Review of Pineapple Express (2008) by Chads. — 05 Aug 2008

Words to Frannie(Meg Ryan) in Jane Campion's unfairly maligned "In the Cut" is what smoking weed means to Dale Denton(Seth Rogen); these disparate labors of love are their passions. Late in the Campion film, the Virginia Woolf scholar literally goes to the lighthouse, a decontextualized lighthouse which is then appropriated for the site of the movie's climax.

Relevance to this stoner flick, you ask, from the guy who graced the indie world in 2000 with his Terrence Malick-like "George Washington"(a meditative and lyrical film about Atlantan youth that couldn't be any more different than this Cheech-and-Chong-have-feelings-too farce)? Well, in "Pineapple Express", Dale ends up at a massive greenhouse of cannabis plants and wonders aloud if he's in El Dorado(which is alluded to in "Heart of Darkness", both "To the Lighthouse" and the Joseph Conrad novel are modernist texts).

Like the lighthouse in the Campion film, the isolated farmhouse that harbors the drugs have a hallucinatory texture to the narrative. Both "In the Cut" and "Pineapple Express" are thrillers, and if genres have genders, a film that's steeped in action could be characterized as being male in the narrative sense.

Unbeknownst to the people who green-lighted the "Meg Ryan's Gone Wild" vehicle that stalled both women's careers, Campion feminized the masculine storyline by rupturing the text with static talk(the dialogue-heavy scenes between Ryan and Jennifer Jason-Leigh), instead of action.

"Pineapple Express" subverts the male narrative, too; most pointedly, in the woods, where Dale and Saul(as in the late-Saul Bellow, perhaps?) are incapacitated by their drug-induced state to do anything to advance the plot.

Just like Campion(the feminist auteur from Australia who's best known for "The Piano"), this filmmaker isn't afraid of making narrative detours that rebels heartily against story convention, by foregrounding scenes which would be more at home in a "chick-flick"(Rogen, James Franco, and Danny R.

McBride aren't afraid to express their feelings like women) than a violent action-thriller, mostly played for laughs. Not only is the film transgressive, but the filmmaker's inclinations, as well.

Films such as the aforementioned "George Washington", and "All the Real Girls", were a breath of fresh air because they came out during a time when the bastard children of Quentin Tarantino were at their loudest and brattiest.

In "Pineapple Express", the poetry of "Badlands" has been replaced by the poetry slam of the post-modernist "Pulp Fiction". And wouldn't you know it, Red(Danny R. McBride) has a CUT on his lip("In the Cut" is slang for vagina; Dale describes the strain of pot called Pineapple Express, as God's vagina).