Get the latest gossip
‘Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie’ Review: The Fabled Stoner Comedy Duo Get Their Own Documentary, and It’s Good Enough to Give You a Contact High
The fabled stoner comedy duo are still smokin', and still at war, in a portrait of surprising fascination.
We hear about their interesting life stories (Chong started off as an accomplished musician in a group signed by Motown; Cheech was passionate about being a potter), their beyond-random meet-up, the evolution of their act, the way they became huger than huge…and, tying the film together in a rather delightful way, we get the two of them today, driving through the desert in a Rolls Royce with a marijuana-leaf hood ornament, shooting the shit about everything, sort of like Will Ferrell and Harper Steele in “Will & Harper.” Even as we think we’re on a quaint road trip of nostalgia, one that’s probably more scripted than it looks, the two start to bicker and argue about stuff, and the quibbling is clearly real, since it’s evident how much they can still push each other’s buttons, and how that was the hidden spark plug of their act, even though it’s also clear that they still love each other. Just as Andy Kaufman lifted his foreign-man character from someone he had met in college, Chong picked up his whole blinkered “Hey, man!” thing from a homeless Vancouver stoner named Strawberry, and Cheech based his persona on a hitchhiker who could barely keep a conversation going because he was too busy checking out “chicks.” They were working in the same mode that spawned the Firesign Theater and the National Lampoon Radio Hour, but Cheech and Chong were the exuberantly lowbrow, so-stoned-we’re-dumb, racially aggro, all-appetite version — it’s as if they foresaw the coming Hollywood revolution in how-low-can-you-go comedy.
Or read this on Variety
