HalfBaked.

MOVIES Half-Baked Pineapple Express will Smakl e you Faugh. But so does most pot. BY DAVID EDELSTEIN HE LATEST GAGFEST from the Judd Apatow Boys' Club Factory, Pineapple Express, throws gross-out violence into the usual mix of substance abuse and raunch; it's like an R-rated Three Stooges comedy with Moe ripping bloody chunks from Larry's scalp and poking out Curly's eyes. Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the film with Evan Goldberg, is Dale Denton, a pothead pro- cess-server who witnesses a (brain-spattering) drug-related murder and lams it with his addled dealer, Saul (James Franco). There's a what-the-hell, nihilistic quality to all the doping and slapstick and gore that can be-depending on your mood and biochemistry-very appealing. But Pineapple Ex2press, unlike Rogen and Goldberg's triumphant last effort, Superbad, is a tad deficient iii the human-feeling department. It's empty and formulaic, with PIRECTEDYSS plotting that's lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all DAVID GORDON the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer. COLUMBIA PICTURES. R. With them, of course, it will be a gargantuan dog-days hit; the ELEGY DIRECTED BY audience I saw it with (mostly real people, not press) got a contact ISABEL COIXET. high from all the head-bashing and bone-crunching. I cackled afair SAMUEL GOLDWYN FILMS. R. bit, too. There's a fight between Rogen and Danny McBride as the FROZEN R infantile dealer's dealer (one rung below the homicidal kingpin) DIRECTED BY COURTNEY HUNT, that's great fun if you like watching fat spazzes throw each other SONY PICTURES. R. over furniture. And Franco is fabulous. In loose striped pants, his hair long and floppy, he shows off his ra- diant good nature; even his irritability carries a wisp of childlike wonder. Some bad decades-heroin overdoses, the crack-cocaine epidemic-took a lot of the whoopee out of drug humor, and it's nice to be able to laugh again at people hack- ing up the contents of their lungs over humongous doobies. Good times. It's too bad the supposedly turbo- charged grass that Dale and Saul smoke (it's called "Pineapple Express") unleash- es no special powers; it's doesn't seem much different from the Hawaiian stuff that screwed up my sophomore year of college. In any case, the Apatow Factory takes an opportunistic attitude toward drugs: Wring as many gags out of them as possible, then make it clear that the heroes must set aside their bongs and spliffs and take responsibility for their (and their dependents') lives. (It was en- tertaining to watch right-wing moralists tie themselves in knots overKnocked Up: "It's pro-life-never mind the promiscu- ity and drugs!") In PineappleExpress, the dysfunctional hero summons the will to descend on the underground lair of the kingpin (Gary Cole) and his spunky bad- cop sidekick (Rosie Perez) to save the life of his friend, so in 90 minutes we go from Cheech and Chong to Die Hard. In Knocked Up, Rogen's unself- conscious jabber had a hilarious charge: 60 NEW YORK I AUGUST 11, 2008 2, U 0 2, 0 0 0 Uo o

