A fun look at Cheech & Chong

   Movies rarely score a double triumph, connecting with their audience and with the national mood at the precise moment of their release. 

  That's my recollection of Up in Smoke (1978), the landmark Cheech & Chong comedy that focused on two pot-smoking guys who were too stoned to care about much of anything. They were also funny enough to create a near celebratory feeling among their fans, many of whom were as stoned as the protagonists of Up in Smoke, a road movie that became a kind of countercultural highlight reel.

  Up in Smoke was followed by eight other Cheech & Chong movies, the last an animated feature released in 2013. Although the Cheech & Chong filmography is decidedly mixed, the duo remained synonymous with pot-driven mirth.

   Now comes Cheech & Chong's Last Movie, a look at the individual and dual careers of Richard "Cheech" Marin and Tommy Chong. Marin, now 78, has appeared in other movies; Chong, 86, has done solo work. He also became a cannabis activist, and, in 2003, served nine months in a federal prison for selling drug paraphernalia over the internet.

   Billed as a documentary, Last Movie revolves around a car trip through the desert taken by Marin and Chong, who recall their lives and comedy exploits. Some of the scenes feel staged or, at least, prearranged, but the two still have chemistry, and the movie -- rich with clips and period footage -- serves up a tasty hunk of nostalgia.

   Marin and Chong were an odd couple. Marin, a Mexican-American, grew up in South Central LA. He wanted to be a potter. Half-Chinese and raised in Canada, Chong enjoyed early success as a musician.

   Before the movies, Cheech & Chong made a hit comedy album under the tutelage of music producer Lou Adler, who produced and received a co-directing credit for Up in Smoke. The movie grossed $104 million worldwide, but Cheech or Chong had signed a famously bad deal that favored Adler and others.

    Adler, by the way, appears in the film, and Cheech & Chong acknowledge the important role he played in helping them transition from improvisational club appearances to a national phenomenon.

    Eventually, Cheech & Chong lost some of that loving feeling for each other, arguing about who would direct their movies and who was responsible for writing them. They never officially broke up, but they had issues.

    Whether director Dave Bushell has made a "pure" documentary or not, Last Movie proves entertaining and informative. It also reveals the evolving personalities of comics who made the kind of pop cultural splash few have been able to match. 

Cage uncaged in weirdly amusing thriller

Color Out of Space pits an isolated family against a force from outer space.

Director Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space might have been another mediocre horror film and, I suppose, parts of it still deserve that description. In adapting a story by H.P. Lovecraft, Stanley introduces us to a family living in rural isolation.

But Stanley smartly uses Lovecraft’s story as a launching pad for another memorable Nicolas Cage performance and as an opportunity to serve up a heaping helping of weirdness. Now the undisputed champion of over-the-top crescendos, Cage appears at his terrifying, comic best.

Cage plays Nathan Gardner, the father of a family which includes a teenage son (Brendan Meyer) and a younger son (Julian Hilliard).

The rural life doesn't seem to be doing any of the Gardners much good. Daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) dabbles in witchcraft. As she recovers from cancer surgery, Mom (Joely Richardson) battles the balky Internet connection that threatens to sink her investment-advisory business.

The already skewed family life of the Gardners is further upset when a mysterious flaming object lands in their yard. The object emits an eerie glow that may be a threatening alien life form. Plants begin to turn colors and various misfortunes befall the members of Nathan’s family. Deviations from the norm further compound: An insect the size of a football appears. The youngest son starts having conversations with characters no one else sees.

Stanley works with juxtapositions that border on the absurd: Lavinia’s witchy aspirations, dad’s preoccupation with the alpacas that he’s purchased as a possible source of revenue and the arrival of a very sincere hydrologist (Elliot Knight) who’s surveying the area.

The only other person living on Nathanial’s property is a squatter (Tommy Chong), an aging hippie who plays the role of deranged profit.

