‘Pineapple Express’: More lows than highs
"Pineapple Express” is the name of some truly primo weed that the principals of the movie of the same name smoke all through it — the “dopest dope ever smoked,” says its dealer.
“Smell it,” he urges his favorite customer. “It’s like God’s …” (what follows is the ordinary dictionary-approved organ.)
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS
Two and a half stars (Out of four)
Rated: R
Seth Rogen and James Franco star in David Gordon Green’s
stoner comedy about weedheads trying to outrun and outgun the drug
king of Los Angeles. Opening today in area theaters.
Don’t tell me, then, that this initially funny but ultimately repulsive and blood-soaked stoner comedy from the weed cellars of producer Judd Apatow is just useless and soulless pandering to the young male audience that’s going to love it to pieces (and probably quote it chortlingly among themselves the rest of the summer, right An English teacher looking for a perfect, if slightly disreputable, referent for an illustration of the art of the simile has it in “Pineapple Express.” Most of the absurdly quotable lines here are herbal life similes: “I feel like I’m a slice of butter and I’m sitting on a big old pile of flapjacks.” That kind of thing.
It’s the newest film written by Seth Rogen and his buddy Evan Goldberg, who wrote “Superbad” when they weren’t old enough to shave daily and watched it ring chimes all over Apatow’s America where the writer/producer’s comedies are the dippy spliff of choice for throwing time away as zealously as possible.
Rogen, you’ll recall, is Apatow’s specimen sympathetic and supposedly sweet-natured loser (“Knocked Up”) — or, at least, was until this movie, where he doesn’t seem at all sweet-natured to me but rather repellantly self-involved and utterly incapable of connecting to anything in life that might actually be considered productive (except, of course, manipulative movies).
Rogen here plays a guy making his living as a process server, an occupation that allows him to spend most of his time in his car “processing” fatties and thinking of cool ways to slap subpoenas on angry people in trouble. He’s found the perfect job for a guy born to lose and be irritating while doing it.
He gets all of his weed from his dealer, played by James Franco as a fellow connoisseur of all things herbal and righteous and, therefore, a true pal.
This guy isn’t just a pot dealer who spends his days in his PJs, he’s a student of the marijuana arts and sciences. Not only does he introduce his buddy to the top of the line joys of Pineapple Express, he has him sample a new invention — the three-headed joint. It looks a little like a cactus made of pot and paper. You light all three ends simultaneously and inhale deeply.
Let me come clean here: Franco is altogether wonderful in this movie. Whatever he thought he was doing pretending to be James Dean on TV or a villain in a Spiderman movie, he was born to play a stoner whose IQ is completely encased in a plastic baggie along with his product. Rogen, on the other hand, tries too hard all through the movie. You want to scream at the screen: “Hey kid, stop yelling! I know you’re pretending to be upset and frantic and fearful but I’m sitting right here! Mellow out, will you?”
The movie itself, for the first hour, is intermittently pretty funny. The drug dealer has ambitions to one day design septic tanks. His pal and favorite customer has dreams of doing a talk show on the radio (and let’s have no unseemly jokes here about that being the same thing).
But then the movie’s avant-Cheech and Chong pleasures meet really bad quasi-Quentin Tarantino shoot-em’-up and it turns into repulsive rubbish, full of bullets and the “comedy” of having your ear shot off and taking two bullets to the stomach, while tied to a chair.
At that point, you become abundantly aware that all Rogen, Goldberg, and Apatow know of bullets is what they’ve seen on TV and movies. They’re just a big goof for the stoner boys to giggle over. Incredibly, they got director David Gordon Green, the man who made “George Washington” and “Snow Angels,” to preside over all this.
In the plot, the boys are on the lam from the city’s big drug wholesaler (Gary Cole) and the cop who does some of his murdering for him (Rosie Perez — yes, Rosie Perez.) Any vague resemblance to the plot of Billy Wilder’s classic “Some Like It Hot” is vastly to this movie’s detriment.
And yes, there are indeed people who take a couple bullets to the midsection and continue walking around for a while. But the reality of bullets in the world is more like the one that greeted Buffalo police officer Patty Parete — just one can be enough to paralyze for life, or kill.
If all you know is making movies about how much you love your weed and your movies, it seems to me you can’t blame the world for leaving you in the dust.
Or, worse, loathing the way you’re pandering to an audience that really doesn’t deserve to be thought so little of.
It’s going to make a fortune. But if, on the heels of that fortune, Judd Apatow suddenly told the world he was going to get out of the supposedly lovable loser business and take a year off to get stoned all the time, I’d give him a standing O.
What a pleasure it would be not to have any more movies like this for a while — a nice long while.
