For Justen - Pineapple Express

[Cadsuane]

Because he's my boy, and I can't have my boy left unsatisfied.  8)

 

I'm even going to try and embed the video, to avoid any unnecessary linking on his part. However, I have almost zero confidence that the embed code works on these forums, so I'm gonna go ahead and post the regular link, as so:

Restricted Pineapple Express Clip: Time Out! from James Franco

(It's a scene posted on funnyordie.com by James Franco himself, who actually grew up in my hometown, and whose younger brother I was in high school with for one year. As if that makes me special or something).

 

<object width="464" height="388" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swf?96d0a705"'>http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swf?96d0a705" /><param name="flashvars" value="key=8404bbb826" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed width="464" height="388" flashvars="key=8404bbb826" allowfullscreen="true" quality="high" src="http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swf?96d0a705" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object><div style="text-align:center;width: 464px;">See more <a href="http://www.funnyordie.com/james_franco">James Franco</a> videos at Funny or Die</div>

 

And the regular trailer:

 

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="

name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="

type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

 

 

Rottentomatoes.com gives Pineapple Express 69% fresh, which, while it could be better, is not actually that bad.

 

I'm picking this "fresh" review from the others, not because I have any more trust in this reviewer than the others, but because it's the first (or only) one with a comment. Did I read the comment? No, because I don't care what it said, I just needed a reason to choose one

I’m a responsible, middle-age man. I’d guess the statute of limitations on any of my youthful indiscretions ran out a long time ago. Just in case, though, I’m not copping to anything.

 

I will say, however, that “Pineapple Express” captures the buzzy stupidity of chronic marijuana use better than any other comedy I’ve seen. And it gets the unlikely friendships that grow out of the buying and selling of pot remarkably right. Don’t ask me how I know. As you’re laughing your head off at this increasingly loony stoner comedy, just know it’s all grounded in some pretty well-observed behavior.

 

And that’s even when it’s flat-out satirizing drug buddy movie conventions, and taking more exaggerated swipes at violent action films and the, um, straighter examples of the emerging genre called “bromance” comedies.

 

Dreamed up by producer Judd Apatow and written by “Superbad’s” Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, “Pineapple” stars Rogen as constantly toking but still quite clever process server Dale Denton. He doesn’t particularly like his fully baked new dealer Saul Silver (James Franco, an old compadre of Rogen’s from Apatow’s well-regarded sitcom “Freaks and Geeks”). Saul, on the other hand, acts like Dale is his greatest pal ever. Saul doesn’t get out of his cramped little dope den much. But he has to split when Dale accidentally witnesses a murder at a drug kingpin’s (Gary Cole) house.

 

A crooked cop (Rosie Perez) is involved, and because the panicked Dale left a roach containing the extremely rare and potent pot of the film’s title at the scene, the bad guys could (and do) trace it back to its exclusive distributor, Saul. Paranoid and judgment-impaired, Dale and Saul set off on an odyssey of getting to know each other and getting on each other’s nerves — and, oh yeah, trying not to get killed.

 

Selling weed to middle-school kids, stealing police cars and a hilariously disrupted dinner with the parents of Dale’s teenage girlfriend (Amber Heard) are just some of the extremely incorrect messes that result. The smoke clears for a while after a wink-wink, nudge-nudge being-stoned-all-the-time-is-bad message gets stated. Amusingly enough, once the joints go out, the violence factor gets mad bloody ballistic. Ears are shot off. Ninjas attack!

 

And then there’s Danny McBride’s middleman Red, an indestructible force of surreal illogic like nothing you’ve ever seen. McBride is a one-man laugh factory. Rogen once again exhibits the incredible ability to act scuzzy, thoughtfully and utterly nuts all at the same time.

 

But the real revelation here is Franco. Saul is a genuinely lovable and needy criminal (he sells dope to keep his grandma in a nice retirement home), and Franco’s gangly body language and befogged line readings put the world’s Cheeches and Chongs and Harolds and Kumars to shame. This is one of those too-rare performances that shows how good dramatic skills can make for the funniest kind of comedy.

 

Whether he’s just letting the actors riff through dumb conversations or staging car chases and firefights, director David Gordon Green seems to be in effortless control of the haze-shrouded material. The maker of esteemed, low-budget independent films such as “George Washington” and “All the Real Girls,” Green clearly had a blast on his first big Hollywood production, and the enjoyment wafts off the screen.

 

But while he keeps the party cooking in “Pineapple Express” from start to finish, Green also maintains indie-style storytelling and character discipline amid all of the blitzed-out madness. His incredible cannabis comedy makes most commercial farces look like they were made by falling-down drunks.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pineapple_express/?critic=columns&sortby=fresh&name_order=asc&view=#mo

 

 

And a "rotten" review to keep things in balance.

 

The latest gagfest from the Judd Apatow Boys’ Club Factory, Pineapple Express, throws gross-out violence into the usual mix of substance abuse and raunch; it’s like an R-rated Three Stooges comedy with Moe ripping bloody chunks from Larry’s scalp and poking out Curly’s eyes. Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the film with Evan Goldberg, is Dale Denton, a pothead process-server who witnesses a (brain-spattering) drug-related murder and lams it with his addled dealer, Saul (James Franco). There’s a what-the-hell, nihilistic quality to all the doping and slapstick and gore that can be—depending on your mood and biochemistry—very appealing. But Pineapple Express, unlike Rogen and Goldberg’s triumphant last effort, Superbad, is a tad deficient in the human-feeling department. It’s empty and formulaic, with plotting that’s lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer.

