Kennelco Film Diary

(2008) dir. David Gordon Green
viewed: 08/08/08 at Century San Francisco Centre, SF, CA

The latest comedy (and this seems to be measured by almost every week) from producer Judd Apatow, he of Superbad (2007), Knocked Up (2007), and The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) among many others, is probably the funniest of the films with his name attached to it since Superbad.  Pineapple Express is a stoner comedy, a buddy film, and an action film, though most successfully, a comedy.

Perhaps most strangely, the film is directed by David Gordon Green, who is best known for indie American films like George Washington (2000) and more recently, Snow Angels (2007), whose work I have only once ventured into, his 2003 film All the Real Girls, which I think I am still scarred by, these many years later.  What he is doing, helming a mainstream comedy for Apatow, well, who knows?  It’s certainly better than his other film.

Written by star Seth Rogan and his Superbad co-scribe Evan Goldberg, Pineapple Express is a romping, rolling, goofball run at the stoner film.  It’s funnier than not most of the time, sometimes for quite long sequences.  And beyond the script, which keeps up the gags and physical comedy, Rogan himself and co-star James Franco, with The Foot Fist Way (2006)’s Danny R. McBride, along with a number of other characters, make for a pretty solidly riotous time in the theater.

James Franco is perhaps the biggest surprise, and the film’s best performance.  Well, I guess that I’m not really surprised by Franco anymore.   My introduction to him was from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) and its sequels, playing Harry Osborn, son of the Green Goblin, and straight-laced best pal to Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker.  But after my brother-in-law loaned me the DVD collection of Judd Apatow’s tv series, Freaks and Geeks, in which he and much of his catalogue of colleagues got their starts, I saw Franco as the cute bad boy character and realized that he had a lot more going for him than Sam Raimi had allowed for.  He’s hysterical as Saul, the pajama bottom-clad pot dealer who becomes Rogan’s best pal after their adventures on the run from the murderous drug dealers.

The film’s biggest problem is its action side, which works to create the narrative construct, but in the end just winds up being pretty violent and extraneous in a lot of ways.  It seems silly to criticize it, but it really drew away from the rest of the movie.  And Rogan’s high school-aged girlfriend, an amusing characteristic of his immature process server pothead, ends up being a sort of unnecessary track as well.

That said, it’s funny and a lot of fun.  It characterizes a consistent theme often cited in Apatow’s work, these sweet-natured but languishing “man-children”, who are not capable of romantic relationships, but oddly, find their emotional centers in what popular culture has recently coined as “bromances”, two best buds who find their way to communicating their humorously and occasionally ironically inflected homoerotic relationship, dude to dude.

It works though because there is a sweetness to their friendship and the characters, for their flaws, come across, and are enjoyable. 

It’s funny stuff.  Really it is.