Cannabis stealing the limelight while explaining the difference between smoking and eating weed.

 

Expelled from university for selling drugs, young black Brit tries to get a job despite his criminal record. The ending is ablazed with arresting images.

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Shorts 2: SELFIE SUFISM

(Total R/T 129 mins)

 

Introverse

The Girl gets a panic attack dealing with others, yet she can paint alfresco with people passing by. Interesting despite her lavender bedroom full of stuffed toys.

 

A pleasant enough but inane young man, a hippie Jesus of sorts, is presented to us by the film’s director as The Most Interesting on earth. Extraordinary and poetic, even as it takes the piss out of the poetic soul.

 

“I’m not fake,” says the tattooed gay Asian American actor of gay Asian type-casting and his audition strategy. There’s gay sex but it’s sex ed animation in pastel rainbow colours. Clever, charming and not the least bit fake.

 

A womanizing photographer takes a train to the Visconti Photo Competition in Venice. As he immerses in the floating debris of his mind, alternative futures and the textures and sensations of life roll pass (the detached eye in a very Buddhist manner) in arresting images, especially the montage of him losing his mind.

 

A lyrical poem of family life viewed through the eyes of love. While tinged with inevitable nostalgia that all must pass from us, the experience is lovely as a sunlit stream.

 

So it begins: Tatooed dude walks down an endless subterranean passage while he is simultaneously asleep at the wheel of his cab. His rainbow skateboard, his minute bonzai tree in a red plastic bowl, his tatoo, tell us he must’ve had fun once. The effects are awesome, spectacular, culminating in a face to face with God who, inevitably, is a bit of a let-down.

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Shorts 3: HOLY WAR ZONE 

(Total R/T 113 min)

 

Brother’s Horn

A crazed microcosm of oppression in a pottery workshop, as the idiot is abused by his boss/brother. The sublime moment when he kisses their pet turtle sets us up for great anxiety over the turtle’s fate after the power struggle is won and lost.

 

Christian preacher crusades against nudists on bikes, refusing to stop his harassment even when punched by the Good Lord Himself. This part-animation is “based on real events” that plagued the World Naked Bike Tour in Canada. Great moment when a woman in a burqa squirts ketchup on the preacher, crying “Shame!” Bright and uplifting.

 

No real names here including the director’s. “A silent monk is a bad monk,” says Liberated Zone ‘Monk King Zero’ who preaches against evil monks inciting death and absolving government officials and soldiers of the sin of killing. “It’s shameful to avoid the Revolution and just be friends with the dictator.” End result: the government supports blood-thirsty monks and oppress good monks, and the people lose faith in Buddhism itself. More unnerving than any horror movie.

 

The Move Forward Party’s backstabbing betrayal by its former patrons is equated with the Burmese people’s armed struggle for democracy. This is the background against which a guy tries to woo a Woke Girl named Grace. “I’m woke just like you!” he claims. Nonsensical political arguments lead to a melee on a bridge and a flashback of the October 6 massacre, when all we wanted to do was kill each other, as we do now.

 

More October 6 clips here. A black hole has appeared in the living room floor as the family chafes under the iron rule of a soldier Dad (presiding over dinner in military camouflage). Of course he throws Mum on the floor and slaps her. Heavy-handed overkill, perhaps, but it does reflect the simmering moral confusion and outrage benighting the world today.

 

The actors’ performances are good in this ambitious and courageous student film, in a country whose cinema has not touched on forced disappearances (such as of human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijitr, brazenly abducted from a central Bangkok street, never to be seen again). Prayoon Chaiyes (riveting as Lady M’s doctor in Shakespeare Must Die’s sleepwalking scene) plays the grief-haunted father of a young activist who fled lese majeste charges to seek asylum in Vietnam, where he ‘disappeared’. But the creative but undisciplined random mix-up of fact and fiction of such a raw, hard-hitting story, in this era of extreme media manipulation, can make one long for an investigative approach and a straight interview with the actual parents.

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Shorts 4: HAVE A NICE TRIP 

(Total R/T 107 min)

 

Rose Rash

Imagine: a ministry of culture-funded animation with naked kids hand in hand dancing round a tree and vultures in a feeding frenzy, set in in an exquisite botanical watercolour forest; like a dream.

 

The worlds of the caveman and the corporate man collide like a comic book come lurching to life in an explosion of colours and textures—of vertigo and claustrophobia, of liberation perhaps, as together they punch a hole through to the other side.

 

Skeletal white tree trunks appear out of the dark as a circle of light moves through the forest at night, making things visible and invisible, appear to grow, lengthen and sink back into black. This spooky, wondrous communion with nature is like, yes, being stoned and walking in the woods at night, especially when the flashing UFO freaks out the bats. Ingenious, bare-bones, beautiful filmmaking from last year’s winners of the Audience Award for ‘Head in the Clouds’.

 

In an act of lyrical militant stoner feminism, the foam-born jesting Mother Goddess Herself, dressed in assassin black, points her Big Cock gun at us, and shoots. How deeply satisfying when the beautiful monochromatic waves and other haunting images turn suddenly (spoiler alert) cobalt blue.

 

Night. Man comes out of a house. He splits in two. Suburban psychotic killer mystery, or is it? Whatever it is it’s definitely stoned.

 

Another Bergus Chan adventure from Yoshi Max, in which if you can follow: some Jewish men find evil relics from humanity’s war with space vampires and with black magic turn them into vengeance-seeking Golems. Demon-Possessed Robots and Artificially Intelligent Gremlins join the cast of supervillains. Then amidst the chaos a magical dialogue with a dolphin. The film exudes the joy of a kid with a box of crayons telling stories as he draws fantastical scenes inspired by disturbing things he has absorbed from the Adult World.

 

The charismatic and amusing local chieftains of the international mafia meet in the gaudy imperial private dining room of a Chinese restaurant in American suburbia to cook up something big. Love the line: “This fortune cookie blew up my fucking eardrum!” This stoner jewel heist with a cast of cry-baby gangsters is the first film in English by Christian Linaban, now seeking political asylum in the US for having made ‘SuperPsychoCebu’, which won the first Golden Ganja in 2019.

 

The screening committee (obviously stoned) notes say: “Indescribable. Beautiful colours. Dialogue hard to follow but never mind.” The ending is glorious with transfiguring images.

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