Pineapple Express

You wait ages for a stoner comedy then 3 come along at once. In the last 12 months the silver screen has been graced with Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, The Wackness, and now the latest in the seemingly endless line of comedies from the Judd Apatow stable: Pineapple Express. Trouble is of course that no-one with any modicum of taste actually looks forward to stoner comedies. That's not to say none of them are any good. And that's not to say they're not all rubbish either. I'm just saying that if you look forward to these sort of films then you've got pretty dreadful taste in films.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Road Trip, Dude Where's My Car... need I go on? All dreadful. But something a little weird happened this summer. The Harold and Kumar sequel actually opened to reasonable reviews. The Wackness opened to even better reviews. And Pineapple Express virtually opened to critical raves, with some proclaiming it a near masterpiece. Having seen it (or to be more accurate, having suffered through the first 50 minutes before walking out) I can only wonder whether they had sampled something rather potent themselves, before viewing this thing.

Pineapple Express is a new strain of weed so amazing that even the smell has stoner Dale Denton (Seth Rogen) fall in love with it. He describes it as smelling like God's vagina, and if you think that's funny then this may well be the film for you. After purchasing some of the said weed, he heads of to serve a summons notice to a guy who just so happens to be someone very high up in the illicit Los Angeles drug trade. Whilst doing so, Dale witnesses this guy murder one of his rivals - cue panic, fleeing from the scene and a whole lot of trouble for Dale and his drug dealing friend Saul Silver (James Franco.)

After fleeing Saul's apartment our "heroes" start worrying that the drug overlord may be able to triangulate their cell phones, even if they aren't using them. Dale suggests to smash his phone on a rock. Saul thinks that he's never heard of such a great plan in all his life and does the same. However his attempt to smash his cell phone involves him throwing it quite limply at a tree in a wood some distance away. He misses. They exchange stoned out histrionics before deciding they had better go look for his phone. This is the point at which I left, happy in the knowledge that the outcome of their impending search for his phone interested me not one bit. In fact had a great big fireball engulfed Los Angeles at that moment, I would have thought it a reasonable trade off for 30 million innocents to die just so long as these two perished too.

The trouble with Pineapple Express is that it lacks characters of the charm of those in Superbad, The 40 Year Old Virgin or even Knocked Up. I know my colleague had problems with Seth in Superbad but I happened to really enjoy the character, and no-one could possibly not find Michael Cera's Evan amusing. Steve Carell and Christine Keener are always going to be eminently watchable, even if the film itself flags somewhat. And then you had Katherine Heigl breaking out from TV in Knocked Up, accompanying a much more sympathetic Seth Rogen role. Here we have two guys, probably played quite accurately, but played nevertheless with untold levels of irritation.

It's been a long time since two guys were that annoying, but granted, I've not seen Sean William Scott in anything for a while. But quite clearly I'm in a minority: 73% on rottentomatoes suggest most critics could tolerate their behaviour. Not me though. The rambling, unpolished script was penned by Rogen and his Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg and needed someone taking a pair of scissors to it and trimming it considerably. In fact it probably needed a chainsaw taken to it. There's a lot of fat in the movie, and I'm not talking about Rogen's waistline. Quite clearly these guys are talented - Superbad is after all my number 6 film of last year - but this is nowhere near that level. The humour hear relies solely on whether you think watching two guys acting stupid because they are high is funny. I don't.

D-

Superbad (2007)

Had heard many good things about this - essentially a familiar sounding teen movie about three hapless guys looking to score with the ladies and the catastrophic chain of events that befall them as they try to make their way to a party in order to achieve the above - but I’m not sure it quite lived up to them. Sure, in parts this is very funny and it plays, again in parts, like a classic Fawlty Towers episode, where things just degenerate from bad to worse for the protagonists but you’re still left clinging to this bizarre sense of sympathy for the characters you’re never quite sure is fully deserved. This aspect it did very well.

However…

Knocked Up

Judd Apatow is the man of the moment when it comes to smart Hollywood comedies. His 40 Year Old Virgin, starring the brilliant Steve Carrel, was a critical and box office success and he has followed this effort, which has taken well over $100 million at the US box office on a budget of just $33 million. Knocked Up gives a starring role to one of the supporting cast of Virgin, Seth Rogen. He plays Ben, a 20 something waste of space who spends his days smoking pot and watching films to identify when actresses get their kit off for his not so original website idea. Kathrine Heigl plays Alison, the attractive, out-of-his-league, successful 20-something who gets her big break at the start of the film and goes out celebrating with her sister, Leslie Mann. A few drinks later, Ben and Alison meet and you can guess what happens next from the title of the film.

I wasn't a big fan of The 40 Year Old Virgin, despite being a huge fan of Steve Carell. I found the supporting characters fairly dull and the genuinely funny moments few and far between. This time the supporting cast are genuinely entertaining. Ben's friends, all 20 something wasters could be, in lesser hands, cliched and irritating but not here. They provide some genuine laughs. The same can be said of a couple of Alison's colleagues, Alan Tudyk and Kristen Wiig, who share two very nicely played scenes with her. The laugh out loud moment of the film however comes from Craig Robinson (who appears in The Office) in a small but brilliant role as a club doorman and I've got my quote for my movie years 2007 page already in mind! It's rare that you get such brilliance out of the supporting cast - even those that have a little as one line. They can make or break a comedy and in this case they made it. Praise is also due to Rogen and Heigl, who make a convincing, if unlikely (if that makes sense) couple.

But this is Apatow's baby. He wrote, produced and directed it. It's a definitely the best comedy I've seen in a while and well worth your time. The creative minds involved in this are also teaming up again for the forthcoming Superbad, which is currently receiving great notices in the States. Seth Rogen wrote it, Apatow produced it and Greg Mottola directs. Mottola also directed some episodes of the best sitcom of all time aka Arrested Development. That alone will have both me and Matt first in line at the ticket booth.

B