To celebrate today’s release of 4/20, the latest holiday film from the producers of Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, Mother’s Day, and 11-11-11, we present the top ten films with 420 in the title. (This content is sponsored by the new film 4/20, streaming now on Facebook Watch.)
- 4:20:00
It’s happening again … again! In this sequel to Groundhog Day, Phil Connors’s underachieving brother, Bill (Bobcat Goldthwait), is a chronic procrastinator—at least until he is forced to live the same sixty seconds over and over again. Beginning each minute with a lung full of the baddest bong rip he’s ever taken, Bill finally opens the books he was supposed to be reading all semester, searching for the answer to his predicament, one minute at a time, in Nietzsche, Camus, the Bhagavad Gita, and others, all while high off his ass.
Why we love it: When the movie fades to black, Bill’s maniacal laughter cracking in the background, and the last thing you can make out is the clock showing 4:20:59. Then the familiar sound of Bill exhaling, maybe smoke, maybe relief. A rival with Inception for best ending in film history. - 420 Hours
After over two weeks quarantined in a cramped apartment with a huge bag of weed but no food (“No munchies?! No munchies?!”), James Franco probes the membrane between what’s us and what’s not us as his arm slowly becomes more and more appetizing. A gut-wrenching exploration of abjection and isolation, this psychology-driven true story is even more relevant in the time of Corona than when it was nominated for best picture.
Why we love it: You know it’s coming the whole time, but you still might find yourself feeling lightheaded when Franco finally takes a bite. - 4 Going on 20
Dreading another day at her elite preschool, precocious but unfocused four-year-old Jenna fakes a tummy ache and stays home. But when she wakes up from her afternoon nap in the body of a twenty-year-old burnout, still living at home and still unable to read, she might just learn the lesson of a lifetime. To take control of her future, Jenna must first retrace the past sixteen years, including the fateful events of 9/11, and find out where things went wrong. But perhaps some memories are best left undisturbed. Weighing the freedom of forgetting against our collective responsibility to remember, 4 Going on 20 reminds a post-9/11 world of something every four-year-old knows by heart: how to move on.
Why we love it: When adult Matty shows adult Jenna the dollhouse he made with dolls of the two in it, thus revealing he is the Dollhouse Killer. - Darren Aronofsky’s 4⁄20
A Wall Street firm hoping to game the stock market, Kabbalists searching for the name of God, and a 420-digit number that just may be the key to understanding the universe. Or maybe just the delusions of a weed-addled mathematician losing his grip on reality. In 4⁄20, Aronofsky asks how we decide which obsessions are good and which are bad while showing us that the boundary between madness and sanity may be little more than a smokescreen.
Why we love it: One of the greatest Easter eggs ever, the 420-digit number, when converted to the Hebrew alphabet, turns out to be a recipe for fudge. Definitely sounds like the key to the universe to us! - Four Dark Twenty
Set on 4/20/1889, sharpshooter Annie Oakley (Jessica Chastain) and the other members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show are touring across Europe. They just have to make one quick detour: to assassinate a newborn baby by the name of Adolf Hitler … if they can find him.
Why we love it: When Buffalo Bill uses enhanced interrogation techniques to get reliable information about the future out of a random blind man in Greece. - Before Four-Twenty
American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and French Céline (Julie Delpy) just met, but they might be soulmates. Flirting with each other as well as pretentiousness, the two stroll through Vienna discussing everything from literature to politics to, of course, sex. Then, going against everything we’ve come to expect from a romantic comedy, the two just go their separate ways after Jesse, who thought Vienna was in Italy the whole time, looks at his watch and says, in an unforgettable line, “Oh shit! 4:20. A time-a to-a blaze-a!”
Why we love it: When Jesse and Céline, using only eye contact, have real, loud, simultaneous orgasms in a Viennese café. We’ll have what they’re having! - 4:20 Louis
The true story behind the number 420’s association with marijuana culture, which begins in 1971 when five San Rafael High School students find a map to an abandoned marijuana crop just in time for harvest. Though they never find the weed, the map nevertheless leads the young men on a death-defying adventure as they reckon with masculinity, life after high school, and a country going through growing pains of its own.
Why we love it: When the terrified boys, lost in the pitch black woods, stumble upon the fugitive hideout of the Grateful Dead, and Jerry Garcia pranks them by pretending to cut off his (already missing) finger while chopping firewood. - 4 Fast 20 Furious
4 cars. 20 states. 1 high-speed pursuit. The gang must make it from NYC to LA in 24 hours, using four different routes across twenty different states. To do so, they must average over 100 mph, with the speed increasing after every detour and obstacle. And if and when they all make it, they will still have to figure out how to lose the hundreds of state troopers hot on their wheels.
Why we love it: A drag race between CGI Paul Walker and CGI James Dean across the entire Texas Panhandle?! Shut up and take our money! - 4:20 to 5
After mistakenly believing their boss left early, three working women played by Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda have “an old fashioned ladies’ pot party” in the restroom. Now, they must avoid him (and his sexual advances) for the last forty minutes of the day while continuing to ensure he doesn’t run the company into the ground. Both a weed-fueled romp and a biting satire of office politics, 4:20 to 5 takes viewers on a tour of a modern (at the time) workplace and stumbles upon something your boss might not want you to see.
Why we love it: When a hallucinating Doralee (Parton in her debut role) encounters the ghost of Eddie, an African-American gentleman who worked in the mailroom his entire adult life and is still waiting for a promotion. (Leading to the classic line: “This white lady done scared the ectoplasm out of me!”) - National Lampoon’s 4/20 Vacation
Packed into the Vista Cruiser once again, this time to visit colleges for Rusty and Audrey, the Griswold family arrives at the University of Colorado Boulder on the best/worst day of the year, 4/20. Splitting up for their own personal adventures, Ellen rediscovers her passions while hobnobbing with professors, Rusty takes acid and stumbles upon a secret society, Audrey overthrows the tyrannical head of a sorority (fun fact: Delta Kappa is Greek for four-twenty), and Clark avoids a contact high while trying to get directions to the bursar’s office from a bunch of fully baked undergrads.
Why we love it: When Ellen tells Clark that she knows it sounds crazy but she will not be going home with them, that now that the kids are grown, she just needs some time, and space, to figure out who she is besides a wife and a mother, just for a little while, probably, but who knows—maybe she could even go back to grad school! But Clark doesn’t hear her because he’s busy trying to figure out where they parked the car, so he just says, “That’s great, honey!” And then Ellen finally just stops walking and watches as Clark wanders off into the endless parking lot, growing smaller and smaller as he searches for a car that was towed the minute they left it.
The new film 4/20 is out today on Facebook Watch. A series of marijuana-themed vignettes from the producers of Valentine’s Day, 4/20 is the first feature-length film to harness deep fake technology to allow the most celebrity cameos in a single picture. But why do famous people always get to have all the fun? Well now they don’t because 4/20 is also the first film available to the public to utilize Facebook’s massive image database to make thousands of lucky Facebook users a part of the story too. That’s right, you might be an extra in what promises to be the most ambitious holiday film yet. Start your free trial of Facebook Watch now to see if you got the part!
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