Female Stoner Buddy Movie "The Wrong Girls" Is Alright

CAUTION: SEMI-SPOILERS HERE. SEE IT FIRST. YOU'LL BE GLAD YOU DID.

The opening shots of "The Wrong Girls" depict an elaborate bong later identified as the "Bongatron" invented by one of the movie's characters, Stanford engineering-school dropout Frankie (Kristen Stewart). Frankie and her bestie Molly (Alia Shawkat) hit the bongatron, followed by a spot-on scene where they communicate by coughing. 

Molly hates her job producing spreadsheets, and loves to cook. She bakes some "accidentally on purpose" super strong pot brownies, with blue cheese added. Meanwhile, Frankie smokes joints while she works (not while driving) as a delivery person for Kwik Things. She's soon mistaken for her doppleganger/double Frances (also played by Stewart), a research scientist working on a mysterious drug the girls lay their hands on and sample. A super trippy sequence follows where Frankie and Molly turn telepathic, able to communicate nonverbally with each other and their cats (voiced by Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani). 

Turns out the drug, called Blaekspruttesaed, was developed using giant squids' telepathic communication by the Norwegian scientist Dr. Olsen (Kate McKinnon in yet another brilliant characterization) for her employer (named Koch, like the brothers, and pronounced "cock"). Koch wants to exploit the invention for mind control (much like the MK Ultra program and LSD), and Koch's violent henchmen go after the girls while Olsen and her team try to keep them, and their experimental drug they hope to use for higher purposes, out of the henchmen's hands. 

While being driven away from danger by their reluctant rescuer Not Metal Head Dave (LaKeith Stanfield), Frankie and Molly light a stress-busting joint, which Dave insists they put out. "Dude, this is California," Stewart protests. "I don't care if it's Canada," Dave replies, throwing the joint out the window. Molly is suddenly able to telekinetically move the joint back into her hand, and Dr. Olsen deduces that mixing Blaekspruttesaed with THC produces the effect. 

OK, it's a crazy stupid plot, but it's no worse than countless buddy movies, including the stoner ones. And it's pretty clever and funny, with lots of interesting camera work, editing, and situations (like the, "Snacks, cats, weed, go" sequence). Stewart and Shawkat give dead-on performances throughout, while appearing in Trashin' Fashion or T-shirts that look straight from Goodwill. The film opens with Cate Blanchett's voice narrating a deep-sea squid documentary, and Geena Davis appears as Dr. Chapman, the head government research administrator. 

Written and directed by Stewart's romantic partner Dylan Meyer in her directorial debut, "The Wrong Girls" is co-produced by Stewart and Rogen, who made the first male action/stoner/buddy movie, "The Pineapple Express." Meyer is the daughter of screenwriter/director Nicholas Meyer, author of The Seven Percent Solution, which centered on Sherlock Holmes's cocaine habit (something he shared with Arthur Conan Doyle). She and Stewart married on April 20, 2025. 

The movie poster is a send-off of Reefer Madness movies and the film, to me, served as a send-off of the tech bros who are taking over psychedelic research and marketing, while having sketchy house parties women are starting to complain about. Tony Hale (Veep) is the suitably swarmy-yet-silly Stanford guy whose party the girls crash in an attempt to sell their drugs. 

Frankie, whose motto is, "Too hard; I quit" is told by Dr. Olsen, "You'll learn to develop focus and self-control" in order to use her new telekinetic powers. Frankie replies, "I probably won't, though," but she does after she is abducted and escapes by feeding her captors Molly's pot and blue cheese brownies. In the end, the girls get a lucrative gig as Stanford scientific subjects and use their newfound wealth to open a cannabis-infused café called "Weed Eat It." 

I'm calling "The Wrong Girls" the First Female Stoner Buddy Movie, something the world has long needed. Brava.

New "East of Eden" Adaptation Tells Cathy's Story

CAUTION: SPOILERS HEREIN

The new "reimagined" Netflix series "East of Eden" from Zoe Kazan tells the extraordinary story from the John Steinbeck novel of Cathy (Florence Pugh), the mother of the James Dean character in the 1955 movie adaptation directed by Zoe's grandfather Elia Kazan. In that film we only know that Cathy has become the madam of a brothel in town. (in an Oscar-winning performance from Jo Van Fleet). Steinbeck reportedly based Cathy on his second wife, who was unfaithful to him, and Dean's character Cal may have been based on Steinbeck's second son, John Steinbeck IV.  

"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents," begins the chapter were Steinbeck introduces Cathy Ames, adding,"There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community." 

