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Pineapple Express
Seth Rogan, James Franco
Bong Hits For Jesus – Supreme Court
Warning: Remember kids, drugs are bad, BAD, no matter what is written below, unless pushed on you through a slick ad campaign by a multi-billion dollar corporation in the form of either a brewery or a Fortune 500 company. So ignore what this heathen says, kids, and remember to encourage your grandfather to get back in the game and this Bud is for you.
Marijuana is not funny. Okay, the Big Lebowski is one of my favorite comedies of all times, but pot is not funny. Forgot, almost every film that director Kevin Smith puts out is filled with silly smoke jokes, but Mary Jane is not so merry. Wait a minute… there are all those Cheech and Chong films, the Harold & Kumar franchise, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, “That 70’s Show,” Super Troopers, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, the Bill & Ted adventures, and about a 100 other films but that is it. … Of course there is Bill Murray, George Carlin, Chris Rock, Conan O’Brien, Sarah Silverman, Mitch Hedberg, Patton Oswalt, Bill Hicks, Jack Black, Dave Chappelle, Demitri Martin, Amy Poehler, Steve Martin, Bill Maher Dane Cook, and about a thousand other stand-ups. That’s it, that is all, there is nothing funny about the sticky icky. Okay, okay, the whole Bill Clinton “I did not inhale” thing or any story that begins with some celebrity beginning their story with the words “Willie Nelson,” is funny. That is it.
Still, it begs the question if cannabis is so dangerous that it has been made illegal, that the federal government has spent millions trying to stamp it out, why does our popular culture treat it so lightly? No other illegal drug has Presidential candidates every four years pandering towards college kids. If pictures of Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Mischa Barton, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, and Charlize Theron at the height of their popularity doing any other drug would have surfaced, the public outcry would have been tremendous. In pro wrestling, a entertainment product geared towards children, the most watched hour of television by families in all of cable, has had a fan favorite good guy encouraging everyone to “roll a fatty” and another good guy has a finishing move called the “420.” In the name of family values, the last few years of the Super Bowl half-time show has been headlined by Paul McCartney, a man who has been arrested for weed, The Rolling Stones and Tom Petty, all of whom have numerous songs with reefer references.
This is why I believe marijuana is a gateway drug, but not in the way you think. The notion that marijuana leads to harder drugs is just foolish, especially because 52 percent of the population has indulged with most not graduating unto harder substances. It can be a gateway drug in the sense that someone who tries grass for the first time and finds it pleasantly harmless might be willing to try other illegal drugs believing the warning about other illegal drugs are overblown also.
Still, like politics or religion, and basically most things in life, when it comes to bud, a person is going to get nowhere, if you approach logically a person who has their mind made up. You can detail the history of hemp or alcohol, which is clearly a more powerful and dangerous drug and is legal because white people drank in the 1920s and 30s and pot is illegal because jazz club blacks and Hispanics liked the silly smoke until the mid-1960s. You can detail the billions spent on our war against the demon plant, that no one has even overdosed on it, the thousands of lives ruined because a joint or two was discovered in a pocket, and how much tax revue is being lost, and your opponent will just shrug their shoulders. All culture wars are not won by logic but rather artistically, by those images and sound bites that form the matrix of our reality.
Judd Apatow and his friends have taken over the comedy zeitgeist of our time, hip checking former SNL cast members into the stands of irrelevance, in a relatively short period of time. Four years ago, unless you were a fan of the television shows “The Ben Stiller Show,” “Freaks & Geeks” or “Undeclared” nobody had a clue who he was. Taking a page from the earlier American Pie films and There’s Something About Mary, Apatow understands that a comedy can garner a large audience is it mixes sweetness with gross out humor. If an audience can identify with and likes the protagonist, crudeness can be enjoyed without guilt. In 2005, The 40 Year Old Virgin hit theaters and Apatow became a superstar. Next to The Wedding Crashers, it was probably the funniest film of the year. It turned the middle-aged Steve Carell into a leading man and grossed $177,378,645 worldwide, unheard of numbers for a lightweight comedy. He followed up that success with Talladega Nights, which again cracked the $150 million worldwide window with $162,966,177. All of a sudden he had enough juice to help his friends, especially the portly Seth Rogen. Last year Rogen returned Apatow’s belief in him by penning the funniest film of last year, Superbad, and starring in the second best comedy, Knocked Up. Rogen, who does not have movie star looks, more than repaid his friend’s faith in him by bringing home $218.9 million for Knocked Up and almost $170 million for Superbad. The take is more than deserving of a 3rd, or even 4th or 5th, bite at the apple, okay, the whole apple.
Pineapple Express, the title of the film, is also the name of a new strain of marijuana that process server Dale Denton (Rogen) has purchased from his lazy drug dealer, Saul Silver (James Franco – the Spider-Man franchise). The two find themselves in deep trouble when Dale witnesses a murder performed by a mob boss (Gary Cole – The Brady Bunch) and a cop (Rosie Perez, yes, the Rosie Perez with the high pitched voice). Panicking, Dale flees the scene but drops his joint. Back at Saul’s, Dale is horrified to discover that the strain of pot he was so smoking is so rare that it will be traced back to Saul. Soon, this odd couple is on the run trying to stay one step ahead of the police and mobsters who want to kill them and take down the mob boss and his lackey. The “put two buddies on the run from the mob” motif has been done countless times since the groundbreaking Some Like It Hot and the buddy flick has been done to death, but writers Evan Goldberg and Rogen know that. Much like The Big Lebowski, this is a humorous ode to the old tough guy films that starred the likes of Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart. Instead, picture what might happen if a stoner and a slacker were the protagonists and their chemistry is great. Apatow fans will be happy to spot many of his regulars here and a lot of his geekish humor is scattered throughout the film. David Gordon Green does a good job in the director’s seat. It is one of the top two or three comedies of the year and is light years better than the average stoner comedy. This has all the beats of a typical Apatow film and should be another huge financial success and captures much of the zeitgeist that The 40 Year Old Virgin did. In a few years when marijuana is legal, will any historian credit films like this for helping with societal change. Until then light a.. (EDITOR’S NOTE: We have censored the last line of this review because drugs are bad, BAD.)
Verdict: A Homerun of a Comeßdy