Movies you only love when you are stoned

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I don’t smoke much anymore, but when I do I have a good time.

I first saw “The Warriors” in a drive-in theatre in Fairlawn, VA, stoned as hell. I was 16. I am now watching it on a 65-inch screen in my apartment, stoned as hell. Ain’t technology great! And I will say this - the opening shot of the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island at night, which then pans down to the subway train pulling into the station, is the single greatest opening shot of any film ever made.

But seriously, folks (although it is a great shot, stoned or not.

I saw Mad Max at the same drive-in and loved it, but haven’t seen it since. First saw The Deer Hunter, a couple of times, stoned. But I still like it, although not as much as I used to. Did I like it more then because I was stoned or would I have loved it anyway? Two Lane Blacktop. Did not like it the first time I saw it, not stoned and I dozed off half way through, love it now either way.

Maybe be a better thread title would be “How has seeing works of art while stoned affected your perception of them, positively or negatively, and how does that relate to your perception of them now” but that it too long a title.

PS. I only made it through 45 minutes of The Warriors. Got to get some better smoke

2

When I was younger, and a keen consumer of recreational drugs, I saw Flying High (Airplane!) at the cinema. I laughed myself sick. A couple weeks later , visiting home, my parents asked if I had seen anything good recently. I recommended it to them but they told me that they had already seen it. They then began to recount all of their favorite bits - and I couldn’t recall any of them. So I went and saw it again, unaided by dope, and it was still very funny but not quite the riot that I remembered.

3

Anything Cheech & Chong really. Also, The Wizard of Oz.

It’s been a few decades since I got stoned though so I do not have any newer recommendations.

4

I have never heard it called by that title, I see now it was in some countries. Interesting.

5

I don’t know if getting stoned makes me like movies more to the extent that I would say I only love the movie at that time. I like The Big Lebowski and Better Off Dead while high.

6

Just about every movie made by a rock band is better stoned. Pink Floyds The Wall, Live Rust, Stop Making Sense, Operation Mindcrime and The Song Remains the Same are basically meant to be watched while stoned. Oh where are the flashbacks I was promised?

7

Wayne’s World.

I had no idea who Wayne and Garth where. I wasn’t watching Saturday Night at the time. I was working third shift.

A friend got me high (she worked the same shift as I) and took me. I had no idea what I was about to watch.

8

I made my college friends watch Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Live in Berlin and Pulse, way, way too many times.
The Wall, Live in Berlin is fun when you’re watching it with people that haven’t seen it before. Between all the special guests and your stoned friends trying to figure out what’s going on as a wall gets built between the performers and the audience, or Tim Curry and Albert Finney show up in costumes, is fun.
Here’s the playlist. If anyone isn’t familiar with it, but is otherwise a Pink Floyd fan, it’s worth checking out some of the videos.

Pulse is pretty flippin’ amazing too.

9
10

I haven’t gotten high in 40 years, but once in 1984 I fired up and watched a PBS nature show and was wowed to the core

11

Rocky horror picture show
The Song remains the same
Twin peaks (1990 tv drama)

12

Not stoned, but “Bio Dome” is somehow a lot funnier after several drinks.

13

A story I read about 2001: A Space Odyssey was how, after the movie was out, Arthur C. Clarke was handed a small baggie filled with grass from a, lets say a questionable individual. “This is the best for watching the Star Gate,” he was told. Clarke said he flushed it down the toilet.

Not having personal experience of this method, I still can’t imagine sitting through that whole move for a few minutes of a light show.

14

This sentence puzzles me.

15

Well, it can impair memory function. So if you’re stoned you can see a movie for the first time several times.

16

I saw “Yellow Submarine” at an MIT movie night circa 1979, and when they were singing, “We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine. We all live in a yellow submarine” etc., I excitedly grabbed the arm of my date and hissed, “I know who’s doing that! I know who’s doing that!”

To anyone watching, I must have appeared out of my mind - indeed, I was quite stoned. But there was an explanation, of sorts:

A week or two earlier I had been at an MIT frat party and some impish engineering students who were cuing up the music had spliced “Yellow Submarine” so that there was an extra “yellow submarine” sung each time the phrase was repeated.

Today, that seems pretty lame, since digital technology has enabled people with a bit of savvy to easily tamper with sound tracks. But in 1979, it was an excellent joke, since people humming along did a double take, and uneasily wondered whether they didn’t know the song as well as they thought they did. I happened to befriend the jokesters responsible, who told me what was going on.

Anyway, that frat prank had nothing to do with MIT movie night. But in my totally stoned condition, I imagined that the extra “yellow submarine” was being played.

So my exclamations of “I know who did that!” made sense to me. My date (not one of the frat guys) didn’t seem particularly alarmed, but he was also extremely stoned.

I haven’t smoked in decades and don’t intend to ever again, but sometimes I miss it.

Yellow Submarine is certainly a classic for movies to watch stoned. I wouldn’t dislike it if I were clear-headed, but it would be much less fun.