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  • More Great Scenes of Accidental Pot Ingestion!


    Last week, we observed that Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock is the latest in a long line of movies to suggest that getting high by accident is way more fun than doing it on purpose. So we asked Slate readers to send us their favorite examples of the phenomenon. You responded with quite a batch of films, but the three most cited were:

    I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!: A number of readers pointed out this classic 1968 Peter Sellers film. Sellers plays Harold, a thirtysomething square living in Los Angeles, who, though engaged, unexpectedly falls for Nancy, a groovy hippie flower girl. When he, his parents, and his fiancé unknowingly eat Nancy's pot brownies, his fiancé tries to undress him publicly, his mother does a Fiddler on the Roof-style jig, and his father demands to play miniature golf.

     

    History of the World Part I: Mel Brooks and Gregory Hines are fleeing from a company of first-century Roman soldiers when Hines discovers some gigantic marijuana plants by the side of the road. He quickly grabs some spare papyrus, rolls a massive joint, and lets the smoke billow out in the wake of their chariot. The Roman soldiers giving chase become impossibly mellow, stumble off into a field, and eventually dance the Lindy Hop

    Saving Grace: The Brenda Blethyn comedy has not one but two scenes of unwitting pot consumption. Blethyn plays Grace, a down-on-her-luck widow who tries to solve her financial problems by cultivating a crop of marijuana in her greenhouse. Hijinks ensue. In one scene, a pair of matronly friends come over for supper, and, finding no one home, brew a pot of fresh tea from the leaves of Grace's remarkably fragrant plants. They don some googly eyed glasses, munch on a box of cornflakes, and get the giggles over the silkiness of Grace's hair. Later, Grace sets fire to her whole harvest, and the smoke intoxicates everyone in the village, leading to a Hieronymus Bosch-style garden party.

  • Getting High Inadvertently Is More Fun


    Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock—about Elliot Teichberg, a young interior designer who saves Woodstock, and his parents' motel, by convincing festival producers to hold the concert on his neighbor's farm—comes out tomorrow. If the theatrical trailer is to be trusted, the film's pleasures include a good cast (Leiv Schreiber, Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch), bad '70s-era wigs, and a scene depicting Tiber's parents dancing around like morons in the rain after accidentally eating some pot brownies.

    Ang Lee is not the first director to suggest that characters who get high unwittingly have more fun than those who do so on purpose. In Never Been Kissed, some new Rasta friends feed Drew Barrymore weed brownies at a club, which, in turn, inspires her to jump up on stage and perform an acrobatic boa and booty-slapping dance in front of her classmates. In Dick, Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams bring Richard Nixon pot cookies, which make him feel so jolly he signs the Nixon-Brezhnev accord. More recently, in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Shia LaBeouf's mom buys a baked good from a bake sale on her son's first day of college, then starts eagerly chatting up co-eds about her son's sex life.

    We're sure that these aren't the only instances of unintentional marijuana consumption leading to outlandish—even by stoner standards—behavior. What are cinema's other classic scenes of inadvertent weed consumption? Send along examples to slatebrowbeat@gmail.com. Extra credit if you can find a clip on YouTube.

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