Nice Dreams

These guys made a terrific movie in their first try. It was an accident, but what happened was a combination of things. There was cool self-reference and the perversion of the buddy road movie. It has a looseness to it that was new to "mainstream" movies in those days. Yes, part of the charm was that this was a mainstream movie and it treated dope smoking as a trivial amusement. It was in a way, the "Thin Man" of dope.

Afterwards, these guys made nothing but drek, sort of a demonstration of the dullness that dope brings. These things aren't even watched any more by the doper crowd because market forces have moved to supply them with hipper, more supportive fare. So if you are considering watching this for almost any reason, you'll find better elsewhere.

That is, except for the appearance of Timothy Leary. In those days, there really were distinct drug cultures. Pot was originally a Black Jazz thing, appropriated by kids. LSD was for the spiritually ambitious. Coke for bored celebrities, Heroin for the ghetto. Speed for the fringe biker crowd. Sects formed around these in the 70s and they became icons for different "life style" choices, though that silly term would be invented later.

This movie was the first C&C that threw all drugs in the same barrel. Pot, coke and acid, all the same.

That last makes its appearance here, ushered in by Leary. I'm convinced that the world would be a radically different place today if he weren't so inadequately suited for the role he adopted: prophet of synthesized enlightenment. By 1980, he was a joke and already exploiting his celebrity status to earn a living.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

I swear when I'd watched Nice Dreams in 1994 I'd assessed it rather silly to my taste due the offering touches in a neuralgic matter at my generation on the eighties deeply devasted by those smoke and white dust on their lives, nowadays as ripened brain revisiting this uncanny funny comedy I manage split the subject of the main preposition that make you laugh upon a countless gags concerning two weirdo guys selling marijuana covered as ace cream.

The duo comics guys already had started in a successful thematic comedy in UP IN SMOKE, CHEECH AND CHONG"S NEXT MOVIE, in fact anytime they didn't logged out of those smokey characters whatsoever, they pursued in this track until the topic was utterly sapped, so Nice Dreams worthwhile take a look for tons of hilarious sequences, mixing a slight sexploitation orientation and the wacko guys around, as the fruit cop character Noodles (Tim Rossovich) often groping Detective Drooler at surveillance at night shift, what a priceless moment.

Beware when it reaches on the highlight sequence at panoramic elevator a naked Cheech in dire straits running from the menacing "Animal", so get yourself ready to see a mocking of those wild times which smoke and sniff were meaning of forbidden things, otherwise on current time quite normal, Cheech & Chong are unforgettable indeed, unfortunately just a couple of pictures were released on DVD in Brazil.

Thanks for reading.

Resume:

First watch: 1994 / How many: 3 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 7.5.

This is the third Cheech and Chong film, coming after Up in Smoke (1978) and Cheech and Chong's Next Movie (1980). The films are a series in the traditional way--characters continue, and there is something of a linear development per the films' chronologies of the characters, but as with the plot of this film in isolation, the threads holding it all together are pretty thin.

In Nice Dreams, Cheech and Chong are selling dope from a barely disguised ice cream truck. They may have struck it rich by this point, or maybe Cheech just doesn't know how to read numbers very well. At any rate, they do not seem to be hurting for money--they have a bag of it, after all, which they have to pursue later in the film--and somehow, they're living in a very expensive, big house on the beach outside of Los Angeles, although it seems that maybe they're just crashing at a friend of a friend's place while he's away (he's a musician on tour).

A lot of it is pretty unclear, because the last thing that Cheech and Chong as writers and director (only Chong in the latter case) are concerned with is telling anything like a traditional story. Instead, it seems like maybe they were high while they wrote and filmed this. That's usually meant as a negative--the idea is to denote how little sense the work makes, or how little coherence it has. I don't mean it that way here. I don't mean it as a knock, necessarily. I mean it literally, and consequently to underscore a kind of stream-of-consciousness, absurdist and surreal flow. Those can all be very positive qualities, as they are occasionally here. But maybe Cheech and Chong were just looking for the easiest way to string together a number of sketch ideas, and not enough sketch ideas, because some of them are drawn out or reprised past their freshness date. And that probably goes for the whole premise of Cheech and the Man (Chong) selling dope and getting into wacky situations while being pursued by Sgt. Stedanko (Stacy Keach). Nice Dreams feels too much like Cheech and Chong are just coasting--vamping while waiting for the next soloist to start. Although I love experimentation as much as anyone else, this is a film that would have benefited from a stronger focus on telling a story in a traditional way. I don't always think that something different is better just because it's different.

So this is definitely a step down from the first two films, although there are more than enough funny moments to keep a fan of the first two films mildly entertained, and most of the supporting actors, including the returning ones, are enjoyable and had even more potential. Some skits (that word fits here better than "scenes"), like the crazy house and the fiasco at Donna's apartment, and even the "Save the Whales" song, are as good as most of the material in the first two films. But overall, it just seems like their hearts, and maybe their heads, weren't as much into making a film this time around.

Nice Dreams (1981) was the second sequel to UP IN SMOKE. The lovable burned out slackers are selling "ice cream". But there nothing more than a front for there drug dealing (pot what else?). Sargent Stedanko is back from UP IN SMOKE. He's no longer the same straight laced cop. Stedanko has turned into the very element he's been trying to catch. The duo is stashing away some smoke for a rainy day. They want to pull off one big score so they could retire in the "tropics". Unfortunately, Sargent Stedanko and his motley crew of narcs want to bust them and lock 'em up forever. Can Cheech and Chong "retire" in luxury? Will Stedanko finally bust them? What will happen to the duo when they stray away from their favorite drug and experiment with others? How does the good doctor Timothy Leary fit into the picture? Watch NICE DREAMS and you'll find out!!

Another funny film from the team of Cheech and Chong. I find it to be hilarious. Not a classic by any means. Just a funny movie that stars everyone's favorite stoners.

Recommended.

This is probably Cheech and Chong's best movie. My daughters often ask me (well maybe not often, but once in a while) which one I think is funnier: Cheech or Chong? My answer is always the same: Chong is funnier, but Cheech is a better actor. This movie is a great example. These guys are very talented and very funny. I talk to people my age (the bottom rung of the Baby Boomer generation) and they still think of C&C as two burn-outs that made some movies. Do people think that Charlie Chaplin walked around with a tiny mustache and a cane? Did Jerry Lewis walk around knocking glasses over? They're actors. Maybe their movies weren't always the best, but C&C are two of the greats. And "Nice Dreams" is one of their best.