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I love the smell of ‘Pineapple’ in the morning …
Pineapple Express is the Apocalypse Now of stoner comedies.
OK, hear me (or read me) out. I promise I didn’t take up Bong Technique 101, since I’m not experienced in such chemical alteration. However, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam classic really is the film that first sprang to mind after I saw it.
It’s not just because the finale is graphically violent and bloody, albeit in an over the top, comical way. And it’s not just because the characters are high or hallucinating much of the time. It’s because like Apocalypse Now, Pineapple Express is a real mystery tour. Moment to moment, I could never tell where the movie was taking me - and that’s an especially rare trait among stoner comedies.
It also helps that like Apocalypse Now, Pineapple Express looks great. Neither Coppola nor his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, are going to lose any sleep, but Pineapple Express has some great shots - especially for a Judd Apatow-produced comedy, not to mention a stoner one. That’s the happy consequence of hiring a director with an eye, David Gordon Green.
Green has directed acclaimed arthouse pictures as George Washington and All the Real Girls, so he might seem an odd fit for Apatow-World, but he turned out to be an ideal choice, not only for his way with a camera, but the way he gets performances out of his actors, who hit all the right notes.
Seth Rogen (Knocked Up) plays Dale Denton, a process server. He’s not exactly a GQ man, but he’s not exactly a slacker either, spending his work hours cleverly disguising himself in his job as a process server, and spending his off hours smoking weed with his dealer Saul (James Franco). After buying a particularly potent batch (see title), Dale witnesses a murder, sending him on the wildest drugged-out binge this side of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.
Like a number of Apatow’s comedies, Pineapple Express doesn’t know quite when to quit because the filmmakers can’t seem to bear to cut all those jokes they laughed at watching the dailies. Even so, it’s still one of the funniest entries from the Apatow stable.
Written by the Superbad duo of Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Pineapple Express doesn’t think being stoned is funny and of itself, unlike say, Dude, Where’s My Car. This movie doesn’t come down on pot-smoking much, but it does present likable characters who have something lurking underneath all that haze. Saul might give The Dude a run for his money first glance, but as played by Franco, Saul does display some smarts, red-eyed as they might be.
Some might say the violence is a turn-off, but I thought it made Pineapple Express a better, more surprising movie . Early on, I was smiling a lot, but I wasn’t laughing much. By the end I was laughing a lot, particularly at how bizarre it was willing to get. And I didn’t need a bong to figure that out. Count me in if we get Pineapple Redux on the DVD.
GRADE: A-
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