SMILEY FACE adds “fire” (as the young & breathless who toke among us would say) to the smoke screened bushel of high-grade Stoner Movies. The take-a-hit parade (thoughtfully packaged below, man) has a Rad Chick addition in a 2007 bongload that, like, totally should have, like, ruled. But, hey, whatever. All is cool. *

La La, Calif. ‘Jane F’ (Anna Faris, praise be unto her) went from studying economics to trying land work as an actress in commercials. Jane enjoys marijuana like most humans enjoy air, and is continually behind in paying her weed dealer. When a ravenous attack of munchies has her scarfing a tray of cupcakes her twilight zoned roommate baked for a sci-fi convention, Jane faces parallel paths of decision destiny. Quickly as well as too late, she realizes the cupcakes were liberally laced with cannabis. She has to make an audition, procure the bread for the dealer, evade the fuzz and enlist help from a guy who’s infatuated with her but too much of a nerd to get to the stadium parking lot let alone first base. What’s a blonde California Girl to do? Maybe the answer lies in The Communist Manifesto…

Directed, edited and co-produced by Gregg Araki, written by Dylan Haggerty, Jane’s 84-minute journey to realization—via car, bus and foot to a dentists office, the freeway, a meat-packing plant in El Monte and the boardwalk of Venice Beach—is shot thru with imaginative touches in the camerawork (Shawn Kim), scoring (David Katay) and editing, all harmoniously in service of the fearlessly funny star. Faris’s instinctive grasp of the absurd takes a ‘baked’ character who in lesser hands could have been aggravating and with her seemingly bottomless tote bag of facial and vocal expressions makes her endearing, her self-inflicted plight sympathetic, an inverted comic version of Michael Douglas’s cross town odyssey in Falling Down. Fall down she does, de-glammed to look scruffy, rumpled and wasted to the Asteroid Belt. Holding the zonked-to-the-toenails mien at pitch-perfect level, Anna’s Jane sprints/stumbles/floats the gamut from amazement to alarmed, impish to impassioned, timid to tigerish: she’s adorable.

By the time the hybrid blend was tamped into the bowl, Faris was 30, eleven years in with 16 credits, including a bag of hits (the Scary Movie franchise, Lost In Translation and Brokeback Mountain) so it’s odd that this well-reviewed showcase was then unceremoniously thrown away before the masses could sample the stash. After previewing at a film festival, a single one-week engagement in L.A. inhaled $9,397, then some international bookings coughed up $169,984. Her delightful The House Bunny came out the following year. For our money Anna Faris is Judy Holliday reborn.

Debts—and a promise to pay back—are owed to John Krasinski, Adam Brody, Danny Masterson, Jane Lynch, Marion Ross, Matthew Shamus Wiles, Michael Hitchcock, the voice of Roscoe Lee Browne, John Cho, Danny Trejo, Richard Riehle, Brian Posehn and for a Venetian split second, Carrot Top.

* This Faris wheel easily rides the high country with Fast Times At Ridgemont High, The Big Lebowski, Dazed And Confused, Pineapple Express and…whoa, almost forgot, Up In Smoke. Duh, there are, like, more but if you don’t know oregano from Oaxacan by now, you’re, like, like that dude in the mall that time…