The best summer movies to watch in high

It’s summer, which means it’s time to curl up on some suntanned buds and indulge in the great tradition of summer movie watching. Whether you get on the vape and venture into a cool, dark theater to escape the heat, catch a cult classic at a retro summer night drive-in theater, or just throw a classic summer comedy on your TV at home while If you’re an indica of breastfeeding your favorite bong, there’s no summer movie experience that you can’t successfully supplement with some cannabis.

Well, the “summer movie” is a nebulous idea that includes movies with big summer releases, movies that actually revolve around summer, and movies that are simply gaining a foothold in the zeitgeist as “summer movies” because they capture the summer mood in some ways or so.

Last year during the quarantine was my best summer movie experience, on July 10th. Doing fat dabs and letting Stanley Kubrick’s ultra-slow burning costume dramedy Barry Lyndon melt in my eyeballs. But listen, I’m self conscious enough to know that this isn’t the optimal summer movie experience for everyone – minus the fat dabs part. In order to design the best movies for you to watch when you’re done, we’re going to cast as wide a web as possible, although the cool summer vibe is undoubtedly the first.

Here is an eclectic set of 10 great, blurry movies to get in the mood for when you’re stoned on this hot, hot summer.

Caddyshack

We’re starting with a classic stoner comedy that has aged relatively well, although it probably started the tradition of cocaine-fueled summer blockbuster productions in the 80s.

Caddyshack is brimming with the hazy counterculture atmosphere that created the cast and crew of National Lampoon. Stars Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield set an anarchic, sativa-dominant tone that bleeds through every corner of any antique frame. Combine it with a generously rolled fat and let the cool summer vibes and cool laughs roll over you.

Do the right thing

I was mad late for this game, but I finally got around to seeing Spike Lee’s classic joint of American racism and class struggle during a brutal Brooklyn heatwave. And it couldn’t have been more appropriate and felt more tragically evergreen in the summer of COVID and George Floyd.

Like most of Spike’s films, Do the Right Thing is based on blurry, cinematic dream logic that opens up to you and hits just right, both emotionally and intellectually, when you see it under the influence. It’s booming with eternal life and a kind of low-key, human psychedely that only Spike Lee can produce.

Miami Vice

Michael Mann’s films are damn awesome. Thief, Manhunter, Heat … take your pick, each of them will make a psychic feast after a fat blob or an edible high. In the mid-2000s, Mann was the premier master of getting the early “standard-def” digital look flawless, and Miami Vice – a full-length update of Mann’s style-defining ’80s series – is almost all vibes.

A clean head high and a mild body buzz from a reliable edible are just the thing for experiencing the deep ocean blues and icy-cool cyberpunk cityscapes to the fullest.

The trip

As director Allan Arkush puts it in the clip above: “What film could be bad if it has a 360 ° shot that starts with Dennis Hopper happening a joint?”

Released towards the end of the Summer of Love, Roger Corman’s The Trip captures the psychedelic vibes of Los Angeles around 1967 and is still a great watch today. Written by Jack Nicholson when he was in Corman’s early indie repertoire company, the film stars Peter Fonda as a commercial director whose breakup leads him to use LSD for the first time. Director Corman is known to take acid before filming to better adapt Nicholson’s experimental script. The charming low-budget results on screen, certainly in keeping with their time, evoke a visual palette that is sure to please the modern, stoned summer viewer.

Once upon a time … in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino belongs to the generation of filmmakers whose films were heavily influenced by the grass culture of the 90s, leaning heavily on the stoner-flick tradition and always making their own genre-mixing, pop-culture-obsessed joints with stoned hangout- Vibes penetrate turn.

Tarantino’s newest – and the movie that belonged to Summer 2019 – Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood uses the psychedelic late 60s as a springboard for a blurry, emotional journey through time, space, and LA mythology that really boils down when you poke up a joint care to the other side.

The burning

No summer movie playlist is complete without a bit of horror, especially for those of us who know the art of smoking weed and watching horror movies.

The Burning is one of the absolute best horror outfits in summer camp after Halloween / Friday the 13th slasher boom of the early 80s. It has awesome cinematography, an effective masked killer, a string of teenage assholes hitting a number of satisfactorily gruesome endings, and an early cameo from a pre-famous star (George Costanza himself, Jason Alexander, which presumably made this film the first makes “Summer of George”). The next time you’re looking for a Campy Late show while you wind down your last puff of the night, take The Burning for a spin.

The nice guys

A welcome addition to the canon of summer movies that take place around the holiday season (Gremlins, Die Hard, Batman Returns, Iron Man 3), The Nice Guys is another retro LA hangout film with a blurry noir plot and grueling comedic renditions of Co-cast Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe. I’ve looked at this several times now, and the relaxed, warm, stoner-logic charm becomes clearer to me every time. It’s a fun, low-stakes buddy comedy with a laid-back, prismatic sense of time and place that goes down smoothly with a couple of evening bong ribs.

Nashville

From the hazy mind of Robert Altman, the patron saint of stoned cinephiles, Nashville is an experimental time capsule epic that traces the intertwined lives of musicians, politicians, celebrities, movie stars and ordinary people during a few days in Nashville, Tennessee, after the 1976 presidential election.

All of Altman’s films have some sort of delayed effect that mimics the headspace of a cannabis high. There is a kind of indescribable communication of images, ideas and satirical humor that is very worthwhile to take up when you are high, even if you cannot describe it or translate it to someone else.

Mad Max: Fury Road (Black & Chrome Edition)

Is Mad Max: Fury Road the best action movie of all time? I’m not going to make a definitive statement about this here, but I will say that you can’t do much better than the crisp, frenetic visual delights of this flawless post-apocalyptic crystalline joint, especially when you have a weed product around to provide a clean, powerful head- High.

And if you really want to take that shit up to 11, I recommend the Black & Chrome edition, which is kind of an even cooler variety of cinema than the Fury Road OG.

Everyone wants something !!

A spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s 2016 sports comedy / college hangout film has the same vibes as its predecessor. and made sharper by the more mature eye of a more mature Linklater.

During the final weekend before the first day of a freshman pitcher’s college, Everybody Wants Some !! captures the blink-and-you-ll-miss-it vibes of the end of summer and the beginning of an exciting new chapter in a young person’s life – all with a rocky, half carefree, half melancholy atmosphere of a time and place both long ago past as well as frozen in the amber of vivid memories. Combine this strain with your favorite vintage strain on a Saturday afternoon in August.

Featured image by Gina Coleman / Weedmaps