Cathy's story is told, beginning at age 10 with her mother finding her partially undressed and lying in a barn with a rope tying her wrists together, and two 14-year-old boys kneeling near her. The boys' defense was that Cathy had orchestrated the event, charging them five cents apiece. 

“She’s haunted by it,” Mrs. Ames told the neighbors. “If she could only talk about it, maybe she would get better. But when I ask her about it—it’s like it came right back to her and she goes into shock again.” She tries to advocate for punishment for the boys, arguing that her daughter couldn't very well have tied her own hands. But Mr. Ames stayed silent, not protecting his daughter. 

The scene has been interpreted as young Cathy being the instigator, but Kazan and Pugh offer the interpretation that Cathy was the victim.  “Her version of safety has been damaged from the moment she was abused," Pugh told Vanity Fair.  "And she told her parents, and her parents didn’t listen. This isn’t someone that understands family life is necessarily a good thing. This child was raped when she was tiny. And her distrust for men, it was ignited then.”

John Steinbeck IV: The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam

John Steinbeck IV, the son of the novelist who wrote The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, was drafted into the army in 1965 and served as a war correspondent in Vietnam.  On January 1, 1968, he published an article in The Washingtonian titled, "The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam." 

Steinbeck wrote that soldiers were supplied dextro-amphetamine by the army in survival kits given to soldiers in the field, and that pharmacists in the port of Hong Kong, an R&R center, sold "all manner of barbiturates, and other prescriptive drugs, to military personnel without a prescription." Writing that soldiers eschewed incapacitating opium, "a drug for old men in this part of Asia," he added: 

After opium, what remains are the fields and jungles of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, which for thousands of years have been the natural home of the ever-popular Cannabis sativa, or marijuana. It has a more powerful brother known as hashish or kif or plain hemp. It is basically the same cannabis plant, but it is richer in resins, and thus in intoxicating tars when smoked or eaten. Unlike opium, which is a body drug rather than a mind drug, you can learn to function normally with marijuana. In the southern areas, the best of this plant comes from Cambodia, and the vast majority of “good stuff” comes across the border via the Ho Chi Minh trail, the same route made famous by the Viet Cong—a fairly romantic migration. 

For the most part, the drug is cheaper and easier to find in Vietnam than a package of Lucky Strikes. It might be interesting to find out if the derivation of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s slogan, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel,” might not have come from the revered Arab expression, “A puff of kif in the morning makes a man as strong as a hundred camels in the courtyard.” In any case, marijuana is as easy to find in Vietnam as a Vietnamese national, and you needn’t find one to find the other. 

Steinbeck remarked that "practically no civil or military controls" were used to inhibit the smoking of marijuana, not so much as "a matter of kindness" but for practical reasons. "To enforce a prohibition against smoking the plant would be like trying to prohibit the inhalation of smog in Los Angeles." 

Rest in Power Dolly Parton, Who Joined the Pot Party in "9-5"

Parton in "9-5"

Dolly Parton, who died at age 80 yesterday, managed to project an authentic, down-home womanly image wearing outrageous wigs and fake fingernails, while making jokes like, "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." 

The fourth of 12 children raised in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, her father Robert Lee was an illiterate tenant farmer and her mother Avie Lee (Owens) sang old Anglo-Celtic ballads and hymns while doing housework. Dolly said she admired a woman in town considered trashy due to the way she dressed, and began emulating her as she began her singing and songwriting career. 

In one of her first hits, "Dumb Blonde" (1967), she sang, "Just because I'm blonde don't think I'm dumb / 'Cause this dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool." She was smart enough to form her own publishing company at age 20, retaining the rights to her own songs. When Elvis Presley's manager demanded The King take half of the publishing profits for recording her song "I Will Always Love You" in 1974, Parton refused (then cried all night). Instead, Whitney Houston made it a monster hit in 1992 and Dolly made $10 million in royalties, investing part of the money in an office complex in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Nashville. 

Tokin' Woman Jane Fonda, who produced the 1980 feminist film "9-5," starring Lily Tomlin and herself, reportedly was looking for a third co-star to broaden the film's appeal when she heard a tape of Dolly singing and decided to make her a movie star. Parton's film debut is a tour-de-force performance in which she sweetly but strongly threatens to turn her lecherous boss Mr. Hart "from a rooster to a hen" with one shot from the gun she carried in her purse. 

In the film, Tomlin's character Violet suggests that her co-workers Judy (Fonda) and Doralee (Parton) smoke a joint together. "Is that one of them marijuana cigarettes?" Doralee asks, offering her home as the setting for their "old-fashioned ladies pot party." Doralee says, "that stuff really don't do much for me" and Judy says she tried it once and "could never figure out what the big deal was." Cut to: the three ladies laughing uproariously (and soon, munching out). 