2 0 'P 0 0 0 0 1- fim U 0 U 0 Z 0 U 0 0 0 u U 0 0U 0 0 0= o- c c c c from its source, Philip Roth's The DyingAnimal, that I'm tempted to say we should abandon altogether the idea of adapting Roth. (I'd suggest Char- lie Kaufman take a stab, except he made uis watch him jump through hoops over Susan Orlean ...) It's not that Roth's novels are too solipsistic; it's that their solipsism is a Versailles-size hall of mirrors-endlessly doubling back and endlessly refracted. The DyingAnimal- the third book to feature David Kepesh, who first appeared in The Professor of Desire (1977)-is abrief (for Roth) mas- terpiece that for all its twists and flash- tacks and cultural musings reads as if it's coming out in one urgent breath. The narrator has fancied himself carnal- ity incarnate, with sex his revenge against the America of his youth (still in a Puritan strdnglehold) and against death. (He is that explicit.) Now, in his The more he rationalized his inadequa- cies, the lower your jaw dropped. Here thatjabber feels like shtick-and, with all the echoes of Albert Brooks, secondhand shtick. Dale has a very cute blonde high- school girlfriend, but it's even harder to fathom her attraction to him than it was Katherine Heigl's. This is a very insular universe, arrested in some creepy (but fi- nancially bounteous) pubescent twilight zone. When Dale carries the limp Saul from a burning building (it echoes Super- bad's climax), it's anyone's guess if Rogen and Goldberg mean to underline orparo- dy the homoeroticism of buddy pictures. The director, David Gordon Green, makes a gung ho leap here from glacial indie art pictures (George Washington, SnowAngels) to the land of mainstream slob-comedy; the only distinctive touch he brings is wide-screensfram- ing, which means alot of dead BACKSTOI space on the sides. But apart When the ri from a promising prologue for Pineappl to YouTube with Bill Hader as a thirties Weeklyfloo marijuana test subject, the posting bac whole movie is dead space. In suggesting HotFuzz, the British team of himself was Edgar Wright and Simon thatSonyp thatthe cli Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) "endorsin, mixed parody and gore in to minors. ways that made wheezy your name, action-movie conventions feel Zip Code, y restricted sa invigoratingly strange. But official site Wright and Pegg's comedy is yourself. Hc rooted in a real place. Apatow it? We see d and Rogen's hails from a parapherna Rogen dri, never-never land where fat smoking d stoners can play with guns woman dro and hit the bull's-eye. and, most ELEGY is a spare, melancholy Cof film that is so far in spirit P sixties, his body failing, his sex drive more fierce than ever, he's going back in his mind, to the anti-puritanical 1960s, when he asserted his freedom by ditch- ing his wife and son and taking student lover after student lover. His latest, Con- suela, might be his last-in any case, she's the first he's terrified of losing be- fore he gets her into the sack. Roth's title brings something else to mind. Dying animals should be ap- proached warily. They snap. They bite. The change to Elegy is sadly appropriate. Directed by Isabel Coixet from a screen- play by Nicholas Meyer, this is another winter-solstice-of-life picture, a slightly more iisqu6 Away From Her. It's Philip Roth, Canadian style. (Vancouver stands in, unconvincingly, for New York.) In the book, Kepesh extols the virtues of classical music-quintets, sonatas- as a way station between d-band trailer deep conversation and bed. Express "leaked" Here it's just classical mu- Entertainment sic. Late in the film, Kepesh ed the zone, to-back articles and Consuela walk along a atApatow beach, the sea the same heleakerand gray as the sky. The led it out of fear soundtrack is Satie. The seemed to be marijuana use animalism, the bite, it's If you type in now so much chin music. ate of birth, and Ben Kingsley is Kepesh. u can enter the He wouldn't be the first ction of the nd watch for actor I'd cast (any more /inflammatory is than I'd have cast Sir An- ugs with thony Hopkins as a clos- a, a blissful eted black man in The ngwhile Human Stain), but I liked it, a midwestern ping the F-bomb, him. Sir Ben has lately emorably, Franco been getting alot of nookie "nparing the smell onscreen. In The Wack- 'ot to the scent ood's"vagina." ness, he had his tongue down Mary-Kate Olsen's throat. Now he's making the beast with two backs with Pen6lope Cruz (as Consuela). He's better looking than in his youth: stillbeaky, buthis chest is built up and he radiates sexual confi- dence. He no longer makes you think of Gandhi. (The real Gandhi, of course, got a lot of nookie, but not Sir Ben's.) Cruz does a hilarious turn as ahellcat in Woody Allen's upcoming Vicky Cristina Barce- lona, so you can't blame her (or Kingsley) for the glacial pacing of her scenes. When Kingsley showed her the metronome on his piano, I wanted to reach into the ,screen and set it faster. In between his scenes with Cruz, King- sleyplays squash and talks about sexwith Dennis Hopper as his best friend, a poet. Even though their encounters have a slightly stale feel (it's metronomical: one scene with Cruz, one scene with Hopper to talk about Cruz), the actors have a ten- CAREER TRACKER PuffPiece James Franco has been inFreaks &S Geeks-and Spider-Man. But the truly star-making role has eluded him thus far, until Pineapple Exp ress, in which he steals the show as Saul Silver, the amiable pot dealer. Franco's not the first actor to invigorate his career by playing a stoner. LANE BROWNMAD DANl1KOIS II Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider (1969) BEFORE: An accused Sburglar on The Andy Griffith Show. AFTER: 4 An Oscar nom (first of many) for playing an alcoholic lawyer who smokes his first joint. - '9 : Also, he's allegedly had : t sex with 2,000 women. Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont [, High (1982) " - BEFORE: One of the , cadets in Taps. AFTER: He rides some tasty waves with a cool buzz as Jeff Spicoli and- poofi-actor's actor- citizen journalist. Chris Tucker in Friday (1995) BEFORE: Johnny Booze in House Party3. AFTER: Tuckers performance as a motormouthed dealer blazed on his own supply has led to the sweetest reward: Brett Ratner's go-to muse. Towelie in South Park (2001) BEFORE: A humble extra in dish-soap commercials. AFTER: Thanks to his sta4turn as a bong-sucking square of terry cloth, now the most powerful towel in Hollywood. AUGUST 11, 2008 j NEW YORK 61 1) 'ed d k- th ti ul ip g '0 eG a, ev dr Ii p m• 3rn I- J G

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION TITLE: Half-Baked SOURCE: New York 41 no28 Ag 11 2008 PAGE(S): 60-2 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://nymag.com/