Cage — who’s playing a character who defies definition from the start -- eventually made me wonder if he weren’t using his performance to comment on the sheer insanity of what we’re watching. I decided he wasn't.

Most times, if you have questions about what an actor might be doing, you feel frustrated and deflated. In Cage's case, this uncertainty is precisely where he lives. He doesn't try to get laughs with a line reading; he just says the line and it comes out funny. In this case, he's playing a character who tries to normalize the most bizarre of occurrences, but with barely concealed undercurrents of madness that could, at any moment, tilt toward violence.

Stanely has fun with the movie's images, notably color settling over rural landscapes like a fog, some version of pink, I think. And, yes, blood and gore are given their due.

You can attach larger meanings to all of this if you want, an assault on the naive values of self-sufficiency and middle-class escapism, perhaps. But I chose to take Color Out of Space as a bizarre entertainment that gave me the creeps and made me laugh.

Stanley, by the way, hasn’t made a film since 1996’s Island of Dr. Moreau, a film on which he was replaced by John Frankenheimer. Stanley’s story is documented in a 2014 documentary called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. I haven’t seen it but plan to seek it out.

Stanley’s career aside, Color Out of Space makes for one of those irresistibly strange movies that leave your head buzzing. When you exit the theater, the world may look a little weirder than when you arrived. That's a form of success.

There's lots of fun in 'Zootopia'

Sometimes fun is the best ambition.

I have no idea whether Zootopia -- the latest animated fantasy from Disney -- will become a classic, but I do know that it scores high on the fun meter.

So three cheers for a story about Judy Hopps (voice by Ginnifer Goodwin), a bunny who aspires to become a cop in the city of Zootopia. Police work has been Judy's ambition since she was a child.

Primed for action and a do-gooder's career, Judy wants to leave the countryside and her family of underachieving carrot farmers.

When Judy arrives in the city, she becomes the first bunny on the Zootopia PD. An unimpressed chief Bogo (Idris Elba), arbitrarily decides that Judy's fit only for parking duty. He doesn't believe a bunny can hold her own on Zootopia's mean streets, hardly a surprising opinion from a water buffalo.

Zootopia is unique because the animals all get along. That's why it's called Zootopia. Predators and prey may not be the best of friends, but the former have learned to refrain from devouring the latter.

While handing out parking tickets, Judy meets Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a conniving con artist of a fox who eventually teams with Judy to help crack a case involving the disappearance of 15 mammals.

If Judy can solve the mystery, she'll get herself off parking duty, maintain a position on the force and climb out of Chief Bogo's (you'll pardon the expression) dog house.

Judy and Nick make an odd couple as they learn some shocking news: Some predators suddenly are turning on prey, thereby threatening Zootopia's peaceable social structure.

Disney loads up on animals and voices, but I particularly enjoyed an arctic shrew mobster who'll remind adults in the audience of Don Corleone. Mr. Big, as he's called, is brought to gravelly voiced life by Maurice LaMarche.
Appropriately, I suppose, the Zootopia's DMV is staffed by sloths, a joke that surely will appeal to every adult who's ever endured what seems like an interminable wait at any department of motor vehicles.

The story evolves into a light-hearted police procedural that winds up preaching a lesson about acceptance and free will -- if that's not too grandiose a term for the fact that the animal characters are forced to decide whether to be ruled by instinct or choice.

Directors Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush do a fine job of keeping Zootopia amusing for kids and equally enjoyable for the adults who accompany them to theaters.

Disney's animators seem to have had a grand time creating Zootopia -- which consists of districts such as Tundratown, Little Rodentia and Bunnyburrow.

OK, that's a bit theme-parkish, but dividing Zootopia into distinct environments must have kept the animators from getting bored. It also gives Judy and Nick an opportunity to venture into Zootopia's bad neighborhoods.

At various times Judy must prove to herself and the world that she's no dumb bunny; the same goes for this frolic of a movie. The highest compliment I can pay Zootopia? It's no dumb bunny, either.