An interesting documentary on the long and storied history of Marijuana in the US. Most documentaries tend to rehash old facts, with sources seemingly cited from Wikipedia. What "High" lacks in filmmaking style and prowess, it more than makes up for it in facts, correlation/causality, statistics, and a keen critical eye.
My biggest complaint would be the low budget nature of this film. The director narrated it, and he's very obviously a teenage/early 20's kid. Hearing him drone on can get boring, but I have to show respect, the kid made this movie himself, and got his facts very well organized. Too often docus like this will just throw numbers at you and expect you to be able to think about them, and apply them to the real world. For example, he shows how many arrests per state for marijuana, adding it up to the 755,000 a year. That number doesn't seem super high when you know there are 300 million people in the country, but when examined by state, asking the question "Why is anyone jailed for a non-violent offense that doesn't hurt anyone else?" it does have a big impact.
He also went far out of his way to find the right people to interview, specifically the founder/director of NORML, and the Harvard Professor that advocated legalization of all drugs. Not only did they have great information, they were able to put it into an easily digestible context. Like when the NORML director says "Most people that are against marijuana change their minds REALLY fast when their mother, grandmother, or similar loved one is afflicted with a debilitating illness that renders their body unlivable, and is instantly changed, literally overnight, with marijuana use". No shit.
The point of this documentary is to examine the American idea of pot, and how it has become so misconstrued over the years. A harmless plant used for all of human history by basically every culture ever recorded, and now it's illegal? In the end, the documentary does falter, and you can tell they didn't have a lot of resources available to their low budget crew. The final 20 minutes or so goes off on a tangent about a doctor who was very wrongly convicted/imprisoned for taking care of sick people, because the DEA thought he was a drug dealer.
It's sad and all that the good doctor had his name ruined, and now some of his patients are worse off because he's gone I'm sure, the problem is, after a solid hour or so of awesome facts, it changes gear into personal stories. Which is fine, but it's really a different movie than the one he was making for the first hour. Again, I don't blame the director, he's just not the greatest director it seems. Awesome researcher, just not a filmmaker/storyteller in the purest sense. Which is alright, I think a pure filmmaker would've skewed the stats in a way Holowach didn't. My only other complaint would be that the entire thing feels like a YouTube docu in the way the animations are done, and the general low budget nature of the entire thing, but like I said before, props to the director for getting his film made, it's more than most people will do in their lifetime, and he does have a good solid hour of one of the best pot documentaries I've ever seen.
If he learns to tighten pacing, omit stories that don't fit the rest of the theme, and get a better post-production animator/editor/graphic designer, I think he could easily be one of the better documentary makers out there, if he holds a passion for anything the way he obviously holds a passion for drug policy reform in America.
8.2/10
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