Weed . Austin Chronicle . 10-06-97

Weed

DIRECTED BY: Doug Wolens

REVIEWED: 10-06-97

"Everybody must get stoned!" That should be the tagline for this frequently engrossing 64-minute documentary on the Eighth Annual Cannibis Cup & Hemp Expo held in (where else?) Amsterdam. Never in your life have you seen so much well-shot footage (Wolens used Hi-8 video to do the deed) of marijuana buds, stems, seeds, pollen, hemp clothes, oils, salves, and just about anything you can think of that might possibly be related to California's biggest cash crop. Essentially, Wolens wandered around Amsterdam during the course of the Expo and shot everything he could (25-plus hours of raw footage edited down into what we have here). Watching Weed, you get the idea that the whole world's stoned, with Expo participants attending from almost every country in the world. And then there are the notorious Amsterdam coffeehouses, each of which sells its own special brands and flavors of ganja and hash of the purest quality, and each with its own unique aesthetic. Some of the coffeehouses fall back on the old Pink Floyd hippy-dippy motifs, while others vie for a more Nineties feel with techno music blaring and little alien faces painted on the walls. Yow. What Wolen's documentary doesn't do is judge. Nobody ends up looking too stupid here, but one scene in which the dope judges struggle to recall what was the primo stuff and what was the skankweed - to no avail - is classic "dumb stoner" humor. You almost feel sorry for the guys, but not really. Watching these stonemonkeys wander the narrow Amsterdam boulevards in a cannabis haze gets a tad repetitive - even if it is just over an hour, there are only so many ways to say "dude, excellent shit!" before you start to feel like giving these wandering rasta brigades a big shot of methamphetamine just to see if they become a bit more articulate. Does Weed drag? Reliable sources say "not if you're stoned, man," but marijuana teetotalers should be advised that no contact high is forthcoming, and the film begins to grind down a bit toward its latter half. Better as a cultural barometer than in almost any other capacity, Weed points out any number of interesting facts and facets of the high life, but its chief concern is as a document of one very, very trippy weekend. Kiss me, Weed-o! 2.5 stars

--Marc Savlov

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