Andy Andersen

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?

Boy, we’re in the thick of it now, aren’t we, folks? Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the game of sex, drugs, and crime in the city, you find the board beneath your feet is like six levels of 3-D chess deeper than before, and bravado is no substitute for true prowess. Main players on all sides are lost in the weeds right now, and as things stand, it’s tough to see who’s got enough of either to come out on top.

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.

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.

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.

“The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell,” wrote William S. Burroughs. “Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.” Few images feel more malignant today than Hollywood’s potent, illusory image of the American policeman.

There's nothing like great BBQ so to celebrate one of our favorite cuisines we talked to Award-Winning Executive Chef & BBQ master Chef Matt aka Matthew Stockard about the dos and don'ts of cooking with cannabis, and picked up some recs for strains and products to pair with your next canna-friendly BBQ.

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.

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.

Maggie Connors is the founder and CEO of Besito, an Los Angeles-based cannabis brand specializing in "mini-joint" prerolls of classic California-grown strains. Besito was recently acquired by vertically integrated Bay Area cannabis operator SPARC, with Connors joining the SPARC executive suite as VP of Brand Marketing.

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.

If you're into weed, gummies are an invaluable and inevitable resource, especially out here on the west coast. I'm a flower guy, which basically means I still dig a good ol' fashioned analog joint above all else. But I frequently turn to gummies — perhaps more than any other edible product on the modern legal market — because they're undeniably convenient for discreet use and precise dosing.

It had been a minute since I'd smoked anything like Cookies' London Pound Cake #75.

David Hershkovits is a lifelong advocate of what he calls "cultural disruption." As a journalist, culture critic, co-founder of Paper Magazine, and host of the Light Culture podcast, Hershkovits has had a front-row seat to cultural disruption in America in every phase of his career.

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.

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.

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.

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

Most of Nolan’s movies I like more than I dislike, but I also get turned off by the fussiness and preciousness with which Nolan approaches his concepts and how his films often feel like looking at an MC Escher drawing with someone behind you demanding you see something more profound than what’s actually there. Fortunately, I mostly found Tenet to be a stylish thrill ride that wasn’t begging me to revere it more than it deserved or even care about understanding it that deeply. And I think what makes that possible is that it’s a loving, Byzantine monument to James Bond movies first, and a Chris Nolan joint second.

The name may or may not ring a bell, but you know the work of Ralph Bakshi even if you don’t know you know it. You’ve likely come across a Fritz the Cat poster at your local comics or record store, caught snippets of the animated Lord of the Rings on Cartoon Network as a kid, or seen memes and stills of a young, pre-fame Brad Pitt with an animated buxom blonde Jessica Rabbit-type in Cool World.