Overlooked ’stoner films' to enjoy this 4/20

There's a great scene in Greenberg where Ben Stiller's narcissistic Gen X-er bemoans the insensitive sincerity of millennials, a condition he feels is best expressed by their inability to appreciate “great coke music” like Duran Duran. I feel much the same way about contemporary stoner cinema: It makes me sad and discouraged to think that an entire generation has grown up accepting Judd Apatow's soft-R procreation fantasies as the real deal.

Stoner movies used to be about something: nihilism, rebellion, anti-authoritarianism, farting in vans. Now, it’s just Seth Rogen dancing to hip-hop with his shirt off. The high-as-hell Comedy Central show Broad City blows all of that bromance bullshit away, and the only cinematic stoner comedy of the last decade worth a damn was adapted from Thomas Pynchon.

Don’t even get me started on the so-called head trips these days—Christopher Nolan shoots Matthew McConaughey into a black hole and doesn’t even allow him to bring his bongos along.

The THC levels are stronger than ever, and the movies are weaker than ever, but the stoner/head-trip movie has a long and storied history. Ever since the earliest silent films, filmmakers have attempted to transport audiences to fantastical places, help them visualize the unimaginable, and expand their consciousness, all without leaving their chair. That’s also the essence of a psychedelic experience, so cinema and psychotropic drugs have always gone hand-and-hand. And since we still have another couple of years before Super Troopers 2 comes out, now is a good time to dig out some forgotten nuggets from the discarded roaches of cinema past.

From the Reefer Madness era: One of the most popular songs in jazz legend Cab Calloway's repertoire was “Reefer Man,” a fast-paced ode to a guy who seems foggy and distracted and smells like burnt tea leaves for some strange reason (“If he trades you dimes for nickels / And calls watermelons pickles / Then you know / You're talkin' to that reefer man”). Calloway performs the song in the 1933 omnibus comedy International House, and since it's totally severed from the film's scant narrative, the scene plays like a hallucinatory black-and-white music video, especially that opening shot of a bug-eyed, practically zombified bassist who Cab diagnoses as “sailing” high. The film is hard to find these days, but it's worth the hunt.

Also watch: The highly sexualized kaleidoscopic fantasias of Busby Berkeley-directed musical sequences in films like Footlight Parade and 42nd Street.

From the “Don Draper Got High, Too” Era: Psychedelia was embedded in the mainstream before the Summer of Love even started, so many of the head movies of that time were frauds perpetrated by squares who smoked bammer shit, if anything at all. Nowadays, the Technicolor outbursts of Vincente Minnelli and Douglas Sirk, or the hyperaware ids of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis, seem a lot more transformative and transgressive than all the “let's make a liquid light show out of an overhead projector” silliness that dominated the Mad Men decade. John Frankenheimer's 1966 film Seconds, a disturbing masterpiece of paranoia, disorientation, delusion and distortion, might be slyly stonier than every Peter Fonda movie put together.

Also watch: More paranoia and delusion in Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, about a reporter who chases the Nobel Prize into an insane asylum.

From the Dazed and Confused Era: For many people, the defining stoner comedy of the 1970s is Up in Smoke, a ramshackle road movie starring Cheech and Chong that became one of the most profitable films ever made. But there were so many better counterculture road movies released in the 1970s, all with superior car chases, and most with more laughs than the deeply dated Up in Smoke. Savor the stony vibes and gnarly crack-ups of Vanishing Point, Electra Glide in Blue, Two-Lane Blacktop or the original 1979 Mad Max instead.

Also watch: The bleary-eyed noir of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, a direct ancestor to the pot-cloud haze of Inherent Vice.

From the Legalization Era: Godfrey Reggio has been making thinking person's head trips ever since kicking off the “the Qatsi trilogy” in 1982, but his 2014 mind-melter Visitors inverts the global ecological focus of those films, centering instead on our dehumanizing relationship with personal technology. With no dialogue and only about 90 intensely crisp black-and-white images, Visitors strips the human soul down to its studs. Call it 2014: The Year We Lost Contact (With Ourselves [and Each Other, {Man}]).

Also watch: Last year's barely released Coherence, a Primer-style mindfuck about a banal dinner party that turns metaphysical.