‹ Sunday Music Spotlight – Wild Sweet Orange •
I’m a sucker for buddy movies. Especially buddy movies with lowbrow humor as their main focus. Two of my favorite comedies of all time are Dumb and Dumber and Tommy Boy, which both do a great job making you believe the relationship between the characters while simultaneously making you shoot the beverage of your choice out your nose. With that in mind, Pineapple Express should be right up my alley. Could the everyman heroics of Seth Rogan pair with the stoner antics of James Franco to elevate Pineapple Express beyond the typical limitations of stoner movie genre? Or would it sink into drug cliches and tired bong humor?
Pineapple Express is definitely a stoner movie. It’s about two stoners who spend much of the movie high. Much of the humor in the first half of the film comes from drug references. That being said, it’s not Up in Smoke or Half Baked. One reason why is its visual style. It looks like something that was shot in a different era. Another reason is the simple fact that the second half of the film has more in common with Gibson and Glover than Cheech and Chong. It’s a smooth blend of action and humor that brings to mind the Lethal Weapon franchise and the first Beverly Hills Cop. Rogan does a remarkable job at playing the average Joe action hero, making you think that if he can do it, so can you. Director David Gordon Green and writers Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg should be commended for making a movie that embraces the strengths of a genre while simultaneously pushing it into new areas.
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