what the film does
a smoke-filled journey across the lives and careers of cypress hill, told by the people who lived it. oriol was an early associate of the crew, serving variously as photographer, videographer, and tour manager, and he built the film out of his own archives: crates of videotapes and contact sheets that document three decades of the group and of himself. b-real, sen dog, dj muggs, and eric bobo sit for the interviews, with cheech marin and tommy chong among the voices filling in the margins. the film tracks the group from south gate, california, through the years of workshopping in muggs’ apartment, to the mainstream breakthrough of black sunday. it also spends real time on the music itself: unheard demos, the long trial and error behind b-real’s signature vocal tone, and the drum programming that makes “hits from the bong” lock into its dusty springfield sample.
why this one
most music documentaries keep an editorial distance from their subject. this one has none, and that is the point. interviewees stop mid-story to ask the director, off camera, “you remember?” and “you were there.” the film is as much oriol’s story as the group’s. the lack of distance reads as trust, and the trust gets material no outside filmmaker would be handed: early demos of “real estate” and “how i could just kill a man” from before the group had found its style.
the record matters too. cypress hill was hip-hop’s first latino supergroup and, after the beastie boys, the act that most successfully bridged rap and rock audiences at a time when the two genres were at odds. they were advocating cannabis legalization when the politics of it seemed hopeless. variety’s review calls them massively popular yet often underestimated, and the documentary’s job is to close that gap.
what stays with me
joe “the butcher” nicolo, the founder of ruffhouse records, demonstrating why the seemingly sloppy drum programming on “hits from the bong” gels perfectly with its dusty springfield sample in ways that more sober minds did not grasp. then he adds: “i know it’ll be a shock for everyone to learn we made those records stoned.” a music documentary that does stoner musicology as a scene.
on hand
digital. the film premiered on showtime on april 20, 2022. it rents and buys on amazon video, apple tv, and fandango at home, and streams free with ads on fandango at home free.
image: tmdb backdrop (movie 957492, key aN31B2SGbxfn1JdyFPj732er8kd); black-and-white group portrait of the crew, verified against the showtime still from variety's review. source luma 121.2, pre-darkened 0.65, baked at factor 0.45, lanczos to 1200x675, on-disk luma 26.8