[yasr_overall_rating]
A pair of weed-loving, freelance video journalists find themselves targeted by a mark they slandered in one of their exposes.
It’s rare for a film that revolves around potheads smoking weed to hold any sort of artistic merit. The somewhat-decent among them – the “Harold and Kumar” entries, “Half Baked,” “Smiley Face,” the Cheech & Chong saga – have a giddiness to them, where plot becomes irrelevant and you follow the protagonists’ stoner logic, be it the search of a White Castle or the consumption of laced cupcakes. Director Cliff Lord makes the crucial mistake of infusing too much plot into “Doobious Sources,” which could have been a midnight delight, but ends up being, like, a total downer, dude.
Zorn Tappadapo (Jason Weissbrod) and Reginald Block-Hunsleigh (Jeff Lorch) are BFFs, who have an affinity for freelance journalism (hard emphasis on “bullshit” here), the former’s job description condensed to “shoot news, rolls dime bag blunts,” the latter acting as the “news reporter.” The “Instant Karma Investigative News Service” specializes in real estate fraud, exposés and the like, “bringing the scumbags of the Earth to the public’s attention for over five years,” as they exclaim proudly in unison. Surprisingly, the local news channel picks up their stories, because they are supposedly brilliant. They embark on their biggest assignment yet: to expose a crooked politician and consequently “bring down the whole government.” They bring along Ky Kittridge (Creagen Dow), who brings down the whole movie with terrible acting.
From this point on, the plot gets too tangled and messy and pointless to depict in detail. Zorn, Reginald, and Ty travel around in a giant bus, smoking pot, stealing safes, infiltrating people’s lives – and so on and so forth. The film is like a nerd that tries too hard to be cool, from its characters’ wacky names to the handheld approach, which must be discussed. Here it stands as a backbone for the entire film, told solely from the perspective of the friends’ two cameras, and while arguably ambitious, the British TV series “Peep Show” did it better, to a much higher comedic effect. Here the approach proves lunkheaded, as editing is crucial to comedy.
“You guys and these cameras, they’re like appendages!” one character exclaims. The handheld narrative is also a metaphor: the heroes’ lives are “merging with art.” Issue is: there’s no “art” in what they’re doing, quite the opposite in fact (though one may argue art’s in the eye of the beholder, I defy anyone to argue me on that point when it comes to “Doobious Sources”). The whole production gives off a whiff of cheapness, and I’m not just speaking about the budget, which by itself would be forgivable.
Yo, bros, check out some of this dope dialogue from “Doobious”:
- “Zorn, man, never forget – a vagina is a cul-de-sac.”
- “Journalism delayed is journalism denied.”
- “The fact that you’re afraid almost makes me cum in my pants.”
- “There is a reason for everything, if you just have faith.”
- “How about you lick my balls.”
On second thought, I change my mind about the film’s artistic merits.
The plotting’s choppy, and the “Gregslist” side-plot brings the film further down into the miasma of incompetence. It’s probably for the best you do smoke a ton of weed before watching this, just so that it evaporates from your mind soon after. It’s a shame, because there are glimpses of chemistry between the two leads, along with a few clever exchanges along the way.
The film starts by quoting an imaginary figure, Dubois (get it?) LeToque (which, in reality weirdly belongs to either Hugh Grant or Milos Forman, according to my Google search – am I missing something here?): “A free press is the cornerstone of democracy.” I’d like to refer to another, more fitting quote, by the very real advocate for democracy, Mr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Now available on Video On Demand & Digital HD
