Word: cheech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Judd Apatow had a problem. The test screenings for his movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin were killing. But the jokes that were really landing were the ones featuring pot. Sophomoric, Cheech-and-Chong-y cheap yuks about weed. But funny ones. He called his old friend Garry Shandling to ask whether he should leave them in. They went with the only responsible choice: comedy comes first...
...Side and is on his way to college--his safety school, but still. In Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker's a pot dealer who sells to successful, bored, suburban business types. Even the protagonists of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay, the closest thing we have to a modern Cheech and Chong, are a banker and a med student. Pot smokers aren't outsiders anymore; at worst, they're arrested adolescents...
...Unlike Moore's movies, Spurlock's don't split their seams with ideas and nervous energy. For all their edifying political ambitions, they are closer to doper comedies, with Spurlock as a Cheech, Bill or Harold searching for a Chong, Ted or Kumar. (In his new movie, during a visit to an Orthodox neighborhood in Israel, he actually addresses one Hasidic man as "Dude.") Here's this guy doing these nutty things - all those McNuggets, all those Muslims - and behaving as if he'd just taken a toke of something stronger than a Marlboro Lite. In the recent history...
Rogen might seem a spawn of Woody Allen, but he's closer to Cheech and/or Chong with a bar mitzvah. He hasn't the Woody whine and inferiority complex. Like the Martin stage persona, the characters these guys play don't have self-esteem problems; indeed, that is their problem. The only star who simmers with comic angst is Stiller. He's the put-upon loser, a jocular Job, in films like There's Something About Mary and Night at the Museum, when he's not taking roles as the pompous, uptight bad guy (in, say, Dodgeball) or the preening...
...Rogen's Ben Stone, he lives with a bunch of dopers so louche they make him seem almost normal. Yes, Ben's friends are descendants of Cheech & Chong and Bill & Ted; but they go back even further, to the all-male enclave inhabited by Gary Cooper and his professorial pals in the 1941 Ball of Fire. Both groups were involved in compiling a reference work: an encyclopedia from the Ball of Fire scholars and, from Ben's housemates, a scheme for a website that will itemize the nude scenes of movie actresses. This is an idea so perfect...