These days, multiplexes are thick with the smoke of mara-jawana — and it’s coming from the action on the screen. This gave us sort of a cool idea, like, a couple weeks ago, which we promptly forgot. And we just remembered it now: we’re picking the best 16 stoner films of all time — one for every easily weighable segment of an ounce. Disagree with our choices? You’ll hardly harsh our mellow if you e-mail us your favorite marijuana movie.
16) SAVING GRACE Old British bitty makes ends meet ... by selling weed. (Inspiration for Showtime’s Weeds.)
15) REEFER MADNESS Intended as a scare-’em-straight vehicle, this 1930s travesty is now an ironic classic — it even spawned a 2000’s campy musical.
14) NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE While John Belushi’s seventh-year senior John Blutarsky dominates the movie, it is Donald Sutherland’s brutally frank and cynical professor Dave Jennings who steals the show — and gets everyone high.
13) PLATOON The bad guys in Oliver Stone’s Nam pic drink booze. The good guys? They blow ganja smoke into each other’s mouths through the chambers of their weapons.
11) I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! Square Peter Sellers and his uptight parents and fiance unwittingly dive into dosed marijuana brownies. “What was his name, your cousin from Milwaukee?”
10) TAKING OFF Milos Forman’s alternately sobering and hilarious take on teen delinquincy and middle-class values features a classic scene in which clueless suburban parents get instruction on how to smoke a joint from Vincent “Fast Times” Schiavelli.
9) FRIDAY Two boyz in the hood — one of them Ice Cube — smoke out on their front porch, while trying to scheme up ways to pay back the $200 they owe a dealer.
8) CHEECH AND CHONG A giant joint. A fishbowled car.
7) HOW HIGH Method Man and Redman smoke special herb that helps them ... ace their SATs and get into Harvard. Later, they smoke the corpse of John Quincy Adams.
6) DAZED AND CONFUSED A Texas high school produces, among other memorable characters, a stoner anti-hero: a quarterback who refuses to sign an anti-drug pledge.
5) EASY RIDER With bikes and bud, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda set the table for buddy movies of the future.
4) RISKY BUSINESS It’s not enough that Tom Cruise makes boatloads of cash by pimping prostitutes — the reason this movie is the ultimate male fantasy is that Rebecca de Mornay utters the immortal lines, “Do you ever get high, Joel?”
3) THE BIG LEBOWSKI The Dude is a Southern California stoner who just wants to bowl — and smoke bowls. That is, until two thugs urinate on his rug.
2) HALF BAKED Dave Chappelle’s homage to herb is hilarious, but he might be upstaged by Jon Stewart cameo, in which he asks “Did you ever see Scent of a Woman...on weeeed?”
1) FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH Jeff Spicoli: “That was my skull! I’m so wasted!”
