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So this one starts okay... well, the opening scene presenting an alternate history of the significance of 4/20 was a bit strange. But after that: we've got an interesting topic, some decent interviews, and yeah I guess it's tolerable enough. Sure, it's unbalanced from the get go, and it's perfectly fine to do that to an extent within a documentary. But when it come things like driving under the influence of marijuana kind of being dismissed passively through a stand-up routine, where the comedian says driving drunk is worse, it feels somewhat irresponsible. Technically, that's right. But I'm sure not everyone can drive safely under the influence of cannabis, as there are sometimes problems caused in some users, like temporary paranoia and extreme coughing fits- both of which could make the act of driving dangerous.
Speaking of those comedians, they're a little inconsistent, but not an unwelcome addition overall. I didn't realise they were padding to get the film to feature length until the last twenty minutes, when the non stand-up padding started to get truly awful, but we'll get to that. Also, some of the interviewees are a little annoying, but the filmmakers may well have been aware of that, and perhaps that's a subjective thing and other viewers won't find themselves irritated.
But yeah, it falls apart in the final twenty minutes, when it basically turns into a series of poorly implemented advertisements for various businesses that involve marijuana. There was one about halfway through the documentary about a university that educated students on cannabis that didn't feel too out of place, being isolated from any other advertisement. Yet later, in that aforementioned final twenty minute stretch, advertisements keep getting shoved down the viewer's throats, one after the other: a pot restaurant, the Bud and Breakfast, the Strava Coffee Roasters, the vape with cannabis that even gets loving close-ups on a blank background, and then specific cannabis related vet products. These are advertisements! You show them back to back like this and it's even more obvious! It feels like an ad break, and undermines whatever decent stuff you had in the first two thirds or so of the movie.
Also, the movie's final skit was incredibly stupid: the monkey throws the bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey; none of the astronauts throw anything up into the air. That's a nitpick, I'll admit, but the last 20 minutes or so bugged me so much and made me angry, so I wanted to snap back. Just under an hour of okay (yet unremarkable) documentary filmmaking falling away to about 20 minutes of advertising is disgraceful, and the shamelessness of it isn't something I can tolerate.
Sure, they might be good products. They might help some people, and for the record, this anger isn't about whether they're harmful or not. It's about them being advertised one after the other in a documentary- you do too much pushing forth of certain products and it's going to feel more like a series of advertisements than a documentary, and a series of advertisements was not what I came to watch.
Avoid this. It's shady and dodgy and maybe 1.5 out of 5 stars is too generous in all honesty.
score 3/10
Jeremy_Urquhart 23 April 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5667995/ |
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6-4-2021 00:05:05