Sture and Charlotte Johannesson: "Hash Girl" and Galleri Cannabis

Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A - Union of
Stoned Anarchists (Sture Johannesson). 

At the Oakland Museum of CA (OCMA)'s Gallery of California History, I spied an amazing poster featuring an image of LBJ surrounded by corporate logos and phrases and, subtly in the margins, cannabis plants. 

Some research revealed the title of the 1967 poster is "Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A" and it's attributed to the Union of Stoned Anarchists and the Swedish artist Sture Johannesson.   

According to the Oak Tree Review, Johannesson’s psychedelic posters "scandalised the progressive Swedish society of the sixties. His defence of psychotropic substances, used as a critique of State control, provoked censorship in both public and private institutions. For more than twenty years, his poster production served to denounce that the way in which society builds and transmits its patterns of authority is ultimately more hallucinatory than the effects of any drug."

When interviewed by Swedish magazine FIB Aktuellt in 1967, Johannesson "enthusiastically spoke about his use of psychedelics and cannabis. For instance, as he discusses an elaborate marker drawing with the reporters, Johannesson admits he created it under the influence of hashish, LSD and mescaline. 'That’s why it’s so great,' he says of the drawing."

Appropriately enough, the interview took place at “Galleri Cannabis,” an art gallery and studio space in Malmö, Sweden, which Johannesson founded in 1965 with his wife Charlotte Johannesson, also an artist. The gallery "functioned as a meeting point and production house for the self-styled underground." 

What Made the Etruscan Women Smile?

Sarcophagus lid in The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy exhibit in SF

The Etruscans, who thrived in Italy between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC before they were slowly conquered by the Romans, invented so-called "Roman" numerals and the famous "Roman" sewers, and pioneered winemaking in Italy, among their many accomplishments and innovations. Wealthy traders, they were among the three main powers in the ancient Mediterranean, along with the Greeks and the Phoenicians. 

Nearly all of their written records were destroyed, but a current exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco tells their story in the form of over 200 amazing Etruscan artifacts from museums around the world, including finely crafted pottery, metal work, and statuary. Household objects like mirrors and vases depict parties or (s)heroic scenes, and both Etruscan women and men are depicted on funeral urns and sarcophagi. 

The Etruscans were people who loved to party, it seems. Banquets were very important to them and banquet scenes are found on painted the walls of their tombs, since they felt death was more a transition than a finality. There's such a thing as the "Etruscan smile," and many of the pieces in the exhibit recorded these, particularly on the women, whose eyes look rather dreamy as they give a kind of knowing Mona Lisa smile. 

"The Odyssey" and The Goddess

Despite its tepid reviews, I did see "The Odyssey" because it seemed like it might have some strong female characters, especially considering the casting. Co-produced by the husband-and-wife team of Emma Thomas (who gets top producing credit) and Christopher Nolan (who wrote the screenplay), it's said to be inspired by a fresh 2017 translation of the Homeric epic by Emily Wilson, the first translation into English by a woman. 

I was hopeful when the Goddess Athena is bestowed as protectress to the warrior Odysseus (Matt Damon) by his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Athena, portrayed by Zendaya, briefly visits Odysseus throughout the film. Her best lines came when assuring Damon that gods are not hard for mortals to understand: "Who doesn’t understand thunder? Fire?" Zeus and Poseidon are the gods that seem to have the most effect on the characters. 

In the film, only Odysseus makes it to hang out with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, and the lotus flower is rather abused by him, only blunting his memories. (Scholars think the Lotus may have been the psychedelic Egyptian blue lotus, or opium.) The scene in which Circe, played by Samantha Morton, turns Odysseus's men into pigs is inventively portrayed, but gone is the holy moly herb given to Odysseus by Hermes that protects him from Circe's magic potion. Even the Sirens are not seen or heard, only Damon's screaming reaction to them. 

Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong'o) is demoted to launching only 500 ships by her abusive husband, and half of her face is horribly disfigured. There is no mention of nepenthe, Helen’s drug of forgetting one’s sorrow, which Homer depicts she serves to Telemachus during his search for his missing father Odysseus. Scholars speculate nepenthe was a mixture of opium, mandrake, henbane, belladonna and hashish. In a 2023 profile of Wilson in The New Yorker, Judith Thurman calls the queen "semi-divine Helen, Zeus' daughter," with "a witchy seventh sense, a ventriloquist's voice, and a pharmacy of magic potions." Also absent from the film is Zeus' wife Hera, about whom Wilson says, "Nothing beats Hera, dressing up with super-chic earrings and skin creams to mess with Zeus' plans."