I meant to post something about Friday’s screening of A/K/A Tommy Chong at the Egyptian but I… uh… I forgot. For some reason I forgot.

While we were in line, someone with a SIFF badge came up to us and said, “Anyone want to say something on camera for the SIFFcast? Something about the Cheech and Chong movie?” This guy holding the camera was someone who, well, let’s just say he seemed to be the kind of guy who has an intimate relationship with green stuff. Unsurprisingly, no one took him up on his offer. He walked away, then turned back, held up his badge, and said (I guess because he was paranoid or something), “I’m official!”

A/K/A Tommy Chong is a documentary about how Tommy Chong, who has turned his fame as that stoner from those movies into a business selling bongs over the Internet, was entrapped by the government—an undercover “client” persuaded Chong’s company to sell and ship a box of bongs to one of the few states where such sales are illegal—and what’s great about it is that filmmaker Josh Gilbert sets the story of the sting against a national backdrop, not long after 9/11, when you’d think that Ashcroft and company would be preoccupied with tasks other than, you know, spending tons of Justice Department resources to bust Tommy Chong for selling bongs. How, exactly, does that make America safer? (Their real motive is to bust Chong for “glamorizing” drug use in all those movies he made.) The documentary has the production values of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and there are a lot of interviews conducted while interview subjects are driving around surburban L.A. (or, later, while a certain interview subject is in his orange prison jumpsuit), but it’s funny, persuasive, maddening, etc. It plays again at the Egyptian on Tuesday, May 30 at 4:30 pm. I recommend it.

The guy who introduced the film stared out by saying, “I’m guessing we have some Cheech and Chong fans here? I’m guessing that we also have some fans of Initiative 75? Is that what it is? 75?” Cheers, applause, etc. The person behind me said, jokingly, “Is that the monorail?”

The movie also includes that great speech Bush made about how “If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terrorism in America” (remember that one?), tempered by some well-put commentary by Atlantic Monthly correspondent (and Fast Food Nation author) Eric Schlosser, who says things like, “It’s the power of the government to choose who they don’t like and destroy them.”