But this movie made me laugh, and personally, uh like, wow, I've never touched the stuff. Fields or Preston Sturges, or even Chaplin and Keaton. You can't recommend Sideways to everybody either, or W.C. Can you recommend Pineapple Express to everybody? Probably not. Saul is as perfect a comic portrayal of a pothead dealer as Thomas Haden Church's Jack was of a sexaholic in Sideways.Īn Oscar nom for an actor playing a sympathetic marijuana dealer? Just watch Franco closely all the way through. Looking and sounding a bit like Brad Pitt in True Romance (he has that same perfect sneaky doper smile), Franco is so far into the part and ignites so many comic explosions, you keep wondering if there's real ganja on this set. Co-writer Rogen plays his anxious doper shtick to the hilt, and his motormouth dialogue (for himself and the others) deserves at least a His Girl Friday scroll.Īnd though all the other actors are good in Pineapple Express, the dude who really keeps this show on the road and cooking is Franco as Saul. Rogen's Dale is a suit-and-tie hysteric, and Franco's Saul is a stoned smoothie. Rogen and Franco and company take those classic movie comedy team types, the smoothie and the hysteric, and give it a different spin. The only stoned amalgamations you can compare them to are Cheech and Chong and Jeff Bridges' Dude and his buddies in the Coens' The Big Lebowski. So why would you want to? For one thing, Rogen and James Franco here are a no-kidding smoking comedy team. And did I mention that these guys also try to get out of their jam by peddling dope to schoolkids? I told you this was a hard movie to stand up for.
Finally, the local Uzi-packing kung fu gang shows up, auditioning for John Woo. Rogen loses part of an ear at one point (he clumsily tries to reattach it), and poor Danny McBride, a Green regular playing a sleazy but good-hearted dealer named Red, gets himself almost dismantled by a pair of idiotic hit men (including Kevin Corrigan). Earlier, in the midst of all this high-spirited carnage, the blood-smeared and dirty Dale manages to get to a get-acquainted dinner with the appalled parents of his high school girlfriend, Angie. Despite that emotion, it makes us laugh at real pain. It's a genuine genre curve-ball, front-loaded with real emotions, more like Midnight Run on Acapulco Gold. with your foot through the windshield - the kind of insensate, overindulged mayhem that usually pops up in a Bad Boys-style movie. Before long, they're neck deep in drug wars, car chases, gun-battles, mutilations, murders, slaughter and driving a stolen car through L.A. Pineapple Express chums Rogen and James Franco the former as an amiable, swizzled but often anxious pothead process server named Dale Denton and the latter as Dale's constantly schnockered but sweet-tempered pot dealer, Saul Silver - get plunged into the dark side, thanks to Saul's relationship with super-mean drug czar Ted Jones (Gary Cole) and Jones' relationship with a crooked cop (Rosie Perez). It's an almost totally guilty pleasure: a balls-out action comedy where Green and co-writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg just don't seem to give a damn how far over the edge they go. But it's not the sort of movie we associate with him. It actually may be my favorite in all of David Gordon Green's ( George Washington) laudable filmography. I haven't laughed this hard at a movie comedy since Sideways - a better, less messy picture which has a similar strategy: the total immersion of two intoxicated buddies in a nightmare of dangerous consequences and unraveling good times. Just when I was beginning to get a little tired of the Judd Apatow movie gang - a malaise started wafting about halfway though Step Brothers - along comes Pineapple Express.
0 kommentar(er)
