Andy Andersen

Writer, cannabis reporter, and pop culture obsessive located in Long Beach, CA. 

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Vulture •

Perry Mason Season-Premiere Recap: The Illusion of Justice

In every great mystery, the world is an onion. And somewhere, slumped in an office chair behind a moving wall of light, shadow, and cigarette smoke, there’s a “detective” slowly peeling back its putrid layers. Each one reveals a fact or clue or piece of violent aftermath that, in turn, reveals some nasty hidden truth of the world. And when we finally get to the center, all we’ve got to show for it is the full view of a grand illusion.
Vulture •

Under the Banner of Heaven Series-Premiere Recap: What We Find Broken

Based on Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book, Under the Banner of Heaven is the true-crime story of a double murder in Utah in 1984, perpetrated by one of Mormonism’s many fundamentalist splinter groups, that’s juxtaposed with the early frontier-justice days of the LDS Church. For your humble recapper, a lapsed Mormon born and raised in Provo, Utah, this miniseries is sure to be one helluva prolonged “TRIGGERED” meme, so let’s get right to it, eh, brothers and sisters?
Vulture •

Tokyo Vice Recap: Choose the Right

Damn, welcome to episodes four and five of Tokyo Vice, where everything heats up. We last saw Jake Adelstein in the custody of the yakuza in the final moments of “Read the Air,” seemingly ready to break the next barrier and get closer to what’s really happening. We also left Sato at his own crossroads — in deep shit with Hitoshi Ishida (Shun Sugata), head of the Chihara-kai crime family, for beating the hell out of a fellow yakuza — offering up a hot tip that will hopefully prove his loyalty.
Vulture •

Tokyo Vice Series-Premiere Recap: What Really Happens

Thirty seconds into Tokyo Vice — Michael Mann’s dank-ass return to the collective, vice-coated neon-TV dreamscape — and dudes are strappin’ on their bullet … uh, knife-proof vests under dark suits and lacquered hair, to which I say: Hell yeah. The pair of lonely dudes in question are expat reporter Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) and Tokyo PD detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe), and together, they’re taking on the yakuza.
Weedmaps News •

We tried it: Farmer and the Felon's UNLOCKED sungrown flower

It shouldn't need to be said, and yet it does: there's more to weed than THC. Much more, though you wouldn't know it on account of how tricky it can be to get a good eighth, half-ounce, or full ounce of bud clockin' in below 25% THC. As both a smokable-flower enthusiast and frequent visitor to dispensaries across Orange and LA County, I can't tell you how many times I've gone into a shop and received a backward glance at the counter because I asked for bud in the 14 - 17% range.

review: Nia DaCosta’s Candyman is a shrewd, artful horror sequel

Hey hey, goin’ a bit off the usual script this week. Haven’t done a straight review of a new release on here before (I think the closest we ever got was our rapid-fire convo about Mank) but I saw the new Candyman over the weekend and for various reasons — chief among them my nagging sense of conflict with the calcifying critical consensus — I feel compelled to get my full two-cents out there in the ether.
Weedmaps News •

We Tried It: Raw Garden Refined Live Resin Review

I've been writing about weed professionally since 2017, which means I entered the industry at just the right time to get an encyclopedic crash course in dabbing. Five years later, I'm still primarily a flower guy. But throughout the 2010s, what kept me coming back to concentrates was knowing which brands I could rely on for pure-grade, high-quality products. Raw Garden is the brand name that remains synonymous, in my mind at least, with the ideal dab.
Weedmaps News •

The best summer movies to watch while high

It's summer y'all, which means it's time to cozy up with some sungrown bud and indulge in the great tradition of summer movie watching. Whether you're hitting the vape and venturing into a cool, dark theater to escape the heat, catching a cult classic at a retro summer evening drive-in, or just throwing a classic summer comedy on your TV at home while nursing an indica from your favorite bong, there's no summer-movie experience you can't successfully augment with a little cannabis.
Weedmaps News •

7 best strains for watching movies, according to entertainment industry insiders

If you've spent any amount of time smoking weed and watching movies, you already know the two activities make an ideal pair. You might say film is the most psychotropic art form, engaging multiple senses and modes of thinking and feeling at once for an experience that, at its best, you can intuit sensorily as well as emotionally. The late filmmaker and legendary stoner Robert Altman once described the ultimate cinematic experience as such on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972.
Weedmaps News •

6 weed products journalist Ricardo Baca can't live without

Ricardo Baca is a prolific veteran journalist and considered the first modern weed news editor (outside of the old High Times school). He was an editor at The Denver Post where he ran The Cannabist for over three years. Baca's place “at ground zero of the green rush” was the subject of the 2015 documentary Rolling Papers. Today, he's the CEO and founder of Grasslands, a cannabis PR company dedicated to championing journalism while helping cannabis brands tell their stories.
Film Cred •

Is 1981 the Most Underrated Movie Year Ever?

1981: it’s the witching hour in America. A recession is in full bloom and Ronald Reagan’s promise to “make America great again” remains, for good or ill, unfulfilled. Strung out between the aching, post-’60s come-down nihilism of the late ’70s and the neoconservative free-market mass-consumption orgy of the Reagan era, the masses occupy a strange, pre-apocalyptic no-man’s-land moment in American culture, and so do the movies.
Weedmaps News •

4 weed products journalist Madison Margolin can't live without

Madison Margolin is the co-founder and managing editor of DoubleBlind, the biannual print magazine and digital media outfit that's taking the psychedelics movement by storm. Before starting the magazine, she and co-founder Shelby Hartman were both prolific cannabis journalists. Though many will be most familiar with Margolin's cannabis coverage in a wide range of publications over the last five years, she's been covering the political, cultural, and spiritual impact of psychedelics
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