 

With them, of course, it will be a gargantuan dog-days hit; the audience I saw it with (mostly real people, not press) got a contact high from all the head-bashing and bone-crunching. I cackled a fair bit, too. There’s a fight between Rogen and Danny McBride as the infantile dealer’s dealer (one rung below the homicidal kingpin) that’s great fun if you like watching fat spazzes throw each other over furniture. And Franco is fabulous. In loose striped pants, his hair long and floppy, he shows off his radiant good nature; even his irritability carries a wisp of childlike wonder. Some bad decades—heroin overdoses, the crack-cocaine epidemic—took a lot of the whoopee out of drug humor, and it’s nice to be able to laugh again at people hacking up the contents of their lungs over humongous doobies. Good times.

 

BACKSTORY

When the red-band trailer for Pineapple Express “leaked” to YouTube, Entertainment Weekly flooded the zone, posting back-to-back articles suggesting that Apatow himself was the leaker and that Sony pulled it out of fear that the clip seemed to be “endorsing marijuana use to minors.” If you type in your name, date of birth, and Zip Code, you can enter the restricted section of the official site and watch for yourself. How inflammatory is it? We see drugs with paraphernalia, a blissful Rogen driving while smoking pot, a midwestern woman dropping the F-bomb, and, most memorably, Franco comparing the smell of pot to the scent of God’s “vagina.”

It’s too bad the supposedly turbocharged grass that Dale and Saul smoke (it’s called “Pineapple Express”) unleashes no special powers; it’s doesn’t seem much different from the Hawaiian stuff that screwed up my sophomore year of college. In any case, the Apatow Factory takes an opportunistic attitude toward drugs: Wring as many gags out of them as possible, then make it clear that the heroes must set aside their bongs and spliffs and take responsibility for their (and their dependents’) lives. (It was entertaining to watch right-wing moralists tie themselves in knots over Knocked Up: “It’s pro-life—never mind the promiscuity and drugs!”) In Pineapple Express, the dysfunctional hero summons the will to descend on the underground lair of the kingpin (Gary Cole) and his spunky bad-cop sidekick (Rosie Perez) to save the life of his friend, so in 90 minutes we go from Cheech and Chong to Die Hard.

 

In Knocked Up, Rogen’s unself-conscious jabber had a hilarious charge: The more he rationalized his inadequacies, the lower your jaw dropped. Here that jabber feels like shtick—and, with all the echoes of Albert Brooks, secondhand shtick. Dale has a very cute blonde high-school girlfriend, but it’s even harder to fathom her attraction to him than it was Katherine Heigl’s. This is a very insular universe, arrested in some creepy (but financially bounteous) pubescent twilight zone. When Dale carries the limp Saul from a burning building (it echoes Superbad’s climax), it’s anyone’s guess if Rogen and Goldberg mean to underline or parody the homoeroticism of buddy pictures.

 

The director, David Gordon Green, makes a gung ho leap here from glacial indie art pictures (George Washington, Snow Angels) to the land of mainstream slob-comedy; the only distinctive touch he brings is wide-screen framing, which means a lot of dead space on the sides. But apart from a promising prologue with Bill Hader as a thirties marijuana test subject, the whole movie is dead space. In Hot Fuzz, the British team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) mixed parody and gore in ways that made wheezy action-movie conventions feel invigoratingly strange. But Wright and Pegg’s comedy is rooted in a real place. Apatow and Rogen’s hails from a never-never land where fat stoners can play with guns and hit the bull’s-eye.

http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/48934/

 

 

 

[Justen Diablos]

That was special in ways I can't properly express.  Thanks beautiful. 

 

I'll probably see that movie in a couple weeks.

 

JD,

Cads' Boy

[Cadsuane]

That was special in ways I can't properly express. 

 

See, I've said that same thing about Empy, and it wasn't compliment.  :-\

 

;)

 

 

[Tenshin_Xo]

SO,I'm planning on seeing this too, though not right away.  I think its funny though that of all the movie stars to have a crush on, Mrs. Xo  has a thing for Seth Rogen.  I guess its a good thing for me in the long run.

[Justen Diablos]

I'd nail James Franco. 

 

JD,

'Chan

[Cadsuane]

Me, too.

 

Oh, and so would I. *nods*

 

[Vemynal]

i loved this movie

[Barmacral]

I saw this one on Saturday night... I'm still giggling. Though that might partially be because I saw Tropic Thunder last night and it was amazing too. Definitely see this one if you can, but be prepared, plenty of stupid humour in it.

[Dwynwen]

I'll probably see this just so I can stare at James Franco.

[Guest Cairos]

I saw this movie yesterday. It was stupid funny and there were some parts that were funny. Not the greatest movie but it keeps you entertained.

[Barmacral]

Its a movie about stoners, did you expect anything other than stupid funny?

[Tenshin_Xo]

A little bromance for one thing.

[Siofra Sedai]

I might take hubby to see this since he has such a mancrush on James Franco.  Works for me since he'll buy all the movies with him in it...  And it's now on the $5 movie club for Keresotes Theaters, so we will save some cash.