Word: chong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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STONED PEOPLE WILL laugh at almost anything. You can make them giggle by stumbling around, and crack them up completely by falling down. Comedy team Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are clearly counting on the undiscerning tastes of high audiences to save their new movie, Up in Smoke, from the outright failure it deserves. The ads for the movie warn you not to go "straight" to see this movie, but if you have any semblance of rational thought left in your head by the time you hit the theater you'll undoubtedly look around and wonder why you wasted good...
...that dope and all that goes with it is not potentially funny--far from it. Yet Cheech and Chong, who wrote as well as starred in the movie, just don't seem to know how to tap the possible sources of humor. The laughs are too easy, too cheap, too shallow--it seems as if they got high one day and wrote up the movie in a couple of hours, but forgot to double check and see if it was funny when they regained their normal states of consciousness. All the obvious jokes are there--people stumbling around, people eating...
After he goes outside and begins to drive his car, Pedro finds a hitch-hiker on the highway who appears to have large breasts. Alas, it is only a bearded hippie (Chong) who has stuffed two hemispheres under his shirt to get a ride. The conversation goes something like this...
...come paying high theater prices expecting to see a play, who are shocked and involuntarily titillated by the uninhibited use of words they have only read in print and even then disguised by asterisks. But for a generation of college students nurtured on National Lampoon, Lenny Bruce and Cheech & Chong, The London Madhouse Company despite all the hyperbolic publicity, will seem quite tame and a bit on the dreary side...
Premier Kim Chong Pil defends these tough measures: "Our cardinal problem is survival. Freedom to the point of license hurts us. The critics who talk about the lack of freedom here would be the same ones who, if we were overrun, would say: 'Those stupid Koreans, they couldn't prepare themselves to stand up against the North.' " In an important but limited sense, the Premier is correct. Seoul's most important weapon against the North is the passionate anti-Communism that unites South Korea's 33.5 million people. But there is probably a limit...